That should be ‘like amanset says’. Meant to hit preview to check the name, and, uh forgot. Such absentmindedness damages my credibilty somewhat, eh? :smack:
Soccer is actually the root of both rugby and American football.
Anyone ever hear of William Webb Ellis? One day while playing soccer he got frustrated, picked up the ball, and ran. The name of the school he was playing for? Rugby. Hence the name of the game.
American football was taken from rugby when they added the forward pass, which in rugby is illegal.
Regardless, it is true that baseball requires only a stick and a ball, but all soccer requires is a ball. Period. You can mark the goals with trees, rocks, whatever. My understanding is that it bacame so popular around the world because even poor people who couldn’t afford equipment could play soccer.
And the legend of the first soccer game is interesting as well, at least as I heard it. Some Scandinavians beat some other people in battle, and they decapitated someone and used it as a ball, wherefore they played the game between towns. The winner was the team that kicked the head into their town first.
Good, story, although I’m not sure of the validity. However, it makes the point that soccer has been around for a lot longer than most, if not all sports due to its simplicity.
le sigh
I’m too tired to pay attention. Appaerntly my only contribution was to mention W.W. Ellis.
Yet another well-intentioned, mindless post. 
We have had netball almost as long as you have had basketball:
It’s not as if we had to put up with football because the more superior American sports hadn’t been invented.
Picking a nit, but if memory serves the above statement is not correct. The NBA Finals WERE broadcast live on ABC and then CBS throughout the 1970s, however, ratings were poor, especially for the Seattle Sonics vs. Washington Bullets finals of 1978 and 1979, so then CBS started broadcasting the weekday Finals games on tape delay, keeping the Saturday and Sunday afternoon broadcasts live. CBS had resumed broadcasting the entire NBA finals live, including the weekday evening games, by the 1984 series between the Lakers and Celtics (Bird vs. Magic). NBC eventually was awarded the rights and solved the NBA’s TV ratings problems by scheduling the finals for June, rather than the so-called “sweeps” month of May.
Getting back to the OP, sort of, I still say it is un-American to care about a sport that doesn’t make full use of the human opposable thumb. I understand that other people of good will, such as my nieces, disagree with that. If they want to go around kicking a ball rather than hitting it with a stick the way God intended then that’s not my problem.
It is very straight forward. Soccer (as you will insist of calling it) requires the least amount of facilities and organisation to start a pick up game. Got a ball, or anything at all that can be kicked? Good. Got two objects that can serve as goal posts? Ok. Got an area of ground that isn’t a mountainous incline? Great. Everybody, let’s play.
Compare with baseball. Sure, a stick and a stone is enough to start with. But then you’ve got to get agreement on who is going to wait for a turn to be batter. Someone gets to be pitcher and gets the most of the game. Someone else has to stand out in the remotest part of the “outfield” doing very little. It all takes co-operation and a fair amount of trust that you’re going to get your fair turn at the action. Soccer, on the other hand, involves everyone equally from the start. If the game wraps up within five minutes then no-one has missed out.
Now consider basketball. You need a ball that’ll bounce with a degree of reliability. You need a hoop. Neither of these can be produced out of nothing. This limits when and where you can play it.
Obviously ice-hockey is the most facility-dependant of all. You need ice. Strong ice that isn’t going to break and drown you. You need skates. You need to know how to skate. You need sticks and a puck of sort. There are areas where these requirements are not a problem. But not for most of the planet.
Football, the American kind, is closest to soccer in requirements. But IMHO it relies more on the physical size of the players. It doesn’t matter if you are the most skillfull player in the neighbourhood, the big guy down the street who’s three years older can still flatten you, and legally. He might even really hurt you and it’s all in the rules of the game. This, I suspect, might limit the game’s appeal. You could play touch, but that requires everyone’s agreement. In soccer each individual can be as physical and committed as they want. You can even play an entire game without tackling anyone, you wouldn’t be much use, but you could. You can’t do that in football.
So soccer is easiest to play, requires the least organisation and cooperation, and caters for the widest degree of physical sizes, skill and commitment. This isn’t a slight on the others, or determines which sport is “best”. It just explains why soccer is the most widespread and popular.
All football games are basically variations on the same theme – a playing area with a scoring area at each end, one for each team. The objective is to get the ball into one scoring area, while preventing the other team from getting it into the other scoring area. The different codes differ as regards the moves and techniques that can be employed for this purpose.
The same is basically true of all variants on hockey, except that sticks or clubs are used.
It is unsurprising that different variations on football and hockey should appear in different places. What is fascinating is to study which variations thrive, and tend to spread and to eclipse other variations. My own guess is that this has little enough to do with the intrinsic merits of the games themselves, and a lot to do with broader social, cultural and even political history.
