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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   3037 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 19, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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A soccer thought. I think it’s fair to say soccer is an inferior sport and us Americans are correct to not play it. However since it’s an inferior sports that’s also why you can have a World Cup.

Tiny nations could not put up a fight in America’s sports even if they played them at the same rate. You need to be a rich country to compete in American sports. For American football it’s probably only America that is richest enough to play it. It requires a huge amount of resources and technology to play at the highest levels. Even if the European powers played American football at the same rates I have my doubts they could create a team that’s competitive with a NFL team and we have 30 of them.

Baseball is showing some ability to create a few competitive national teams but baseball can’t be played internationally because of how much we’ve perfected pitching to the point that a human arm has limits on how many pitches it can throw a year. Elite arms can handle about 150 innings per year so there is basically no ability to use them for an offseason tournament.

And since Soccer is a low event sports it means that inferior teams can actually pull out ties or wins against power house teams with the right luck.

This is just cope. Polo is a more expensive sport to play by any standard and is also more involved and I'd wager, a superior gentleman's sport compared to the hooligan sport that gridiron football is. And yet the US is nowhere to be seen in the polo rankings and would get bodied by multiple developing countries were a match between national teams to be held.

Baseball is showing some ability to create a few competitive national teams but baseball can’t be played internationally because of how much we’ve perfected pitching to the point that a human arm has limits on how many pitches it can throw a year. Elite arms can handle about 150 innings per year so there is basically no ability to use them for an offseason tournament.

Baseball is undoubtedly an inferior sport to cricket, and the US national cricket team I guess would likely lose to Zimbabwe. Perhaps even Hong Kong.

Polo is a fantastic sport that should get more press and coverage. It's incredibly entertaining, more effectively co-ed than any more legitimate sporting event, it has the crash-danger of NASCAR and the player-hotness of Italian soccer.

The patron (team owner) often plays on the team itself, which is achieved by the polo equivalent of a salary cap: the handicap system, by which players are rated in goal-value from -1 to 10, and then the team has a budget of handicaps it can spend. As a result, if a team has one of the Argentine star 10 handicaps on the team, you need to balance it by grabbing somebody who sucks with a 1 handicap. So you get a 55 year old investment banker trying to play a real professional sport on a team with real professionals.

Plus, in America at least, the tickets cost almost nothing and they encourage you to tailgate right on the side of the field! In Newport, $150 gets you 20 people, a tent set up for you, and a place to park your truck. Bring your own food, and the drinks there are strong and delicious and reasonably priced.

the US national cricket team I guess would likely lose to Zimbabwe. Perhaps even Hong Kong.

It made minor news a couple years ago (2024) when the US team beat Pakistan (generally one of the top teams). Of course, the usual suspects noted that most of the team was first or second generation South Asian immigrants.

So last year I was at a town meeting for my little burgh. And the audience is full of Indians, like twenty or thirty Indian guys of all ages, when the typical public audience of people not involved is like me and two boomers. And I'm thinking, oh, there must be a motel or a gas station up for a zoning exception and his friends came in to support him. But they work through the agenda and the Indians don't stand up for anything. And I start thinking, oh no, they're all here together for the courtesy of the floor at the end, something bad must have happened, I bet something racist must have occurred and they're here to complain about it.

And the end of the meeting comes and the public comment, and sure enough their spokesman gets up and walks to the podium, and says: "We are all here as part of the [Region of PA] Cricket Club, and we are here to ask for a cricket field to be built in one of [municipality's] parks for the use of all the cricket players in [Region] who currently have to travel to New Jersey to play on a proper cricket field."

Ah, that was an extremely embarassing thing and a one off black mark to be forgotten. Pakistan are known for being mercurial, one day they make easy pickings of the world champions and then a week later look like they're all on some drug and lose to a much worse team.

So why does nobody else care for American Football? Are the other nations so inferior that they don't even see its greatness?

(Is American exceptionalism going the way of Japan now, from "we are so great everyone wants to be us" to "we are so great nobody gets us"?)

It's not really American football vs soccer. The reality is that, if you haven't grown up watching either rugby or American football, and then you were exposed to both, you'd never choose the latter as a viewing experience. The rest of the world has their own version of American football, but more free-flowing, more naturally physical, and less advertisercucked. Even the Japanese play rugby.

Even the Japanese play rugby.

When I last visited Japan I took some pictures out of a Shinkansen of kids playing in a field, and only later realized they were playing American Football from the ball and formations (the train was moving too fast to tell at the time). The Internet tells me it is played there at least a bit, and there is even a professional league. I was surprised, but it's also possible I found the local American expat school.

American Football is a very different sport. This is important to the appeal! In my mind Rugby is just a shittier version of soccer, that's reductive but it is true that sports like Hockey, Rugby and Soccer scratch similar itches with free flowing gameplay as an example feature. Tennis, Golf, American Football - these are all very different experiences.

