Posted on 08/03/2004 3:12:33 PM PDT by swilhelm73
While people from Oslo to Athens and from London to Vladivostok were avidly following the European football championship in June, Americans ignored it. In the United States, the only way to see the Greece-Portugal final, or any other match in the tournament, was to make a special, costly arrangement with a satellite broadcasting company or to find a pub that was showing one of the games. Any such pub would invariably be located in an obscure corner of a large city and filled with people speaking languages other than English. Euro 2004 was the latest episode in the long history of American indifference to the world's favourite sport, which continues despite strenuous efforts to put the game on the same footing as America's three major team games: baseball, American football and basketball. Why have these efforts failed?
One reason has to do with the existing popularity of the big three. Even in as large and wealthy a country as the United States, where the national appetite for playing, and even more so for watching, games is enormous, the cultural, economic and psychological space available for sport is limited and that space is already taken. Baseball, American football and basketball have long since put down deep roots, claimed particular seasons of the year as their own (although they now overlap) and gained the allegiance of the sports-following public.
A fourth team sport, ice hockey, is widely played across the northern tier of the country and has a professional league with teams located across the border in Canada and throughout the United States, even in cities whose climates are so benign that ice has never formed in them: indeed, the franchise in Tampa, Florida, won this year's championship. The presence of four major team sports - more than in any other country - has made the barrier to entry in the competition for the affections and the dollars of American sports fans extraordinarily high, so high that even the world's most popular game has not been able to surmount it.
One in particular of those three sports - basketball - poses a singular obstacle to the national acceptance of football. The two are too similar for them both to succeed. Each belongs to the family of games whose object is to put a ball (or similar object) in a goal.
Because the two games are similar, they have the same kind of appeal. Both are easy to follow; you can immediately understand the point of each one. The rules and strategies of cricket, baseball, rugby and American football, by contrast, are less straightforward. The action of a basketball game and of a football match are easier to follow than that of other team sports as well because the ball is larger than in cricket and baseball and is never hidden in a tangle of bodies or a scrum, as it is in American football and rugby.
Football and basketball are also easier to play than the other team games. They do not require elaborate equipment and satisfactory informal games can be staged without the full complement of players. And both football and basketball players can perfect their skills practising entirely alone.
Spectators see the same thing in the two games: episodes of spontaneous coordination, with players devising and implementing schemes for scoring. They see, that is, acts of creation. If architecture is, as is sometimes said, music set in concrete, then football and basketball may be said to be creativity embodied in team sports.
The two games are both played partly in the air. Basketball players spring off the floor to launch shots at the basket and soar to capture missed shots as they bounce off the rim, even as football players leap upward to intercept a kicked ball with their heads to control it, tap it to a team-mate, or redirect it into their opponents' goal. Football and basketball are therefore the team sports that most vividly evoke a common human fantasy: to leave the ground and fly through the air.
This is why, perhaps, football and basketball are the team sports with the widest global appeal. It is no surprise that each of the two has established a beachhead in the last great expanse of unoccupied sports territory, the People's Republic of China. Their marked similarities, however, also mean that the two sports duplicate each other. They provide the same satisfactions. For spectators they are, in a sense, alternatives. North Americans don't need football because they already get what it has to offer from basketball.
There is, too, the problem of the frequency with which football matches end in a draw. Americans want conclusive results from their games. Baseball and basketball have rules forbidding draws: the two teams must play until one of them wins. Draws were more common in American football until two decades ago when, responding to the national irritation with them, the managers of the sport changed the rules. Now collegiate games cannot end in draws and professional contests very rarely do.
Most American sports fans would regard the method used for deciding international championship matches that end in a draw even after extra time - the penalty shoot-out - as absurdly arbitrary and no more fitting a way to determine a winner than flipping a coin.
There is a remedy for what is, in American eyes, football's gravest defect. The game's rules could be changed to make scoring much easier, which would mean that even if the match were drawn at the end of 90 minutes, one or the other team would almost certainly score in extra time.
