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Oh yeah and watching Baseball is not boring as ****. As much as you want to think its true but the truth is that knowone cares if Americans dont like football. Heck I am delighted most of you dont. With all your adverts during the games I am sure it would ruin the game. We like it you dont. Who cares. You enjoy watching your world series which is strange when its not a world series because its only in America.
P.s football is the biggest sport in the world watched by a hell of a lot of people. You are missing out on a lot and your negative atitude towards the beautiful game is really sad. The reason you Americans find football stupid is because you are watching fellow Americans play it. If you watched a world cup final played between two European or South American teams you might think of it a bit differently.
Well, this is a bunch of nonsense. If you didn't care, you wouldn't be weighing in on this thread in the first place. You do care. And have you ever noticed that there aren't many, "Why don't Europeans like American football threads?" That's because we totally get that you guys like soccer. No skin off our nose. But we are always dealing with this obsessive behavior of soccer fans. It's kind of obnoxious after awhile.
its simple really.. look at some of the reasons why Americans love baseball, football, basketball, hockey etc... and these reasons are all missing in soccer.
here are a few:
1. Stats- Americans love stats... E.R.A, points per game, yards after catch, yards per carry, assists per game.. theres no such thing in soccer that comes close. whenever i hear actual soccer fans argue about their favorite teams or players its hardly ever about stats.. and the only stat u ever hear is goals, and since not every player is a goal scorer, it reduces the conversation u can have.
compare that to basketball.. two people arguing whether kevin durant or lebron james should be MVP.. you will hear about points per game, assists/blocks/rebounds... they're player efficiency rating.. assist to turnover ratio.. points scored in the paint, pts scored in the 4th quarter, game winning shots..
its the same with baseball and football. yards per pass, interceptions, rushing yards.
soccer? no
2. Americans love to watch scoring. and there's not enough of it in soccer, and there are rules that limit teams ability to score (i.e the offsides rule, where if your toe is ahead of that invisible line your offensive opportunity is ended immediately). games that end in ties is idiotic to me. ending games in penalty kicks is like ending a basketball game with a best of 5 free throw contest or a best of 5 field goal hitting contest.
3. the 'playoff' rules in soccer, in the uefa league for instance.. this whole 'aggregate' goals victory thing is absurd. why not have a 3 game playoff? a system where there is a 2 game playoff and a team can be eliminated despite splitting the 2 game series is stupid. a 3 game playoff like in every other sport > aggregate goal victories.
4. the CLOCK... in every sport the time winds down, which builds suspense. in soccer the clock counts up, and then when the time ends, it doesnt really end. the referee adds a random number of minutes extra on top because of the time that was wasted flopping around pretending to be injured. and even then the players can manipulate the extra time by faking more injuries.
there is no 'shot at the buzzer' in soccer.. there is nothing like a 9th inning bases loaded walk off homer.. there isnt anything like Doug Flutie's miracle in Miami.
something similar to Joe Montana and John Elway's 4th quarter comeback heroics don't exist in soccer
5. soccer seems like more of a game of skill than a game where raw freak athletic feats are accomplished. example: soccer 'dribbling' looks fancy and when messi wigglges thru defenders and accurately kicks the ball in the corner of the goal post is more of a 'skills' thing, whereas barry sanders going 80 yards while 240 lb linebackers are hurling themselves at him is more of an athletic feat. Blake Griffin jumping over pau gasol or kendrick perkins, both close to 7 footers and dunking over them is more athletic. and people like to see freak athletes.
there are no freak athletes in soccer... none.
that's why people are so into things like the NFL Combine... which is what again? ABOUT STATS. what's a prospect's 40 yard time? max bench? broad jump, vertical jump, etc.
there isn't a soccer player dead or alive as athletically gifted as say, Chris Johnson of the titans.
or as freakishly built as Lebron James.
the best soccer player in the world is what, 5'6 140? and he does nothing in the world's biggest stage.
