Posted on 06/20/2014 8:05:16 AM PDT by SoFloFreeper
The US has brought more fans to Brazil than any other country and this may be a genuine tipping point....
A recent ESPN poll found that among Americans aged 12-17, football was now neck and neck with baseball in terms of popularity, and well ahead of ice hockey. A Washington Times survey found that almost a third of Americans planned to watch at least some of the tournament. The New York Times has splashed the World Cup over its front page several times in recent weeks. Beneath the surface, the last four years have seen the emergence of magazines such as Howler and Eight By Eight, covering the game with the same depth and detail as any European publication.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Yes for football, I love football, also a yes for football variants rugby and Aussie Rules, not so much for Canadian or Arena League. Probably not for baseball, baseball only gets my interest when there’s a good narrative so if I don’t know the teams there can’t be a good narrative (at least not good for me). Basketball it depends, when the game is played well I find it enjoyable, but it really isn’t played well anymore, NBA is all dunk ball, and the one and done thing in college has really impacted the quality of play.
I’ve watched soccer. It tends to be not that exciting. Though with the fall of Spain the long ball defense style (which lets face it, that’s just a stunningly boring way to play the game, playing not to lose in any sport is dull) seems to be fading away. Everything I’m hearing says this is one of the highest scoring World Cup round robins ever, including lots of come from behind victories. Come from behind victories are a sign that a sport has interesting things happening. Look at the NHL after the lockout that cost the whole season, going into that the trap/ lock was popular and the sport suffered (playing not to lose), there were rules tweaks during the lockout and 3rd period scoring skyrocketed, and lead changing scoring went up astronomically, and the league just finished what was probably the most purely entertaining playoffs I’ve ever seen from the NHL.
The problem with your idea of familiarity being required for enjoyment is that if you can’t enjoy a sport before you know it you have no reason to get to know it. Sport I like I liked first then learned, they had a movement cycle I could be entertained by even if I didn’t understand it. Curling is like that, I watched curling for the first time during the ‘02 Olympics and something about it just grabbed me, but it took me 3 or 4 matches to start to really understand the scoring, and the implications of the scoring system fascinate my game theory mind. If the game was on TV more I’d watch it, but it entertained me BEFORE I understood it.
Something about soccer entertained you enough to get familiar with it. To me soccer still has too much time when all it seems to be doing is marking time, there’s a lot of fencing in it, two sides looking for the other to make a mistake. But where fencers will spend seconds tapping blades looking for the minute slip, soccer will spend 5 or 10 minutes bouncing it back and forth. It’s not a terrible sport to me, it’s just not that great, and in the modern world of options I no longer spend time on not that great.
I was given a stop watch as a gift about 40 years ago. The nly time I can remember using it was to track the amount of time the ball was in play during a televised football game. It was the NY Giants against somebody. This was probably sometime in the mid to late 60s.
I wish I still had the notepad because I was pretty meticulous about it. I noted all the plays. Yeesh. My attention span today wouldn’t let me get past the first quarter.
The Giants in those days had a pretty decent running game so dropped passes didn’t stop the clock much when they had the ball.
Anyway, the ball was in play for less than 15 minutes that day. Figure that for each team the offense was on the field for seven and a half minutes and the defense for the rest.
You can see that it takes a lot of television engineering to make 15 minutes of action spread over a 3.5 hour timespan to seem exciting. Yet, millions of viewers are glued to the set drinking it in week after week and missing it when the season’s over. I marvel at the mass hypnosis that TV and good marketing has accomplished.
If you watch televised football for its TV production instead of for its sport value, you can a lot about sedating a population into submission.
I wasn’t really trying to knock football or baseball. It was just a way to illustrate that you can make any sport seem boring, depending on how you describe the way it’s played.
Meanwhile, if you broadcast 90+ minutes of soccer in a continuous fashion, it's "boring" (despite the 15 or so minutes of "excitement").
Depends on what aspect of it you care about. In the business aspect popularity only matters in so far as it generates revenue, having millions of people like your thing in a way that doesn’t make you money means nothing. That popularity at least has to generate TV ratings, and preferably a lot more than that. It’s one of the reasons why the soccer business wants to be popular in America, nobody spends money on sports like us, 1 US soccer fan will generate as much revenue as 10 to 20 South American fans. Just look at how much ESPN paid for this World Cup (about $212 million) versus what they pay the NFL ($1.9 billion), and they let Fox “take” the World Cup contract for next time for the same amount ESPN paid. That’s the difference in popularly.
