I don’t know any other sport other than the Iron Man where an athlete has to be better conditioned.
American football has a two platoon system - the player is off the field sitting on his ass half the game. There are endless boring wait times for reviewing the plays, it’s “hike, crunch, and huddle,” and the quarterback might as well be allowed to wear a dress as he’s become so untouchable. American football is killing itself. The cheerleaders are in better sporting shape.
In Fussball or Futbol a player has to run up and down the field constantly for up to 2 hours, and you can earn some great Academy awards for the pratfalls.
Watching foreigners run up and down the field is not my idea of excitement. There seems no point in it. And with games ending with 1-0, I mean how exciting can it be?
Nah, I’ll stick with football until it goes all gay.
Poll: World Cup a liberal’s game; just 30% of nation following it
Yeagh!
Amusing see the bitchin about normal football by those who worship masked players play “foot” ball by throwing the weird shaped thing with hands, injuring each other for life, now joining the unions???
Enjoy what you enjoy and stop putting down what millions enjoy.
One thing football can use to spruse up the game is the elimination of offside rule. Just like (team)handball has. More dynamic game, more goals. Why stopping fast players???
> I don’t know any other sport other than the Iron Man where an athlete has to be better conditioned.
Water polo.
From my perspective, soccer had three basic flaws that make it difficult to enjoy it as a spectator sport:
1. It's one of only two sports (football being the other) where the clock runs while the ball is out of play, after a whistle has blown to stop play, etc. As you correctly pointed out about the NFL, this really slows the game down and removes a lot of the urgency of playing the game for real.
2. Related to #1, I have a hard time taking a sport seriously when the referee on the field is the only one who knows the official time, and is the sole arbiter of how much "stopped time" is added at the end of the game. This is indicative of a sport that is so archaic that it was designed to be timed with an hourglass or a sundial.
3. Free substitution would go a long way toward making soccer an exciting game. The implementation of free substitution -- even "on the fly" during the course of play while the clock is running -- in professional hockey back in the early 20th century is what helped define the sport today. Previously it had been a slower, almost gentlemanly sport ... much like soccer on ice. Adding the free substitution turned it into the fast-paced, frenetic game you see today.
And I don't think I'm going out on a limb here by suggesting that hockey is a sport where an athlete has to be better-conditioned than soccer.
As the Tour de France starts this weekend, check out those guys. Amazing to watch them pedal for hours on end, day in and day out, for 3 weeks...I heard yesterday that some ride as many as 20,000 miles a year...
I prefer footie to any of the games mentioned. For the uninitiated, footie is Australian football. A hell of a game that provides more excitement than American football; similar athletic prowess to soccer along with the rough and tumble of rugby all on a field the size of Rhode Island! (Ok just a little hyperbole on that last part)
Nonetheless I made certain on my last visit to Australia to actually attend a game as opposed to only seeing it on TV. AMAZING!
In Fussball or Futbol a player has to run up and down the field constantly for up to 2 hours,
...one of soccer’s most prevalent myths...watch more closely...