YES.
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)
Soccer: A bunch of guys running around on a big field where nothing happens.
I first came to the United States in 1969, and got permanent residence status through the effective but admittedly imprudent stratagem of enlisting in the US Army. The first time I went home to England on leave, a year and a half later, the subject of football came up during an evening at a pub. Most of the participants held out for the superiority of the Euro-version (soccer here) over American football. Some of the pinko contingent (no doubt influenced by The Guardian) tried to connect this with other alleged failings of American culture and society. Being the closest thing to an American there, I took the contrary position and asked, "Ok, if a couple of blokes are talking about football, and the conversation is taking place on the Moon, which version do they mean?"
Nonsense. Baseball is a far more subtle sport and has enjoyed fabulous popularity for over 100 years.
And how about the hordes of America's Cup fans when the USA won year after year after year after......(yawn).......
YES.
right on!!
First of all, you gotta quit calling soccer "football." It is SOCCER. We already have football and it is far more exciting than watching some Brits and Brazilians trot across a field that is better suited to growing hay. You have a goalie wearing something Dennis Rodman wouldn't even wear, and no one has any personality. Sheesh, the most exciting thing in soccer is that British guy cheating on Posh Spice. C'mon. Get real.
There's no cheerleaders.
There's no beer commercials.
There's no personalities.
There's no excitement.
All this from someone who was the captain of his high school soccer team, the school's first soccer team. Soccer is fun to play, but B0RING to watch. Just ask the parents at the YMCA on Saturday morning.
So am I!! Nothing like a day of good old woodsball!!
I love watching Aussie Football. I haven't a clue to what the rules are, but I love to watch it all the same!
For the record America has two very good national teams, reaching the quarterfinals in the 2002 World Cup and being very unlucky to go out to the eventual runners up Germany. On the way there they beat Portugal and Mexico (nice one lads) and did better than France, Italy, Argentina, Russia, Croatia, China, Sweden and Ireland .
So to sum up, this guy is an idiot and probably doesn’t watch football (sorry soccer) back in England much anyways. Next time some Euro berates you about soccer, hold your head high and just ask them how they did in 2002. :-)
Well, no, not ALL, a large number, but not the majority. Take the best players in the world IMO -- they're Zinedine zidane and Thierry Henri (from France), Ronaldo and Ronaldinho from Brazil, Luis Figo from Portugal, Milan Baros from the Czech republic, Ruud van Nistelrooy of Holland and Wayne rooney and Michael Owen of England
>>"Ok, if a couple of blokes are talking about football, and the conversation is taking place on the Moon, which version do they mean?"
LOL that is funny.
Response: A game for 'girlie men!'
I beg to differ on that one. The National Hockey League is filled with players who owe their skills to the countless hours they spent playing by themselves on frozen backyard rinks long after everyone else went home. This, in fact, is what is missing from the modern game of hockey -- the creativity that was engendered by such an approach to the game.
FWIW, I am now a sweaty, smelly mess after a two-hour hockey "practice session" on inline skates. First by myself, then with a small bunch of kids who showed up and wanted to be part of the action.
I'm getting too old to do this kind of sh!t in 85+ heat and 90%+ humidity. LOL.
:-)
Ah, the classics. Thanks. Much better than that nine-minute headache they use now.
He attributed this to his early teenage years, when he figured out a way to sneak into the local rink in the middle of the night, and would spend hours firing hockey pucks at the net in the dark. To challenge himself (with no goalie in the net), he would practice shooting the puck into the net off the bottom of the crossbar and the inside of the posts.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.