Soccer Rules Question (and, why are the Americans so bad? - dmc)

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Well, proportional given the presence of an infrastructure to develop atheletes... Otherwise India (with over a billion people, and where at least Bengal is really into soccer/football) would have a great national team. But I don't think they have the infrastructure in place to develop footballers the way they do for cricketters.

I agree that the smaller salaries given to soccer/footballers relative to other sports reflects the level of interest in the US... Tho I would imagine kids don't think at all about salaries when they choose a sport, it's more the lack of cultural interest (which then translates into lower salaries).

 

You would've thought that with all the Mexicans and what have you in America, they'd be at least a section of real hardcore football followers and players. Those Hispanics are crazy for football (as is most of the rest of the world, hint hint).

 

When you're talking about young kids, I'm sure you're right - but that's not the problem. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of kids player soccer in the U.S. I'm talking about the time they reach college. I imagine it's a hell of a lot more tempting to accept a football, basketball, or baseball scholarship than a soccer scholarship.

 

Didn't i mentioned women's football? America, i don't think is that bad. Don't tell me no one play women's football. The very least, i know Liverpool FC has a ladies team and they have a few leagues to play in. Liverpool's women relegated from Premier division to northern division. There were 4 women's world cup, US had two. Really, is football in US bad?

 

Only 4 million people in New Zealand, so it's no surprise that our soccer team is ranked about 120 in the world.

 

Good point. I think this ties back into what Bion and I were saying before though. There are far fewer professional leagues for women than men, and the pay for professional women athletes (with notable exceptions of golf and tennis) is nowhere near the level it is for male athletes. Sure there's a professional women's rugby team, but they aren't making millions. There's a women's NBA (appropriately named the WNBA), that's barely managing to keep its head above water financially. There's probably a professional women's softball league out there, but hell if I could name a single player on it.

What I'm saying is that the salaries and prestige women in the U.S. can acheive playing soccer are as good if not better than most other sports, so I feel that more of our women athletes are directed that way. It's like I was saying before - it's not that the U.S. is incapable of producing world class athletes, it's that most of our world class athletes don't pick soccer as the sport to specialize in. I think it's different for women, as there are fewer options available for becoming a professional athlete, and much fewer options for making a huge amount of money.

 

OK then, how come you manage to come up with so many great track and field athletes and winter sport athletes? Those sports must rank alongside soccer on the public interest scale (i.e. behind the BIG team sports). People don't watch those sports passionately every week.

The question still remains: why is it that the USA does not follow soccer as passionately as just about every other country in the whole world does? EVERY one else loves soccer. EVERY one. So why not USA (and Canada, for that matter)? The rest of the American continent is completely nuts over it, and the Soccer World Cup is the biggest show on earth. Plus, you don't really need to have a world beating domestic competition in order to come up with 20 decent players. Look at Brazil. Only a couple of their players actually play in Brazil. All the rest are over in Europe.

 

Not to make myself flame-bait or anything, but I don't think women's soccer is nearly as competative as men's (yet, at least!)... Certainly the US dominates women's soccer, but I think that just points to the US taking an early lead in promoting women's team sports.

There's probably a stage in setting up a team sport when even getting the basics worked out well is enough to be very successful. Once all your competitors are up to speed, however, then you have to turn things up a notch...

The US women's team have had some really good athletes (Mia Hamm in particular has been singled out for star treatment), but much like in men's soccer, I don't think they've produced anyone who will go down in the ages as 'brilliant.'

Many (though certainly not all) great atheletes have fixed on sport as the only way available to them to raise their social position. Which is to say, you need a lot of hunger. Boxing is a pretty good example: in the US, top-level boxers have almost always come from underprivileged classes and recent immigrants. When the Irish were among the poorest of the poor in the US, Irish-Americans were among the best boxers. Now that the Irish are completely assimilated, Irish-American boxers are much more rare, and the best boxers tend to be Black and Hispanic. A lot of it is who wants or needs it the most...

Even in Brazil, children of the middle and upper classes aren't nearly as obsessed with soccer as those from the lower classes (from where a lot of their players eventually come). It's one thing to do a sport as a hobby, realizing you can have a completely comfortable life without the sport, and to think of the sport as your one make-or-break chance.

Of course there are plenty of counter-examples to this...

 

Regardless of the rights or wrongs of your opinion, that does not explain why a whole nation of 300 million people should have a completely different opinion to every one else on the planet. Why doesn't anybody else share this opinion?

 

Shoot-outs are only used in tournaments of a cup nature ie World Cup, Continental championships and club championships. All national leagues (except the weird experimenting Dutch) uses straight series where over 40ish games the team that ends up on top wins. There are ties though but that is also part of the sport, football is a game with three possible outcomes, win, lose or draw. This is seen in the World Cup as well with the group stage, generally speaking the structure of football favours the more consistently good team than the team that happens to be lucky in one game.

I do think the social aspects brought up by other posters here play a big difference though. In the US football is the sport of choice of the middle class, for kids who have a pretty bright future and dont nurture the same fervent dream as the kids from th block shooting hoops. The opposite is true in the rest of the world, football is the working class game, the poor mans game all you need is a ball and a few mates and you are set to go. So all the kids with a lot of will but no assurance of a good education and a good job see football as a way out, to be someone.

 

I never looked at it that way, but there is probably a lot of truth in that. The game of the poor in the U.S. is basketball. Again, all you really need is a ball and a space to play. However, when you look at the really poor areas in the U.S., typically there's not a lot of free space, and a basketball court is a hell of a lot smaller than a soccer field.

