As I understand it in Europe the private teams at the local level take the place of college teams in the US.
Also I dont see Europe or other counties having the variety of sports the US has. Pretty much all soccer with some rugby, cricket, basketball, and team handball mixed in some.
I don’t believe any over-arching explanation for why school sports took off in the US, and not elsewhere, is possible. It just happened.
Even within the US, we’ve seen that sports can go down different paths. Baseball went from gentleman’s clubs to semi-pro town teams to a fully professional National League without any scholastic involvement; schools adopted baseball only later and it never became hugely popular. For children younger than 14, school sports never took off; if you play sports at that age, you’ll play on independently organized teams (Little League, Pop Warner, etc.) often sponsored by a local business.
But between ages 14 and 22, for all sports except baseball, schools are king. Why? IMO, mostly happenstance.
Certainly conditions in America in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century were more favorable to school sports than conditions in other countries. The US had a higher percentage of its young men in school at an earlier date. And, American public schools have always been locally funded and a source of local pride; unaffiliated adults were more willing to cheer for their local school than they probably would have been in Great Britain.
But, I don’t believe these factors were dispositive. Instead, it just happened that a bunch of Ivy League kids developed an offshoot of rugby called football that became hugely popular with spectators. It just happened that a Canadian-born YMCA instructor invented basketball, and school kids took it up with a vengeance.
And once schools became established as the vehicle through which young men played these sports, it became impossible to dislodge them. If you’re an American between 14 and 18, the best competition (with rare exceptions) is via your high school team, so that’s where you want to play. Since that’s the best competition, that’s what people want to watch. If you’re between 18 and 22, and playing any sport except baseball or hockey, the best competition in college. So, you want to go to college and play, and people want to watch.
It just worked out that way.
It’s a self perpetuating local ritual to be involved in your local high school teams sports. Many of the people who go are former team members and can somewhat relive their youth and feel attached to the pageantry that goes along with the games. Other participated in other activities associated with the school; the team, the band, the cheerleaders, the home coming dance and other social events like pep raleys. Local merchants get involved and sponsor activities like car washes and candy/flower sales. It’s an American thing, part of the social fabric and we don’t expect the Brits to “get it”. 
Myself I could care less about sports on TV but love going to a live game.
Baseball players can get drafted right out HS and go directly to A ball and work their way up the ladder. Many never go to college, or only go for a year or two.
Basketball players either go to college for 1 year minimum or can play ball overseas until they age out of the restricted pool. There were a handful of very successful players who entered the NBA right out of HS before the 1 year requirement was added.
Football players generally need to be older/bigger/stronger to compete in the NFL ranks so college allows them to learn skills and gain size/strength. It’s rare that an 18 year old would be capable of playing well in the NFL the Div 1 NCAA is really the only place to play while that happens.
In the US lately the really elite HS aged players are on AAU, Legion, and other non-school teams that play either year round or much more extended seasons. Many still play on HS teams but the real competition is elsewhere for baseball and basketball. This doesn’t apply to football as far as I know.
I would think that the largest of the three groups would be the one that’s ambivalent about it all but I don’t have anything concrete to back up that opinion. With few exceptions, college football isn’t nearly as well attended in the populous northeast part of the country as it is in the south and midwest.
Sports Media Watch reported that about 16 million people watched one of the Division 1 football games every week in 2013. Add in the several million in attendance and there’s still almost 300 million other Americans who didn’t care very much about what was happening.
The U.S. has a ridiculous number of colleges. Different sites give different numbers but let’s say 2500-3000 4-year colleges and around 4000 non-4-year ones. Starting in the second half of the 19th century, every new town that got started needed a train station, a newspaper office, and a college to achieve respectability.
Big colleges came along at the same time from the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. Each state got a grant of federal land it could sell off to start a college to teach the agricultural and mechanical arts, the practical skills that turning empty land into civilization by their standards required. Almost every state also created a state university system that covered more traditional courses. In most states any high school graduate could qualify for admission, giving these schools huge enrollments and high local pride and visibility. University of State and State University naturally also became huge rivals at everything and that included sports. Meanwhile the smaller but most prestigious elite universities also developed rivalries most easily expressed through sports, and those became of national interest because their alumni ran the country and people follow celebrity patterns always.
