Posted on 06/11/2010 12:41:38 PM PDT by AJKauf
leaving politics aside, the reason that soccer has not arrived (and may never rise) to the first tier of professional sports in America is tradition and timing. There is no American soccer “tradition” as there is in baseball and football. Even basketball enjoys a tradition far beyond any national memories we have of American soccer....
(Excerpt) Read more at pajamasmedia.com ...
That’s a really interesting graph.
>>putting together something new, while borrowing heavily from soccer.
Hey, if we passed the ball with our hands and tried to throw it into a basket.......
“You don’t have to put down one sport to elevate another.”
You’re too sensitive. I didn’t try to elevate anything. I don’t like soccer, I don’t like the culture that supports it, (in general), and I resent constantly being told what a great sport soccer is. Since I was in school in the 1970s, the teachers always told us how great soccer was. It was as if, since Europeans liked it, and Europeans were so cultured, Americans who didn’t like soccer must be very uncultured, and uncool.
The metric system and soccer. Two things that were constantly presented to Americans, and two things we completely rejected. (Ok, so the metric system is useful, I’ll give you that).
You can enjoy soccer, I have no problem with that, but I won’t, ever.
BTW, The New York Yankees ARE the world champion of baseball, if you can find another team to beat them, let me know.
The New Orleans Saints ARE the world champion of football, if you can find another team to beat them, let me know.
Either the Boston Celtics or the Los Angeles Lakers will be the world champion of basketball, if you can find another team to beat them...
I’d like to see a soccer player run up and down a court at full speed for some 2.5 hours which included jumping very high and getting knocked to the ground by very muscular men.
The NASL had the 35-yard line where you could only be offsides beyond that line.
FIFA struck it down.
It it THE official national sport of Canada. Oh, I just looked, yep, you are correct, that changed in 1994, probably about the last time I played on an organized team, too.
Precisely. But it has its uses — helpful viewing for insomniacs, I suspect.
Fenway Park and Soldier Field are still there!
The reason soccer is not popular in the US is because in a professional match there are only 3 ways a goal is made
1) Pure luck
2) Goalie falls asleep from sheer boredom
3) In last 10 seconds of game, a team will intentionally commit a foul in order to give the other team a penalty shot in order to avoid being forced to endure overtime
“I have only seen one professional soccer game in person, but was surprised at how rough the sport can actually be. Guys getting kicked in the face, getting knocked out of mid-air and landing on their heads, spiked in the groin, balls sailing into their face or gonads at 70MPH. It’s not football, but up-close it is rougher than you think.”
They could have Mayan priests cuting the hearts out of players in mid field and it would still be a boring sport.
And wasn’t Baseball heavily based on a British game called Rounders?
On that...you may be correct. But our baseball is a definite refinement.
Soccer is the cheapest sport you can play....grab the severed head of a recently executed person in an Islamic country and bingo-—you can play soccer..
Soccer's been around since the mid 1800s. It's not about America.
Soccer to them is basically a "war replacement" competition.
Didn't work for those years they had to suspend the World Cup for WWII. Still, I do agree to that a bit. It is a way to express national pride and competitiveness in a way that for some reason the Olympics can't do. People dance in the streets when their country wins even a quarter-final. People still talk about when their country won the world cup 20+ years ago.
They have neither the economic nor intellectual means to compete with us or among themselves on the battlefield and use soccer as a replacement.
Oh, they do have the means, both intellectual and economic. But why do it when we are still willing to shoulder the lion's share of European defense expenses for them? This is still the continent that produced the likes of Guderian.
To soccer fans, it’s like baseball, there is a very cerebral aspect to the game, in terms of strategy (what formation will a team use), who will the substitutions be, etc.
Stupid liberal headline... It ought to read “What does America know that the rest of the world doesn’t?”
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