I'm certainly not discounting the social aspect of it. Black athletes dominant a great many sports in the U.S., but one sport where they are notably absent is hockey. One of the reasons for this is that there is a relatively high cost for equipment. The same is true of golf. The clubs alone cost a few hundred dollars, not to mention it also includes a considerable investment to play on the different courses. Cheap courses are $20 per round, and courses that charge upwards of $50 per round are common. So poorer areas simply do not have the economic means to compete in these games.

However, you would think that the public school system would be the big equalizing factor. While I am sure there are exceptions for some very poor school systems, I have yet to hear of a high school that didn't have a soccer team. Sure, they have basketball and football teams too, but you would think that once it was made available to students, they would compete if there was a general interest.

That's one of the reasons why I keep coming back to potential salaries. Unless a student gets a soccer scholarship (if such even exist in the U.S.), chances are he isn't going to play soccer once he goes to college. It benefits him more to play the other sport, not only for the millions he can make when he gets out, but also for the immediate benefit of getting to go to school for free. (Note on scholarships: I'm sure soccer scholarships exist, but they are far fewer in number than the other sports. The sports that bring in the most revenue for the college are typically the ones where they give out the most scholarships, so that means there are more scholarship athletes in football and basketball than anything else.)

 

If we are talking money I am convinced that the top footballers in the world make at least as much money as the top basketballers/Am.Footballers/Baseballers they just dont make it in the US. Many if not most of the American players have gotten their "final polish" in Europe going to the Acadamies run by the clubs which are basically schools and training acadamies in one. The big European clubs comb the world for talent and tned to pick them up as early as the age or 12. A large amount of the American nationals were picked up like this and got their schooling in Europe while at the same tmie getting an education. The problem is that it is only the very best who get this kind of oppurtunity and there isnt much room for late bloomers. A club like the Dutch giants Ajax have a youth academy bigger than most colleges and high schools and quite a few Americans have gone there.

I have always found the big divide in sports between Europe and the US to be where the kids play, we dont have any such thing as school sports really. No school teams, everything is run by independent clubs separate from the schools. And there are a lot of clubs when it comes to football, every single little village have a club, every neighbourhood my middle sized city with a population of around 110k have more than 20 football clubs from the tiny club with only one team playing at the bottom of the series system to the big club of the city with one professional team and then several teams in each age group down to 5-6. The big beauty of the system as I see it is that all these clubs are basically in the same system. Teams move up and down in the system but if the big team have a bad season or two they are sent down a notch in the system and a tiny club can advance up and fight with the pros. This is the basic structure in all European countries, we dont have "closed" leagues, if you suck you are relegated and someone else will take your place and your position in the system is with few exception based solely on your perfomance on the pitch.

 

In the U.S. it really depends on what age group you're talking about. For pre-teens, yes, it's usual for it to be separate from the school. Things like little league for baseball, pee wee football, and youth soccer leagues are usually independent of the school. It isn't until you get to high school (or at least junior high/middle school) that you start seeing school teams.

 

Nobody has still come up with a real reason why soccer has the place it has in the USA. We can talk all we like about money and opportunities and lack of interest, but that's a circular argument. If soccer has the same popularity in the USA as the rest of the world then the money and the opportunities etc would follow. So, we come back to the question of what is the historical root cause for the USA taking a different direction from the whole rest of the world in the sports they have decided to get excited about.

 

It's just as circular as the arguement you are presenting. Sure, we can say that IF soccer was more popular, then the money paid to soccer stars would be similar to that in other sports. But that arguement could be made for just about any sport.

Two sports that have similar basic premises are cricket and baseball. Why is baseball far more popular throughout North America, Central America, South America, the Carribbean, and the Far East, and yet cricket is more popular in the UK, India, Australia and Southeast Asia? You could make the arguement that if the other sport was more popular, there would be more interest, more money to be made, etc.

So I don't think the situation of soccer in the U.S. is in any way unique. Yes, a sport would be more popular if it paid more money, and a sport that pays more money would become more popular. In that regard it's a circular argument. However, I think it is futile to ask specifically about why the U.S. doesn't find soccer more interesting. The same could be said of any sport that is popular in some countries, but not in others.

 

The situation with soccer IS different because soccer is so overwhelmingly popular across the whole world but not in North America. I agree that we are all arguing in circles so I think we need to look at history to find the answers that lead to the current situation.

Cricket and baseball don't have anything like the widespread appeal of soccer so are not really the same. The cricket world cup or baseball world championships are not watched in every country in the world like the soccer World Cup is.

 

Americans just need to give football the time of day. They'd love it then, everyone does.

The problem is with the US, and I'm being completely serious here; they don't take much interest at all in things that happen away from their shores. They've got their own interests and that's it as far as they are concerned.

 

Barmy - the only problem I see with that reasoning is that most Americans living here today can trace their roots to some foreign country. Moreover, it's not like a large percentage of people trace their roots back to the 1600s or 1700s prior to the time that soccer was a popular sport. There are far more people in the U.S. who have been here for less than 100 years, and presumably came from a country where soccer was the most popular sport. I don't have an explanation for why people would change their sporting interests upon moving to America, but apparently, that's exactly what happens.

 

They don't 'change their sporting interests' I reckon. The people who move to America will keep their old interests (although keeping a keen interest in a sport is hard when it's never shown on the local TV). But when these people has wee shavvies, and these kids are brougth up around American Football, Baseball and Basketball and football is treated as a sidenote, then they will obviously take on these interests. It doesnt matter if US people are from the US, Mexico, Britain or bloody Timbuktu, if they are brought up around certain sports and they are the only sports shown on the TV, and the ones the majority of people take interest in, then they are the ones they will play.

If football in the US had more media coverage, more games were shown on TV, more local leagues and teams would spring up and more people would play it.

And the MLS needs sorting. Wage caps and the clubs being central to the league don't help matters either.