Throughout this period the only professional team sport of any consequence was baseball and that was populated by farm boys, city thugs, and other illiterates. The handful of college-educated players before 1950 were rare, rare exceptions. Major league baseball existed in all of ten cities, while colleges were everywhere, full of home-town hero-type young men trying to exhibit the ideal of a sound mind in a sound body by bashing in the brains of their rivals. In a culture with few other sources of entertainment. Of course sports would become huge. Totally unsurprising that it would filter downward to high school to form a seamless lifetime whole.
And just as important then as today, you could gamble on sports. Horse racing was the biggest sport, because of gambling, and boxing was a solid second. Betting on college football? Sure.
The most important sports movie before WWII was - hold on to your hats - the Marx Brothers’ Horsefeathers. We see the zaniness today but don’t get how keen the satire was. Sports were already getting more important than academics at some colleges. Gamblers infested the sports. And they regularly rigged games by bringing in adults as phony students, “ringers” they were called, to ensure victory. You can’t outcheat the Marx Brothers, as they proved. They were suddenly the peoples’ heroes and they got the cover of *Time *magazine for the movie.
All this history in unique AFAIK, and I don’t know what substitutes for this aspect of culture other countries developed. There must be some: the needs be filled are too basic.
So…the association with sport was to help American universities market themselves.
That kind of fits.
In the UK the universities are public property and until comparatively recently they were wholly state financed. There are only one or two very small ones that are privately owned. They did not have to market themselves much all, they were oversubscribed and could chose their students. Their sporting prowess never entered into the equation. Sports scholarships are unknown. Today it is a little different, students have to pay fees and that strange business of ‘working my way through college’ that is heard in US movies, now makes a little more sense. However, in the UK the fees are the same (almost) everywhere and people are usually done with their university education by the 21 or 22. Alumni giving is also one of those strange American concepts. Most soccer players really did not spend a lot time in school. More like street kids.
I am assuming US universities are all private concerns, is this correct? Not sure why anyone would chose a university on the basis of its football team. Are sports scholarships very prevalent? Are they needed for career in sport?
Both Oxford and Cambridge have very old sporting traditions. The Boat race and Cricket matches ard well known but they play other sports as well. Quite a few cricketers have come from a university background.
No. The 50 states together comprise the largest public university system in the known galaxy.
ETA: Read Exapno’s post above for a good history of the topic.
I assume you simulposted with me, but no, somewhere around 600 4-year universities are public and part of state or city systems. The large state schools are enormous factories that reach 50,000 students and many states have a half-dozen or more at the 20,000+ range.
There’s a complicated system of dividing colleges for sports. Division III schools are usually smaller private universities. They cannot issue sport scholarships at all, only on basis of need. They still have a lively system of dozens of sports, mens and womens, national championships, and all the rest. Almost everyone there are true “student-athletes.”
The sports you hear about are from Division I schools. The 100 or so largest or most major schools are Division I in football. They are the factories that substitute for professional minor leagues. Scholarships are given out in all sports, but football and basketball are about 95% of public interest. They cover a lot, so they can be worth $50,000 a year. In addition, athletes often get special dorms, special foods, special health care, special training facilities, special failure-proof classes, and special protection from local rape laws. Now there’s talk of paying them as well. Why choose a university for its football team? Because $$$$$$$.
Some less huge schools are Division II, which can give out sports scholarships in smaller numbers and don’t take part in the big, gaudy national championships since they have their own. In addition, schools can choose to be in different divisions in different sports. Don’t worry; nobody over here understands it either.
The vast majority of professional players come from Division I schools, although you often hear of a Division II or Division II athlete overcoming the odds.
Most universities in the US are public state subsidized/funded institutions, with the majority of the revenue coming from student tuition. There are a number of private non-profit universities, normally with some sort of religious affiliation. Private for profit universities are a more recent phenomena but are normally more online correspondent type degrees, and they do not usually have a sports tradition.
The sports traditions in US universities go back over a 100 years and traditionally involve rivalries with other universities. For students and alumni there is a strong sense of emotional tradition associated with your alma mater typically played out on the field or court. Attending those sporting events as a student has a lot of tradition and continues after you graduate, when you have the opportunity to go back attend games or even watch them in TV.
Athletic scholarships are prevalent among most sports. They permit people a way that couldn’t economically attend university to do so by using their athletic abilities to pay for their tuition. A very small % of college athletes make it to the professional ranks. Most get their degrees and have careers other than professional sports.
In this I think we’re unique in the world. We hosted high school students from other countries a few times and I told my wife that taking them to - or having them actually participate in - high school sports would be an experience that they likely wouldn’t have if they went anywhere else in the world. I do believe that’s true.
Promotion of sports has traditionally been associated with schools in the U.K.
