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Notes -
American football is well adapted to modern attention spans.
I think the key feature of this is the structure of first downs make for a very effective dopamine drip, every third play (2-3 minutes in real time) your team is either going to convert a first down, or fail to convert a first down, unless the game is already out of hand, you its a moment to either be happy or frustrated, there's some emotional payoff to the moment.
I have no doubt that various midfield actions in soccer and hockey (getting possession in the zone?) are similarly as important in terms of changing a team's win percentage, but those moments a less legible to the untrained eye (maybe that's what being able to appreciate a sport actually is?), for someone not all that familiar with the sport, it's easy to miss that a unit of win probability has been gained, or to not actually be able to distinguish whether what has just happened actually amounts to gaining a unit of win probability (as someone who doesn't watch that much soccer, my naive reaction to it is to think they should take more shots on goal, I think I've read enough about it know that's wrong though, what teams actually want to do is to work the possession more so that the shots they do take are higher probability).
Somewhat separately, American football is well suited to modern cell phone usage, there are games I put down the phone and actually pay attention, there are lots of game where I don't though (Sunday Night game between teams I don't have any special interest in). Football is the easiest game to follow while playing on your phone, the action happens in 5 minutes spurts, every play is replayed several times if you missed something, its easy to quickly check down and distance, if the team is in the red zone. In contrast, watching the US game Friday night, only two of the goals was I actually looking at the TV when they happened, replays are pretty quick because once the action starts up again you can't stop to show a replay. Great midfield actions that are like football first downs never get shown again because the action keeps going. So if you didn't appreciate it in real time, the TV isn't going to explain to you why you should appreciate it. The only non-scoring plays that get replayed are things that cause penalties or corners or free kicks.
No particular value judgement either way, I just think it's less adaptive to modern attention spans.
I appreciate what you're saying, but I don't believe it's the case that we're seeing a significant shift in fandom between sports as a result of phone introduction, which we would expect if the modern attention span drove changes in which sports were more amenable to fandom.
I've been seeing these "just-so" stories forever about why X sport is superior to or expanding past Y sport, and for the most part things haven't changed that much from when I was a kid. I've no doubt phone consumption is way way way up, but we're not seeing a concomitantly massive change in sports consumption.
Which sport you find interesting and engaging seems to be mostly downstream of what you grew up with, with the possibility of conversion as an adult being unusual but not unheard of. The parallel is closer to religion than it is to anything else.
Yeah, I think you're mostly right, I don't think it resulted in any particularly massive shift, I think maybe it explains why some sort fandoms are stickier than others, maybe?
I grew up on the normal American big 3 sports, football, baseball, basketball, I still follow the results of each (I go on the internet and look up who won, generally have a sense of who the stat leaders are, etc), in terms of actually watching full games, I rarely ever watch a baseball game anymore (sometimes I flip over to the 8th or 9th innings of playoff games), I occasionally watch a basketball game, more frequently I flip over the last 3 or 4 minutes of the game, and will watch if it's still close, I regularly watch full football games.
(Obviously sample size of 1 doesn't say much about anything, but from my perspective, football watching has seemed more sticky in a marketing sense than the other sports, idk).
I think Football is more of a social event than the other sports for most people, and as social connections have gotten more attenuated and the list of acceptable small-talk topics has shrunk, the NFL has taken on a greater meaning for a lot of people. It's doing work that casual discussions about things that didn't used to be risky or politically charged used to carry the burden for. Being Birds fan is a bigger part of my personality now than it was in college, because "Go Birds" is an easy way to chat with a wide variety of people in my life now. I can talk with my wife's ob-gyn and with my roofer about the AJ Brown trade quite easily.
One more thing about the phones (and the social nature of it), the pace of it is such that group chats can happen concurrently with the game. I'm in a group chat that starts pinging every time the Steelers play. It's easier to check a group chat(and contribute to it) during a football game and not miss important action than it is a soccer game.
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