Why I prefer soccer, no commercials until the half. I now prefer watching the Premier League to the NFL.
:) I grew up just outside Leicester City....we still have a big smile from last season.
Nice to see some overdue respect for soccer. For a long time, many FReepers have been deriding soccer as a game for European Nancy boys.
MLS consists of two 45-min. halves, a short half-time break, no timeouts, and a reasonable amount of tacked-on stoppage time, and you’re outta there. NFL? A 1-hr. game that takes upwards of four hours to play, what with commercials, never-ending time-outs, watching replays to be sure the bonehead refs got the call right, half-times that often rival any Barnum & Bailey show I ever saw, and ticket prices that make your face blanch.
Which one do you suppose I’ve chosen?
Soccer is just a better spectator sport. I grew up watching and playing football, and it used to be a cornerstone of Americana. But changes in the game combined with changes in the coverage have yielded something almost unwatchable. I have tried, in recent years, to get back into it, but it is like watching grass grow. Surprisingly, even though soccer has roughly the same amount of scoring (a little bit less, but then again they don’t give you seven points for a goal, so it is deceptive), there is a much greater proportion of actual excitement. Once you stop watching football, you realize that it is actually incredibly dull.
With basketball going full thug-life, and football become a snooze-fest, baseball really would seem to be the only American sport that will retain its popularity over the long run.