This was written by a friend of mine who may choose to remain unnamed if he wishes. It provides a very erudite and multi-tiered explanation of why soccer sucks. Enjoy: Sounds like someone prefers coin flips to chess, mindless drones to guided missiles, simplicity to a well developed set of rules that makes for interesting strategic components. Might as well be watching marathons. A good friend of mine whose one fatal flaw is his interest in non-American football recommended the book Inverting the pyramid to me, which tells the fascinating story of how over the last fifty years, soccer has evolved from a forward heavy layout of the players to a defense heavy layout. I told him you do realize that the equivalent of that radical shift in strategy that took soccer 50 years happens about 5-7 times during each NFL game. You do realize that the strategy and rules of soccer have barely evolved over the last 150 years, whereas other sports go through substantial changes in strategy and rules all the time. Precisely why is it that American sports have evolved so much more than soccer? Four main reasons, as I currently understand it: 1. Competition from other sports. Football, baseball, basketball, and hockey compete with each other in America, so if they dont evolve, fans lose interest. Soccer is a monopoly, fans are extremely closed-minded and uneducated, so its the classic case of a natural monopolist having no incentive to evolve. 2. Wealth and time. Americans spend so much more time and energy on sports than the rest of the world, its a joke. Someone find me some stats. This is true more than ever now, and it has been true for the past 150 years. When sports were professionalizing and evolving during the first half of the 20th century, Europeans were busy fighting world wars and recovering from them, and didnt have the time or resources to develop and refine strategies and rules for their sports. This effect became even more pronounced when radio and then TV came out - the stakes got a lot higher for American sports. 3. Innovative spirit. This is a cultural thing. The American mindset is This is a great game. How can we make it better? The European and South American mindset is: Lets just go out and play. 4. Organized leagues. Americans play in organized sports leagues (mostly soccer) starting from a very young age. There are coaches who teach you the rules of all the games, expose you to different sports, teach you strategies, design plays, etc. There are high school sports, summer academies, and all sorts of things. Europe and South America pale in comparison to America when it comes to this. Most kids learn soccer by kicking a ball around in a park with their friends. Very few are ever exposed to participating in intense organized competition.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 17:40:13 +0000