[Fuzz]

“American football and basketball have been harmed by excessive breaks for TV commercials and various other timeouts.”

The continuous play with no commercial interruptions is one of the things that makes it enjoyable for me to watch.

[Steve_Seattle]

"The continuous play with no commercial interruptions is one of the things that makes it enjoyable for me to watch."

That does somewhat compensate for other factors. Such as, per current Major League Soccer stats:

2.72 = average goals per game (total, both teams).
1.36 = average goals per game (per individual team).
33% = percentage of games ending in a tie.

In American football, this would be equivalent to a preponderance of 10-7 or 14-7 or 7-0 games, with a lot of 10-10 and 7-7 ties. A 42-28 game would be almost unheard of.

[sphinx]

The continuous play with no commercial interruptions is one of the things that makes it enjoyable for me to watch.

Yes, and in a perfect world, one of my reforms for football would be to allow commercials only between quarters or halves, return to more or less continuous play, and return to limited substitution/single platoon football to run the 300 pound steriod freaks off the field.

Were they put onto the field, three quarters of a typical NFL team would drop dead of heart attacks within the first 20 minutes of a soccer game. Of course, if you performed the reverse experiment, most of the soccer players would be carried off a football field on stretchers due to collision injuries. Football has become a gladiatorial contest. Soccer is still an athletic match.