I suspect that the reason that US sports have not migrated much beyond the US is simply that the US is a nation of immigrants, not emigrants. It is really only from the second world war onwards that the US has had much of a presence abroad of the kind that might spread US sports – e.g. army bases - whereas the English had been doing this from the previous century. I think, basically, soccer had a head start as the UK was the most prominent nation, and the one with the most international connections during the time when much of the world was industrialising, and was developing the kind of societies where organised sport would be played professionally and would be watched for entertainment.
Is there some reason you soccer fanatics are obsessed with making American sprts seem more difficult or something? This is all total bull.
We never had a problem with this. In fact, we all just sorta took turns as we pleased. And anyway, no one ever had to stay out of play. Nor did we play in actualy baseball fields, either. We all just arranged ourselves as needed to cover the area.
Its not exactly a huge expense now, either? Hoops cost little, too. Half the neigborhood had 5$ hoops drilled to their garages.
…Which is why its popularized in the northern areas where they have such ice. Down south, we could just play it with sticks on a level lot. Though I never did because it wasn’t very interesting to me. I like hockey games now though.
You’ve got it all wrong. Have you ever played neighborhood football? Ever? The tacklings half the fun! And don’t think the little kids get beaten up either, those scrawny guys are the ones you watch out for! They’ll run right around you and score before you can say jack sprat.
Moreover, this applies to any sport! Older kids are almost always better.
You have done nothing but bring up overblown, specious points. COuld you stop this one-trick pony. Its obviously supported neither by logic nor historical fact. These sports are popular in America. You bring up these points as if to somehow justify a position saying they will not be popular, when this is clearly not the case.
That’s it? Soccer/Football has only one rule - “Don’t use your hands.”? :rolleyes:
Somehow I doubt this. I seem to remember in grade school learning about positions and who was allowed where when. Aren’t there rules (similar to hockey) in which players aren’t allowed forward of some line if they play a certain position? What’s the red and yellow card business about if there’s only one rule? Why corner kicks v. throw ins if there’s only one rule? I’m not saying the rules are difficult to learn or complicated, but to say there’s only one rule to soccer/football is specious, at best. The most basic American Football rules are also simple, and you also need only a ball to play. Rugby rules are even simpler (excepting maybe that scrum thing 
) and again, you only need a ball to play.
Perhaps it’s the ovality of the Am. Football and rugby balls that’s the problem. Anyone can put a roughly circular ball together, but making it roughly oval is harder.
Why not Ultimate Frizbee? All one needs is a disc and a space. Rules, again, are relatively simple. Why not tag? Why not kickball? Why not any of our grade school sports, like dodgeball? What I’m trying to say here is that I think the question is more complicated than one of rules, requirements, or player size and talent.
Snicks
Excuse me???
Field hockey was a male sport long before it was ‘for girls’.
It has been played in the Olympics since 1908 (by men)
and only entered in 1980 (for women).
BTW, and I quote:
The roots of hockey are buried deep in antiquity. Historical records show that a crude form of hockey was played in Egypt 4,000 years ago, and in Ethiopia around 1,000 BC. Various museums offer evidence that a form of the game was played by Romans and Greeks, and by the Aztec Indians in South America several centuries before Columbus landed in the New World. The modern game of hockey evolved in England in the mid-18th century, primarily around schools.
Its a great sport. Leave it alone. Girls indeed…Huh.
Smiling bandit**, nobody’s saying that! Look here, for example:
What’s so inflammatory about that?
Soccer is the most popular sport in some of the poorest countries in the world. There, a $5 hoop can be a huge expense. Not everyone there has garages either - even in Europe, most people don’t. Even a stick strong enough to hit a baseball with can be hard to find in some parts of Africa.
Actually, consider that point: the poorest countries in the world, those that have least access to good facilities, mostly play soccer as their national sport. Doesn’t that indicate that perhaps soccer requires fewer facilities, like so many of us here have said?
You’re seriously saying that with American Football, there’s the same risk of injury as with soccer? Contact is good, rough and tumble can be fun, but serious injury is pretty off-putting.
I’ve brought up history to support my case. Fact supports it - football is the most popular game in the world. Logic supports it. There is no need to get riled up and insulting about this; a question was asked, answers are being given, nobody’s attacking American sports, whatever inferences you may take. Personally, I like to play ‘rounders’ and basketball, and I’d probably enjoy watching a baseball game (not so sure about the others, but I would like to try them at least once), but I do contend, based on facts and logic, that soccer would have become popular even with the competition of other sports.
In fact, as has been shown by the early introduction to Britain of basketball/netball, and the simultaneous development of rugby (the predecessor of American Football) with soccer, there wascompetition. And soccer won. Because it has the edge on other sports for ease of use - not always a huge difference in convenience, but enough.
Oh, one more point. Soccer players are sexier.
Sorry, Aro, but in the US, field hockey is strictly for girls. Much as I was informed baseball (rounders) is in the UK. Nothing personal.