The 15 minutes thing on football is misunderstanding the game. Snap to whistle isn’t the whole game, the play really starts when both teams finish their substitutions, that’s when they ( and the commentators, and audience) start trying to figure out what the other team is doing, that’s when audibles start, adjustments happen. Yeah the PLAY is 4 to 8 seconds, but the ACTION is closer to 30.
Also football is structured exactly the same as classic TV dramas. For decades TV drama followed the rule of 3: tell the audience what you’re going to show them, show them, tell them what the just saw. That’s exactly how things work for football, the players come out, the commentators start guessing what will happen, the play happens, the commentators analyze and replay. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s no coincidence that the NFL’s rise coincides with the rise of TV, it truly is the perfect TV sport. It is The Rockford Files with pads.
I’m not knocking football either. The facts I discovered are the facts and they’re stubborn.
People are free to enjoy what they like and can get swept up in it.
I happen to have enjoyed football for many years from my childhood. Longstanding NYG fan. But today I live in a post-football mentality. I can take it or leave it. I see it differently now. When i watch, once or twice a year, I can see how the broadcast is manipulating the images, juicing up the crowd noise, hyping the “action”. Often you see the fans in the stands doing nothing but if you listen to the broadcast, you’d think they’re all standing and screaming in a pique of excitement.
It’s all in good fun. It’s how you sell the game.
My understanding is that MLS (that I do not watch and frankly, cannot stand) is profitable. So what does relative popularity really mean? It’s a business.
It’s hardly a misunderstanding. I said that as a kid I tracked the time the ball was in play. That was less than 15 minutes. No misunderstanding at all.
Whatever value you perceive beyond that deals with something beyond the ball being in play. The same could be said about the interplay between the batter and the pitcher in baseball. People who understand the game appreciate what each is trying to do to the other.
Soccer - sorry if I’m hijacking this thread! - doesn’t leave a lot of room for thinking, neither does hockey.
I don’t anything about what you consider to be classic TV drama but Rockfish doesn’t fit anywhere in my definition - with or without pads. 8+)
ummmm, no. (from Forbes Magazine)
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/chrissmith/2014/06/09/american-world-cup-rights-fees-soar-along-with-viewership/
Things have changed quite a bit since then, and network investments reflect the increased exposure. When TNT secured the rights to the 1990 World Cup, the cable network wound up on the hook for just $7.75 million. Four years later ESPN paid $11 million for the English-language rights, and it doubled its payout to $22 million for the 1998 tournament in France.
Compare that to the $425 million check Fox will write for the rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups (plus a handful of other rights, including the Women’s World Cup). That’s not only a massive increase over the tournaments of the 1990s, but also over even more recent years: The same package cost ESPN just $100 million for the previous two World Cups, in 2010 and 2014.
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And why do you keep comparing to the NFL. NO soccer fan I know thinks the popularity of soccer is close, nor believes it will be anytime soon.
Minor league hockey is profitable too, doesn’t mean it’s popular, just that they’re smart enough to spend less than they earn. Relative popularity means benjamins. You can profitable English Premiere League hauling in 2.5 billion Euros from all revenue sources, or you can have a profitable NFL making as much money as the entire domestic movie industry anchored 5 billion dollars of TV contracts.
Ok so there’s this round ball in the air coming towards you.
You have 2 choices:
a) CATCH the ball (with your HANDS), or
b) hit it with your HEAD
Hands with opposable thumbs are what separates human beings from all other animals. To take them out of a game seems, well, kinda dumb.
You still don’t get it, I think. Are you suggesting that Minor League Hockey dedicate its existence to becoming more “popular” than the NFL?
I’m not sure how exciting it is to watch do overs...I mean, er, plays called back for penalties.
Or dropped passes.
Or the offense taking their time to kill the clock or putting a knee down to end the game.
But I’m glad your filters help you ignore these things and see “that every one of those 15 minutes (if that’s the number) is ‘exciting.’.”
It doesn’t work that way for me anymore.
+1
Americans hate ties so much that pigskin football was forced to implement effective tie breakers.
"Effective?" LOL--Why do they need to keep changing the tie-breaker rules, seemingly every year? And that goes for the NCAA and the NFL.
Inconclusive results in sports are un-American.
No, they were American, until corporate America decided otherwise. And hey, it's cool . . . just like Chevy pickups are "American."
I will grant you the point about diving. It's worse in soccer than American sports, because Americans are complacent about diving if someone on "their" team does it.
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*just one sport where a draw result was acceptable at one time
Embellishment City Part 3 [NHL dives]I guess hockey is a Canadian sport, but I don't feel like finding examples of diving in the NFL or NBA.
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