What do Americans think of Soccer?

I hate football. Most of the so-called stars are overrated and all of them are massively overpaid. I am English by the way.

 

Please explain.

 

http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/14/health/brain-damage-dementia-cte-soccer-football-study/index.html

 

I played a lot of soccer when I was younger. I enjoy it a lot, more so than any other sport, most of them are simply uninteresting to me.

 

You're from the UK but call it "soccer"

I'm from the UK too and I love football, I can't wait for the season to begin this month!

How crazy is the money involved in that Neymar transfer?

 

The entire reason soccer is not popular in the U.S. as a professional sport is the diving. It goes against the grain. It goes against over two hundred years of taking responsibility for your own success. The idea of "diving", for instance, in the NFL would get you black-balled from the league. I can't imagine a player in the NFL faking an injury, even it was a strategic way of buying a time-out or a few minutes for the team to rest. When European players started coming to the NBA "flopping" started coming into vogue and the league put a stop to that real quick- you can get major fines for faking a foul in basketball. There's no doubt that professional soccer players in the European leagues are the most aerobically fit athletes in the world; however, the cheating is something that just will never, ever be accepted by the American sports culture (which, by the way, puts the sports culture in the rest of the world to shame.)

Go team. Just two cents worth from an old guy trying to not masturbate.

 

Soccer's coming up. It's becoming popular to people of my generation and younger. In fact, our soccer league, the MLS, sells more tickets every year than the NHL (National Hockey League) which is considered one of the big "four" sport leagues in the USA, along with the NFL [gridiron], NBA [basketball] and MLB [baseball]). Soccer will only become more popular and I suspect the level of play will improve as well.

That said, I've personally always preferred soccer over "football." Football takes forever to play, they are stopping the play all the time, it's impossible to watch on tv because they take breaks for commercials every five minutes, and the game just in uninteresting. If you want a rough sport, try rugby.

 

If that's the case then why isn't rugby popular? There's no diving in that sport yet it's largely ignored in America. When the last Rugby League World Cup was on I think most Americans weren't aware that such a tournament existed let alone that they had a team in it.

 

No one over here knows about rugby because of football (American Football). They seem very similar at first glance. Football is so well established, in both the US and Canada, that rugby is a very minor sport in comparison. Honestly, rugby is kind of known as a girl's sport over here. All the boys play football.

 

Yes. Soccer is very popular at the elementary school level and increasingly popular at the high school and college levels. This had been a trend for some while now, and now that my generation, which grew up playing soccer in elementary school, has reached adulthood, soccer is coming into its own in US culture.

Maybe in ten years or so we will be able to compete on equal footing with the South American and European leagues .

Yes, that's one of things I like most about soccer. Everyone loves it, well most people. And because of that it draws people together, from all different parts of the world. What's one thing a Ghanian, an Australian, a Brazilian, a South Korean, a German and a Britain are all enthusiastic about? Soccer.

 

That there shows the culture differences. A number of people think that of American football over here - they just can't understand why they have much protection. I once remember an English newspaper headline about American football with words OVER PROTECTED AND OVER PAID.

My grandfather used to say American football players are stupid because they don't know who has the ball that's why they keep tackling everyone.

Personally I used to like the NFL but then I learnt of the NFL cover up and that put me off it. I have no problem with violent sports, but when there's a cover up by the sports governing body where they try to hide the effects of the violence well I think that's unacceptable.

 

As an English guy who loves footage aka "soccer" and follows it every day plus watches it every weekend, I have to say that none of us enjoy it when our player dives or another team's player dives. Like we do not want to see that at all and we would love for it to be out of the sport completely.

At least in our Premier League, it's the best league in my opinion and also the toughest league. I've tried watching games in the Spanish league and the diving there is terrible. I'm glad the Premier League is not as bad as those other European leagues.

 

This is a fair assessment. I like sports in general. The five you mentioned and tennis too. Every sport has its disadvantages in my opinion. Baseball struggles with the pacing issue. Football with CTE and pacing. Basketball, while fast-paced generally, has a foul system that becomes nonsensical at the end of the game. NHL may have expanded nationwide, but few outside the North play the sport.

The helmets and padding offer an illusion of protection that leads American football players to bang their heads harder, ultimately causing more CTE than soccer. The same principle (risk compensation) keeps boxing, ice hockey, and skiing relatively dangerous.

 

LOL, well, I don't think the United States needs soccer in order to be "taken seriously on the world stage."

 

One thing to note - and I'm not trying to take anything away from the athletic abilities of rugby players - but when you actually look at the people on an NFL field - they are genetic anomalies. How many rugby players are 6'8 350 lbs? or the linebackers - who are incredibly athletic and get a nice head start before they hit you - who are 6'5 250 with hardly any body fat?

If NFL players played the game they play without padding - there'd be only one game a year before all the players were in the hospital.

 

exactly, if the nfl wants to reduce the cases of cte among its players, they should go back to leather helmets

This is a thing with street skating too. Almost no street skaters wear padding, and it's not because padding isn't "cool" or some shit like that -- it's because helmets and padding teaches you to fall where the padding is. In other words, skaters that wear helmets generally don't learn the muscle memory of rolling with a fall and consistently land head first when they slam. I've had some gnarly wipe outs from pretty high distances and speeds but they were all uneventful because I rolled with the fall, and thats definetly preferable to slamming head first even with a helmit on

 

@Icarium to be honest with you I'm not a rugby fanatic, more of a casual observer. But I've been looking around online to watch people say on the football vs rugby issue. Quite a number of people say you can't compare the two sports. The only two similarities is that they're both physical games and the balls look similar (although the rugby union ball is thicker but the rugby league ball is probably just as slim as a football ball). But a part that the way the games are structured is so different.

Rugby league and union 15's is played continuously without for 80 minutes with a 15 minute break at the 40 minute mark. Really, unlike soccer, it's a rather brutal sport because even if a gets injured they don't stop - he either has to get up and carry on playing or he has to lay on the pitch for the physio to come on to treat him.

Another thing is there is no offensive and defensive team in rugby. A team is divided between forwards and backs - sure they have subs but those very forwards have to defend with the backs. It be would interesting to see how a football team would be if they offence and defence.

Then you get to the protection. I've been watching the NFL since 2008 but I've never realised that the padding helps a player in his attack. So would this mean no padding = less aggression? Maybe the protection is an enabler of the roughness?

It would be interesting to see what football would be like if they played 80 minutes with just 15 minute break at 40, as well just using one team for a whole game that consisted of offensive and defensive players and no padding. Would be less aggressive knowing they had a 80 minute game as well as no protection?

Of course this would never happen but it would be interesting.

I admit football is more of a physical game than rugby since they do a lot of blocking and really in rugby the only player they're after is the one with ball.