As for the football vs. American sports argument, the main reason that football is the most popular in the world is due to European imperialism and the nature of the colonization of the areas in question. It has little to do with how easy it is to play or whatnot. Look at India and Pakistan. Cricket rules over there, not football. Look at the Caribbean and Japan (and maybe Korea) where baseball rules. Those areas have been more influenced by the US than Europe, and so adopted baseball rather than football. Even the poor kids in the Caribbean have no problem playing baseball with a lack of equipment, they just use sticks and rocks. The popularity of baseball, football, basketball, whatever, has less to do with how much equipment or how easy it is to play than who influenced the area the most during a given time.
That’s not a knock on football. It’s not a knock on American sports. It’s just how it is.
What I think is neat is that the US (AFAIK) is one of the few places where the colonizers adopted a native game that became popular in the general populace: lacrosse.
Small boys in parks, jumpers for goal posts, three and in, an enduring image isn’t it? isn’t it?
You having a Ron Manager moment there, owl ?
Soccer (from now on I will be refering to this sport as 99% of humanity does, I mean FOOTBALL) is for girls? Ja my sister plays american football and my mother Basket 
I don’t like football that much, I prefer Rugby it is for me more dynamic but of course I am an exception.
I fear this horse may have died a while ago, but I’ll try one more time.
For what reason do you believe that you could have sold ice hockey to the tropics on the grounds that it’s an easy enough game to play where it originated?
It doesn’t matter that you can play it on the streets of Texas - the only reason why you do play it that way is because you have the real thing on your doorstep for comparisson. Take the ice and the skates away and you basically have field hockey - that’s what you would have been selling to most of the world. But the British-influenced world has had access to that game since the C19[sup]th[/sup], and nobody’s been interested very much. So your “iceless-skateless-use-your-imagination-trust-me-this-is-huge-in-Wisconsin” game would have fared no better would it?
OK, let’s have your explanation. (US) Football is basically like rugby, rugby was exported at the same time as soccer. Rugby is small, soccer is huge. Why?
I noticed you didn’t reply to my previous posts, but I just put that down to rudeness. Maybe you genuinely don’t understand the arguments being made?
This is just not true. South American countries had been independent for about 60 years before they took up football so massively.
And how would you explain the spread of football from Britain to continental Europe? We never rules those countries.
The mostly recently colonised countries (Africa) have only become major football nations in the last 15 years or so, several decades after the colonisers left. In any case, the British colonisers preferred rugby to football (sweeping generalisation I know).
Millions of us are doing just that right now; they are showing informed and knowledgable devotion to football that outdoes many of us.
[quote]
We nevuh rools those countries
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I know it’s irritating when someone pads out their post-count by pointing out their own typing mistakes, but this one is particularly embarassing.
Wow. Who stole your cookie?
Try to address the point please bandit. I made clear that my post was not an attack on any of the sports.
The fact is in baseball that only two players at any one time are assured play. The pitcher and the batter. If one person wants to appoint himself pitcher than no-one else gets to do it. Not everyone gets to bat, you take your turn. It requires cooperation and agreement about who is going to do what, two things that can take time and effort to establish in a scratch game. This is not the case in soccer.
The fact is that you can play soccer any time, any place. Unless you are in the habit of carrying a $5 hoop in your back pocket all the time, with a basketball in the other, you can not say this of basketball.
The fact is that size gives you a distinct advantage in American football, far more than in soccer. If big kid flattens little kid in soccer it should be a foul. In American Football it’s like it or lump it. Either go away and grow some, or pick another sport.
The sports mentioned are not as popular in most of the countries of most of the world as soccer. That is historical fact. This is what the OP (remember that?) asks about, not their position in America. All my “specious points” address issues that suggest why soccer remains the most popular team sport in the world.
Unless you have suggestions as to why this should not be the case then you’re not contributing anything of relevance to this thread.
I think you’re wasting your time waiting for a sensible response from smiling bandit, as several people have already tried to get one and failed. I’ve addressed two posts directly to him, most recently three days ago but got nowhere, even though I notice he’s been on these boards today.
To summarise my own position in respect of the OP, I’m sure that if the “American” sports had got to the world before soccer they would be much more common and widespread than they are today. But I’m equally sure that my country would still have soccer and that it would be the most widespread team sport in the world for the reasons we’ve already explained at great length.
The existance of soccer does not require the non-existance of other sports. Even considering the top four US ones, they aren’t all equally popular or equally concentrated where they are played.
As a further aside, I have a friend in Tokyo who has had a journalist from The Guardian staying with him for the duration of the World Cup. He (the press guy) recently wrote about how soccer has grown in popularity in Japan since the J League was set up. Apparently the younger generation see baseball as an older salaryman’s game and see soccer as the game for them. Only time will tell how much this attitude is sustained, but although I don’t expect baseball to become extinct in Japan, it tends to suggest that soccer can be an easy game to promote even in a market where US sports already exist.