*Sport, Sport, masculine sport.
Equips a young man for society.
Yes, sport turns out a jolly good sort.
It’s an odd boy who doesn’t like sport. *
Nonsense.
If by “universities” you mean institutions comparable to the British universities of the time (which themselves, apart from Edinburgh, were well behind the German universities of the time) there were none in America at all! On a rather looser, more inclusive definition, there were a few of what were basically seminaries, of which a handful (Harvard, Princeton,…) might have had decent academic standards, plus maybe a few agricultural and other colleges, probably mostly nearer the academic level of a modern community college than that of what we would consider to be a university now (or what Europe would have considered to be a university then). Some of those colleges may now have evolved into distinguished universities that boast about their early dates of foundation, but they weren’t universities back then, and I very much doubt that, even by the most inclusive criteria, there were anything like a hundred of them. (And, incidentally, applying those sorts of inclusive criteria to Britain in 1835 would certainly net you a lot more institutions of “higher education” in England than just Oxford and Cambridge. Some of them, including several of the Dissenting Academies that flourished in Britain from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, were academically quite distinguished, producing important scientists such as John Dalton, the originator of chemical atomic theory.)
As I pointed out in my post below yours (not then having seen yours), the huge advance, both quantitative and qualitative, of American higher education happened after the Civil War, not really taking off until well over a decade after, and the first “real” American University, i.e., the first research university with a serious provision for graduate education, was Johns Hopkins, founded in 1876. Others soon followed, with older foundations also upgrading themselves. (This, of course, is also, not coincidentally, the period when America’s population really started to grow rapidly, largely through extensive European immigration.)
You are right that there were not many British universities in 1835, and that (apart from the Edinburgh medical school) they were not up to the standards then being set in Germany, but there were not many, if even any, in America before that time, or even forty years later. The expansion and improvement of higher education in Britain got going several decades before it got going in America, and, even up until the first decades of the 20th century, the American professoriat had mostly, of necessity, been educated in Europe (mostly, in Germany, but Britain and other countries contributed too).
It occurs to me that the strong association between American Universities and the distinctively American sports of football and basketball may have something to do with the fact that these sports were also invented in the late 19th century, just the time when American higher education was itself getting going.
The first part of that statement is completely wrong. There are three times as many 4-year private colleges as public ones.
The second part is probably also untrue. First place I looked was Ohio State University and government exceeds students. Students are distinctly a minority when all sources of funding are added in.
njtt is correct about the history of universities. However, the culture of founding zillions of tiny local colleges is part of U.S. history and not found elsewhere to my knowledge. Only a few of those grew up to be major universities, of course.
Addendum to previous post, after missed edit window:
Baseball on the other hand, the other distinctively American sport (taking ice hockey as Canadian), seems to have originated a bit earlier, before the Civil War (if Wikipedia is to be relied upon), and so had presumably already established an ecosystem for itself before America really had much of a system of universities. By contrast, American football and basketball originated and grew together with the U.S. university system, so it makes sense that they should have become intertwined.
No, see what I said about about Dissenting Academies (which are far from the whole story, even in Britain). Nineteenth century Britain, like America, had lots of little local colleges of various sorts, some, but far from all, of which eventually grew into, or were assimilated into, real universities. I suspect the same is true in France and other wealthier, industrializing European countries too. (Maybe less so in Germany, as their university system was already so good.) Demand for higher education (beyond education for the clergy, which is what universities were mostly about even up to start of the 19th century) is really something that grows up with industrialization and urbanization. Initially the demand got met by unregulated private companies and associations, until consolidation and need to maintain recognized standards led to a more formal institutional system.
I’ve wondered that myself. Although I am a HUGE college football fan I’ve been wondering, lately (mostly when the topic of “Should college athletes be paid?” comes up) if it wouldn’t make more sense to have minor leagues for basketball and for football, as baseball does, or sports academies like the Dutch have for soccer. One thing a neighbor of mine once told me about the minor league idea, though (and I think he made a good point): take those 18 - 22 year olds that currently play college sports and put them in a minor professional league, instead, and watch the interest from fans dwindle precipitously.
For baseball players, it is the minor leagues. If it weren’t for colleges, football and basketball would have to support minor leagues too.
Most college athletes do not play professionally. And the ones that don’t have wasted four years not getting an education and not getting started in life. They are often not permitted to take real courses that would take too much time out of practice. And if they get cut or injured, there goes that scholarship. It is a disaster for most of the players who are treated like dirt.