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Americans need better chants.
Embarassing.
Most American sports have a much faster cadence than soccer. Popular crowd activities from these sports don't port over easily.
That can't be right ? American sports are known to be stop and go.
Hockey is the only one with a faster cadence. And honestly, their fans have some pretty good chants. (Or at least my school did)
The debate is impossible.
Soccer fans claim the sport has more action because the ball is constantly in play. Non-soccer fans claim it is boring because there is little danger of anyone doing anything important for the vast majority of that time.
Soccer fans claim that baseball is boring because the ball is in play very little. Baseball fans feel it is exciting because every single pitch can result in a score.
Hockey and fight sports probably have the best balance of constant action with meaningful scoring at any second, but both are somewhat niche and require some degree of specialist knowledge to properly understand.
I know this isn't intrinsic to your point but it is something that bugs me about the Soccer discourse so I will rant.
Soccer players are constantly doing things that are dangerous and important to the outcome of the game, they are just less legible and it is a problem because the most popular American sports are focused on the score. Football is all about the points, big plays are exciting but ultimately considered subservient to scoring, individual points aren't as important in Basketball but it is a constantly scoring sport. Hockey is pretty similar to Soccer but I think Baseball is most instructive - it is also often a very low scoring game like Soccer. It has really intense non-scoring moments (like with Soccer) but at the end of the day outside of a few specific accomplishments Americans just focus on the score while watching and immediately tune out the non-scoring moments once the tension is released. Soccer is all about following the tempo, possessions, scoring chances, set pieces and so on. It requires much more attention and fan knowledge to notice quality play and actions that should be work "micro points" and because the numbers don't go up like we expect from our other stuff, it seems boring.
It can be not boring pricelessly because the numbers don't go up very often, but you have to pay attention to the whole scope of play. When you are used to chunked up Basketball and Football, well that's hard.
The score is the point. Keeping score is what separates a sporting event from a dance. To quote one of my favorite philosophical quotes about Soccer from Sampaoli:
All the stuff that isn't scoring fundamentally doesn't matter to the outcome of the game. Those actions that don't lead to scoring could have mattered, the omission of them might have mattered, but ultimately they didn't matter. They might matter inasmuch as they are part of a longer process which leads to actual scoring, but if they don't lead to anything then it didn't matter.
This is kinda silly. The average baseball scoreline is 4.5-4.5 basically forever, the average scoreline in the Big 5 UEFA leagues is 1.4-1.4. So baseball features three times the scoring of top flight soccer.
But anyway, my point isn't that soccer is boring, I quite like it, I intend to get quite drunk at the local brewery for as many of the USMNT games as possible. I want to cheer on our boy from Herhsey and a bunch of the most accidental Americans imaginable.
It's just that I think Soccer fans who talk shit on American sports are stupid and ignorant.
It's the same bullshit when soccer fans complain about commercial breaks in American sports, while buying soccer jerseys that are walking advertisements.
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).
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