See, there I’m puzzled as to why cricket wouldn’t be more popular Stateside. You’ve got the ball being delivered about 90 times an hour, probably being hit at least every other minute, and in a typical good-standard one-day game you’re quite likely to see 4-500 runs scored in a day and probably 15+ batsmen out, including a number of catches held with bare hands. No more than half an hour of the whole day’s play is taken up with fresh batsmen coming in to bat, and you’ll likely see several “home runs” every day too. You don’t get to see double plays and triple plays, 'cos there can be only one “out” per ball, tops, but our run-outs must be at least as exciting as yours and with the possibility of a spectacular “direct hit” once in a while.
Ah, there’s no need for cricket. We’ve already got baseball and that’s boring enough.
And as for there being no room for sponsorship in soccer? HELLO!?! Do you think European football is a charity event? Their clubs make millions by advertising on the shirts. Every single guy who walks around wearing the shirt is also a walking billboard. Not only does it work during the game, but also when some guy walks around in the shirt. I know it’s not the American way to advertise things on shirts, but hey, they do it in Nascar, so it’s possible. Also the walls have ads on them. Plus the pitch sometimes.
I just think Americans have different taste in sports. Football and baseball, for example have dead time. But when it does pick up, it’s pretty exciting. Football is very strategic, which gets you discussing it with your friends in the downtime. Soccer could be I guess.
But yes, this diving crap has to go. It totally confuses the hell out of me. I’m so sick of seeing idiots running around grabbing their faces. It’s so goddamned childish! They act like little kids tattling on some guy that hurt them in (American) football at recess. We played rough when we were kids, and if you got hurt, you pretended you weren’t because you didn’t want to be the one who got football banned for a week. Arguing with the Ref with exaggerated hand gestures…
By the correct way, you mean backward?
Because people don’t like to watch a sport they don’t play, and 7s rugby is HARD! Well, if you usually play prop in 15s, that is.
To answer the OP: I think a smaller field would make it more exciting to watch. I used to play indoor soccer, so the pitch was as big as two basketball courts side-to-side. It did, in fact, make it much more like hockey, and was more fun, IMHO, to watch.
The problem with soccer is as follows:
In American football, if you were to put 12 guys on the field (without making the field bigger
and/or giving the offense some advantages-c.f. Canadian football) then the resultant zone
defenses would pretty much squelch the long passing game.
In baseball, if you had 10 fielders (not 9 fielders and a DH), the resultant 4th outfielder would
cause batting averages to drop towards the Mendoza Line.
In hockey, with 6 skaters (+ goalie), the resultant traffic jams and obstacles (=other players)
would cause the game’s pace to grind to a halt, and 1-0 shootout games would be very
common (in the postseason you’d be playing 3-5 extra periods before a score).
In basketball, 6 player zone defenses would result…you get the idea.
In soccer, the extra players end up doing the same basic thing as the extra players do in
the hypothetical examples above. Over time each of the above 4 sports have “evolved” in
a sense so that there’s a good balance between defense and offense (and indeed there
are occasional rule changes-not involving player #s-which attempt to redress said balance
when it goes off-kilter for one reason or another, and have been for 100 years+ now).
IIRC American football originally had much more than 11 on a side, and the games were
massacres.
For some strange reason in soccer there was no such evolution in terms of player numbers
and/or other changes to help the offense. I am convinced that with the current rule set
8 or 9 would be a more optimal number. I dislike the offsides rule, because unlike the blue
lines in hockey there’s no objective mark on the field to tell you where the offsides is-and
you get that inane offsides trap stuff, where offensive players are in effect penalized for
getting a good jump on a arguably lazy defense. But I see no better alternative (blue lines
or the equivalent would seem very much out of place). Guess I just prefer a game
with a faster pace.
Hockey (w/8 players) on a frozen soccer-sized rink would rule…
Exactly. All the attempts to get Merkins to enbrace soccer are futile and downright annoying. So what if the rest of the world revolves around what we consider to be a silly, sissy sport? Since when did we care?
As for cricket…that’s what ESPN4 is for! 
I agree with GorillaMan. The suggestion that soccer is unpopular in the U.S. because it’s “defective” is nonsense. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, and it’s that way for a reason. And I can’t prove it, but I think soccer is worming its way little by little into the American sporting consciousness, and will end up by being a big deal here. I don’t buy the argument that there’s no room for it in the sporting ecology. If that were true, then where the hell did Nascar come from?