Altering the rules to encourage scoring is an old and well established practice in American sport. In the course of the 20th century, baseball, American football and basketball each did so several times. The changes helped to sustain, and indeed to expand, the popularity of all three, since, as one astute student of baseball put it, 'offense [scoring] is making things happen. Defense is keeping things from happening. People would much rather watch things happen.'
To do the same thing for football might well require dramatic modifications in the way the game is now played - the abolition of the offside rule, for example, or awarding points that count in the final score for corner kicks, which, as in prize fights that do not end in knockouts, would give an advantage to the side that makes the most determined efforts to score.
Why has this not happened in the US? One possible reason is that such changes would make the American version of football substantially different from the game played everywhere else, and here Americans are reluctant to be out of step with the rest of the world. If that is the case, then the failure of the world's most popular sport to gain full acceptance in the world's most sports-obsessed country suggests that there are, after all, limits to American unilateralism.
· Michael Mandelbaum is one of America's leading authorities on US foreign policy and international relations and the author of The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy and Free Markets in the Twenty-First Century (Public Affairs)
CUZ THAT AIN'T FOOTBALL!!!
</rant>
Ignore this asshole.... Mandelbaum... I love soccer and haveplayed it all my life... Everyone on this thread who thrashes the sport is being caught up in the moment... The writer is a schmuck.... Sorry.... But people on FR are being brought into a stupid discussion about a great sport....
ARA
Flame away
It took me years to figure out the rules. At least I think I've figured them out. Who knows?
Basketball is popular because it is easy to set up a court between buildings or to hang a hoop on the garage. It was invented to keep footballers (American) busy in the off season...and in my mind rates just there; something jocks can do in their spare time. Not something I'd watch because it is dominated by gigantos with absolutely NO connection to anyone I know or want to know - all trying to look good within the space of a commemorative postage stamp.
Soccer was one of my favorite spectator sports growing up; it was where the Germans rivaled the Puerto Ricans, the Italians and the mexicans, Brits and the Micks...while they were working toward being Americans. Lost all of it's charm when there were suddenly hordes of mexican (non) americans & local school boards demanding that it be made a major sport regardless of it's non relevance.
I also hate the kiddie soccer standard lore that winning is not the primary goal of the sport - diversity and acceptance are more important.
Oh, yeah, the latin american wars and european riots that seem married to the sport are a bit of a turn off.
Who's "we?"
Which is all great, but unfortunately that's not how basketball is played anymore. Now it's all about driving strong to the hole and going for the dunk, sad but true. When it's played right basketball is a thing of beauty, unfortunately it hasn't been played right in at least 10 years at the professional level and the college level is falling off badly.
Great point. You turn on a soccer game, and likely as not, the ball is in the middle of the field where the chance to score is negligible. Hard to keep you're attention that way.
It's not a greater knowledge of subtleties, it's a greater desire to pay attention to them. And really in sport's like soccer and hockey it's a greater need to understand them to enjoy the sport.
You can be a fan of football and baseball and quite thuroughly enjoy the games without being a student of the game. With the modern era of basketball it actually helps to NOT be a student of the game because the modern NBA has ruined the sport for people that actually understand it. Hockey and soccer simply don't make sense until you're at least an elementary level student of the game, you see it over and over where people complain that the sports seem to be a lot of pointless movement with nothing happening.
I'm perfectly willing to discuss the game. All games have flaws, Alberta's Child and I already had a quick discussion of some of the flaws of soccer, and I can do two hours on the flaws of my favorite sport hockey. I'm not saying the fans have flaws, it's perfectly OK to not be into the subtleties of a sport, no hit on the fans at all. I'm an old school Chicago sports fan, I'll watch any game at anytime for any reason, and I love to study them, I've even watched shuffleboard because the basketball courts were closed for repair and I was desperate to watch SOMETHING while eating my parkdog. I realize not everybody grows up in that kind of environment and it's probably better they don't (who would write the great novels if we were all watching sports every waking minute).