Check out attendance figures for Lacrosse game and tell me its a more popular sport. The attendance for MLS is higher than that of Hockey which isnt bad for such a new league.
I've got a better idea. Why don't you compare Nielsen ratings between MLS soccer and the least-popular NCAA bowl game? MLS's Nielsen ratings averaged around 0.2 while the freaking GoDaddy.com bowl featuring perennial powerhouses Northern Illinois and Arkansas State managed to garner a 1.4. And that's the bottom of the barrel in terms of viewership. So on its best day, MLS can only get roughly one-seventh the number of viewers that the very worst college bowl game can attract. So sitting here and telling me how popular soccer has gotten is kind of a laugh.
Now on to lacrosse. The National Lacrosse League average attendance is 9,722 per game while flying completely under the radar, while MLS averaged 17,872 in 2011 even after years of this constant drumbeat of "Soccer is the hot new sport!" and despite tens of millions of people playing the game in their childhoods. And the bit about MLS being a new league is a bit of a canard, given that people have been trying to flog professional soccer in the U.S. for decades. Hell, I remember Pele playing for New York years and years ago. And if the greatest soccer player ever, Mr. Bicycle Kick, couldn't make the sport popular in the states, then who is going to?
And admittedly, my remarks on lacrosse were kind of a red herring, but you actually managed to make my point for me. When lacrosse is in spitting distance of outdrawing soccer with zero marketing, that means soccer's roots in this country just aren't that strong. Heck, CBS has just committed to airing professional lacrosse in April, while Coca Cola has become the league sponsor. If that doesn't mean momentum, nothing does. What's more hockey pretty much committed suicide by losing an entire season thereby pissing off its entire fan base, so your comparison to that sport just doesn't hold water.
But that's not the point of this thread. The question is, "Whyyyyyyy don't Americansssss liiikkkkkeeee soccer....Jeezzzzz guyssss, c'mon." And I simply answered. And guys like you predictably rose to the occasion.
Oh. One more thing. There are ties in soccer. I do not want to waste two hours of my time watching a tie. I want to watch someone win and someone lose.
It sums up the mechanistic nature of the American way of thinking.
Soccer is more fluid in nature. More compromising. It isn't a yes/no sport. Draws happen. Sometimes it's not fair. Sometimes you get unlucky. Sometimes it's ambiguous. It's more reflective of the real world. It isn't conducive to the strict black and white thinking that Americans idealize.
It's also cultural. What you grew up around is what you end up liking most of the time.
It doesn't matter to me, to be honest. I just kind of feel bad that Americans, the majority of them, will never experience what it's like when your team scores after 60 minutes of play when you were the underdog.
I remember celebrating goals in my youth by literally jumping up off of the couch and running around the house for like five minutes screaming and yelling....only to come back to the TV and realize it was offside.
Stuff like that doesn't happen in many other sports..
lol are you kidding me.. there is way WAY more suspense/thrilling victories in other sports than in soccer.. for the simple fact that there are no 'last second' victories in soccer.. as in, the buzzer sounds, the clock hits zero and someone hits a 3 point game winner... or a last second hail mary touch down
... or the red sox coming back from a 3-0 deficit to win 4 straight, eliminate their most bitter rival the yankees and win their first world series in 80+ years.
It sums up the mechanistic nature of the American way of thinking.
Soccer is more fluid in nature. More compromising. It isn't a yes/no sport. Draws happen. Sometimes it's not fair. Sometimes you get unlucky. Sometimes it's ambiguous. It's more reflective of the real world. It isn't conducive to the strict black and white thinking that Americans idealize.
It's also cultural. What you grew up around is what you end up liking most of the time.
It doesn't matter to me, to be honest. I just kind of feel bad that Americans, the majority of them, will never experience what it's like when your team scores after 60 minutes of play when you were the underdog.
I remember celebrating goals in my youth by literally jumping up off of the couch and running around the house for like five minutes screaming and yelling....only to come back to the TV and realize it was offside.
Stuff like that doesn't happen in many other sports..