Speaking as an American, the field is too big and as a result the players look too small on TV. I always feel like I’m spying on something from a nearby mountain.
Also speaking as an American, adopting World Cup soccer as your sport of choice would be like a Brazilian deciding he’s going to be a Cubs fan.
By the way, I occasionally play baseball and softball, and I’d love a chance to play cricket. When I lived in Jersey City I’d occasionally see Indian and Pakistani guys playing inside a fenced-in tennis court, but it seemed more like they were just having batting practice.
Rugby not so much. I wear glasses, seems like a bad idea.
Which is why I didn’t say that. :rolleyes:
I think Americans grow bored with lengthy strategizing and maneuvering - we want to see the shot. And the more muscular, the better. It might be necessary to shrink the field a bit in order to accommodate it, but I think a shot clock would change soccer much as it has collegiate basketball.
I love soccer. You know what you could do to get me to like it better? Let me watch the elite clubs play on a regular basis. I’m loving the ESPN UEFA coverage; if there was more available I’d watch more.
Yes. It does seem that way sometimes. A problem we have here in the states is that when an American TV crew is used to do the camera work and directing etc. for a soccer match they generally don’t know the game very well, if at all. Any videographer will tell you that if you don’t know what is happening in front of you or what to expect next, shoot the scene a little wider.
The game is just shot too loose in America. Plus, the director doesn’t fully understand the flow so he doesn’t know how to make crisp camera changes. It really hurts the presentation of the game from the fans point of view.
This doesn’t even get into how HORRIBLE the U.S. announcers are. And this is even when the color folks have played at the international level. They simply don’t know how to call a match properly. And the play-by-play guys… YIKES! The best announcing crew during the last World Cup on ABC / ESPN was the British / Irish crew and they were the crew used LEAST! The very WORST crew (Marcus Balboa and J.P. Dellacamera) was the lead crew who did all the big games including the final.
Answer 1 : NO
Answer 2 : Look what you did to crickett and rugby, does it look like we care?
Defending your goal by stepping AWAY from it has a subtle elegance wasted on people who think you play football with your hands .
We silly football-fans know how long a match lasts.
The thing that makes soccer great is the injustice of a fallable ref. One of the greatest, most talked about moments in football is one where the whole world minus one referee saw Maradonna’s hand touch the ball. You want to videotape the controversy out of football and then people will like it MORE? :smack:
Who are you who are so wise in the ways of SDMB-science? 
I second that. Every now and then I get to see some Champions League coverage but since I have left NJ I rarely see any televised matches. Back home growing up, I could turn on Telemundo and watch games on most weekends so that was always fun. I couldn’t speak a lick of Spanish but I really enjoyed the coverage. If you televise more talented teams, then people will develop an interest. There is no need to change the rules, IMHO, just a need to increase exposure.
Fox Soccer Channel? Telemundo? Sentanta? GolTV?
There’s a ton of soccer on TV nowadays.
I do agree that the way that timekeeping is handled in soccer is incredibly lame and open to abuse. And the whole foul/penalty/reward system could use a re-working.
The whole “referee as final arbiter” concept seems to be another part of the America/Europe divide. The referee being the official timekeeper is one part of this. Also bear in mind that another principle affects this: that the same rules are used at every level of the game. So referee+watch is the timekeeper both in the Premiership and in amateur sunday league matches. (This argument also affects things such as video replay, goal-line detection, etc.)
Please do elaborate!
NASCAR just replaced open-wheel racing as the dominant form of motorsport in the United States because A) ESPN was able to get broadcast rights cheaply and it filled a lot of time on the schedule and B) American open-wheel shot itself in the foot with the IRL/CART split.
Daytona is more relevant now than Indy, which wasn’t the case as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.
Ugh. The International Ice Hockey Federation(hockey equivalent of FIFA) does this. It results in ridiculous rules like “if the puck strikes the goalie in the mask, play is called dead” being enforced at the highest level of the game.
I would like to see the players be free to use their hands but… using your hands means other players are free to tackle them while they are holding it. If you say that isn’t one of the best ideas you ever heard, I doubt you will ever tell a bigger lie.
You’re comparing apples and oranges, if you’re going to come out with specific examples of individual rules. And in any case, it’s the enforcement of deliberately-vague and catch-all rules which allows the system to work: unsporting behaviour in a professional match is not the same as unsporting behaviour in an amateur one.
It’s a terrible idea.
I presume you’re joking.
It’s called football for a reason. Anyone other than the goalkepper using their hands would ruin the game.