It's not a hit, it's just a fact. Most fans just aren't interested in the subtleties of their game. They don't want to hear about how Jerry Rice taps a cornerback before making his break to make the guy think he's running a different route, they don't want to hear about the importance of the plant foot in a blocking scheme, they're barely interested in hearing about why you run on first down 5 times in a row to setup the play action touchdown pass on the 6th. There are subtleties in every sport, but most fans don't care which is their perogative, it's their brain space if they don't want to fill it with useless sports trivia I'm not gonna say they should; but in some sports those subtleties are closer to the heart of the game, more necessary to understand to be able to understand the game. It takes years of watching hockey to be able to spot a set play coming over the blue line, it takes one quarter of a football game to understand that they're all set plays, it takes about 6 people getting on base to understand there are set plays in baseball.
Different sports for different people. Just because a sport isn't popular in America doesn't mean either the sport or the fans are at fault. American sports fans have a distinctive character, and that means their not going to like all sports; American games have a distinctive character too, and that means not all the world is going to like them. Such is life.
That's actually one of the reasons I love Madden. Literally Madden remade me into a football fan. I'd gotten so tired of the coverage being only about the QB, one RB, two WRs and maybe a CB I'd actually stopped watching the game for a few years until a friend pointed me to CBS and Madden. But even Madden doesn't really dig deep into it very often, he can't the audience will lose patience. The standard football audience doesn't really want to hear more about the blocking scheme beyond "they did a good job picking up the blitz and giving their QB time to make the play", maybe a quick "BOOM look how he knocked that pass rusher down", but they're not gonna sit for hearing during every possession about how this block worked because of how the lineman got square to the rusher and picked the correct plant foot. Your average football fan would be bored to tears by that kind of coverage, which is OK but it shows why your average football fan is not also your average hockey fan, hockey fans eat up that kind of coverage, we want to hear about how the shooter dragged his toe to keep his stick extended and improve his angle on the net. Neither is better than the other, they both simply are.
There's not enough motion in baseball to have anywhere near the level of subtlety.
If you let them use their hands you've just made basketball, which is a fine sport but that slot is taken.
no I think nuances aren't boring. But I understand that if a person has wasted the time and brain space learning the nuances it'll get boring.
Why all the soccer threads (3 in the last 2 days and I've not read through this one yet) lately?
Oh, and some of the best games I have ever seen were 0-0 ties.
Actually it's 90 minutes, with a small break.
I don't think soccer will ever overtake any of the big three. It's just not an American sport, it doesn't appeal to the American fan. Although I guess basketball could destroy itself, but if it does expect hockey to overtake it since most pro-basketball courts double duty as hockey rinks the foundation is already there.
No. Formula One doesn't do well in America because American's like to watch the whole game, which you can't do in road racing. NASCAR has overtaken Indy because Indy because the IRL and CART feud is stupid and the warring factions have been very creative in finding new and exciting way to kill their sport. Also Indy has lost all the interesting drivers, and NASCAR has found a way to mass produce interesting drivers that give great interview and are highly approachable by the fans.
I love football, the complexity is what keeps me interested. But I also know that 90% of football TV coverage is geared towards obfuscating the complexity, there are very few announcers will to discuss play selection with any depth that would help people understand what's going on in the game.
Scratch all but the last one, call it soccer, and I'll tune in every weekend!
This isn't football school. If you are fan of the game of football you probably have an understanding of blocking schemes and how recievers run their routes. Football is an exciting sport with drama,skill, strategery, and every NFL game means something to the team. NFL football is an event, not one of 82 games or 180 or whatever baseball plays.
If a person grew up playing football they know the jobs of each position, now the anouncer needs to anounce whats happening, not show us how informed he is about the game. As a fans knowledge of the game grows you start noticing and appreciating the DE and the Tackle having that brutal battle or the 80 yard drive all on the ground.
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