Sorry. But that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It's incoherent babble, an argument based on absolutely nothing at all.
What? Underdogs don't beat favorites in American sports? What? There aren't thrilling come-from-behind victories in American sports? The irony here is that you are arguing that Americans are ignorant of soccer, while you chose to make an incredibly chauvinistic argument of your own, one that is easily rebutted by a thirty-second scan of the sports pages or five minutes of SportsCenter on ESPN.
Shucks, before you make that fatuous point again, why not attend a game that's won on a fifty-yard field goal attempt with one second left on the clock? Or a bases-loaded grand slam in the bottom of the ninth? Or a manufactured run on a suicide squeeze bunt? Or a three-pointer that gets nothing but net as the buzzer sounds. Now THAT'S heart-stopping stuff.
And the notion that a tie is somehow a sign of nuance and sophistication is just laughable. A sport is a contest between two sides. When nobody wins and nobody loses, it's not much of a contest. If it were, lots of sports would end in ties--but the large majority of them don't. Somehow people like you have become advocates of that goofy way of doing things. You might as well tout the advantages of sex without having an orgasm. I suppose you could, but what would be the point?
Finally, the 'mechanistic thinking' argument is just completely baseless. Sure, football is a highly structured game. But the very structure of the game also means it has endless layers of strategy to it, as does baseball. People who criticize both sports are generally too lazy to understand them. Basketball and hockey are far more fluid and graceful than any soccer game. To sit here and make statements like that demonstrate your own cultural biases rather than any knowledge of either American sports or culture.
i can think of so many thrilling/heartbreaking victories and losses.. can any soccer fan do the same...
the music city miracle, the miracle on ice, 'the play' in cal vs stanford, 'the drive', The catch Montana to Clark, "The Shot" Jordan over Craigh Ehlo, john elway 'the drive'.. aaron boones walkoff homer to eliminate the red sox, joe montana's game winning drive against the bengals, David Tyree's catch against the undefeated and heavy favorite pats etc etc etc. too many to list
i can think of so many thrilling/heartbreaking victories and losses.. can any soccer fan do the same...
the music city miracle, the miracle on ice, 'the play' in cal vs stanford, 'the drive', The catch Montana to Clark, "The Shot" Jordan over Craigh Ehlo, john elway 'the drive'.. aaron boones walkoff homer to eliminate the red sox, joe montana's game winning drive against the bengals, David Tyree's catch against the undefeated and heavy favorite pats etc etc etc. too many to list
Exactly.
Here's the thing. The only reason I'm even on this thread is because the sheer nonsensical arguments of some soccer fans. The operative word in that sentence is 'some.'
Hey, if you like soccer, that's great. It's your preference. It doesn't mean that you're culturally or intellectually superior. It's just what you like. And I'm cool with that.
But the whiny and insecure "Why doesn't America like soccer?" crowd can't seem to handle this basic fact. Instead, they have this need to weigh in on what a bunch of primitives we are and how we are the world's insular hillbillies. Just because we'd prefer to watch a baseball game.
Why care if anyone likes it or loathes it? It is the greatest sport on earth, IMO. I don't like any American sports except ice hockey, and I only watch that every once in a while, but it is up to Americans what they like. Football is LIFE to a lot of people not just sport, and I know a lot of Americans won't get that and that's cool. Honestly people should just except that it is never going to win a lot of Americans over and just carry on loving the beautiful game. I think some Europeans just can't understand why people can't like it when it means so, so much to them but that's just the way it is now lets move on!
Why care if anyone likes it or loathes it? It is the greatest sport on earth, IMO. I don't like any American sports except ice hockey, and I only watch that every once in a while, but it is up to Americans what they like. Football is LIFE to a lot of people not just sport, and I know a lot of Americans won't get that and that's cool. Honestly people should just except that it is never going to win a lot of Americans over and just carry on loving the beautiful game. I think some Europeans just can't understand why people can't like it when it means so, so much to them but that's just the way it is now lets move on!
Exactly. And thank you.
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