An example of what this means practically - Football is chess, in the sense that the pieces have abilities but really it's all about the person moving the pieces (the coach) making choices. Football is a coaching battle and a roster construction battle. Yes your coach and roster matters in the other team sports but football is a bunch of different players basically playing an entirely different game (on the level of the difference between a goalkeeper and everyone else) but for every different position on the field.

It's crazy intricate and complicated.

As much as I want to call soccer an inferior sport which I believe is true; I also like that it exists. And that it slot in somewhere around Sport 4 or 5 in America.

It has two greats features. The endurance test of soccer and players actually becoming tired is kind of cool. And while I think being a feet only sport is inferior since the upper body is a significant component of fitness that also allows it to select for athletes without the same emphasis on pure physical size.

I suppose so. Though there's a lot of coaching and player specialization involved in other sports, it's just the most extreme in American football because there isn't the need for players to fill other roles (even in cricket, you occasionally get the equivalent of your big guy needing to kick a field goal). Do you feel that the emphasis in ultra-specializing players physically is good or bad for that chess-style of watching?

Personally, I simply cannot understand the appeal of a sport where you sit around watching largely unimportant nonsense for almost all the time in the hope of catching 30 seconds of action - I already have my girlfriend for that.

Football is the most war simulator sport or in modern terms - Football is like Fire Emblem.

It's turn based. You go and then they go. Your units perform an action their units defend against that action. Your units have stamina, you rotate them throughout the game, some hero units need to be in for the whole game.

Understanding your units and the strategies that work well for them (and how they relate to the enemy units and their strategies) is critical.

Football more than most sports (with perhaps the exception of pitching in baseball) requires strategy, tactics, and "logistics" - roster building is fair and open (because of the salary cap) and unit selection and resource management is critical because even a dozen games at the tempo of one per week is too much for most human bodies. Basketball load management is trivial in comparison.

This complexity really rewards high level fan engagement, I know a guy who got a summer job out of emailing an essay on a bad game plan to one of the major NFL teams.

On the other hand without the higher level of knowledge it's pretty enjoyable, most partners I've had in my lifetime who are sports avoidant have gotten more into American Football - the attack and then defend structure makes it more understandable than a lot of Soccer for instance. I love watching the gradual grinding down of a defense or Spain midfield control but it isn't as enjoyable to casuals.

As you note the action is limited to a short span, but you know exactly when that span is, leaving the rest of the time for celebration, drinking, and chitchat. It's a much better on the background at a party sport, you can easily miss the only true action of a soccer game if you piss for thirty seconds.

Interesting, in my experience watching American football I'm basically unable to tell when the action will resume in a given space of milling around. I assume you pick that up fairly quickly.

In my experience, women go for soccer very quickly, but they only remember the good-looking players (I have an American friend who still occasionally asks about Olivier Giroud) or the villains of a given team. It's easier for sports-agnostic women to experience sports as personal drama between men - see also the explosion of F1 interest.

I think the connection to baseball is a meaningful one, even if cricket is probably closer than baseball to the abstract idea of American football you're portraying. American sports are, generally, optimized for ultra-intense fan engagement with lots of statistics, whereas old-world sports tend more towards "may the best man win, old chap" with relatively less structure around that. Personally, I sort of appreciate that the stats wonks in soccer aren't really that useful, but it also means that there's very little to actually think about beyond watching the games and scouting transfers. Tactics are incredibly important to a team, but you've discussed them to death by Monday.

I can see the Fire Emblem metaphor, though I think the "war simulator" thing has been tortured to death (I could also give a spiel on how soccer and rugby are closer to small-unit infantry tactics - let alone that soccer fans engage in much closer activities to war than any professional athlete...) and we should accept that the war-related psychological inheritances that sport activates in us have almost nothing to do with what happens on the pitch.

Yeah you get the tempo pretty quickly (and you have an actual play clock that tells you when you have to go by).

You'd think so but the major lesson from the World Cup was that bitches over here love Haaland (because he's goofy). America football players offer more of a variety of good looking men (because each position requires a different body type) and the outfits show off the gents butts more. Both have sex appeal lol.

I love Soccer's evasion of stats and rules loose nature. I also love American sports nitty gritty and optimizable nature. Just as I suggest to Americans to enjoy the looseness of Soccer I think Football also has some value for things in the other direction.

So it's interesting, I think American Football most resembles a war simulator, European Football most resembles an actual fight. The simulator makes some things clear and explicit. Things have to happen, ambiguity is artificially reduced. People take turns slugging each other in the face. In contrast you have a free flowing game where nobody wants to get punched in the face, you push and pull, ebb and flow until you can safely strike without cost - or something slips up and things happen quickly. Things are rarely clear. Sometimes it just ends when it ends vs. goes on forever etc etc.

I bring this up not to explain which most resembles the territory, but point to which map is on display. You can enjoy both stylized maps without ever having seen the territory.

Even Rugby Union is the superior sport to gridiron football (all variants).

What do you mean by "even"? Rugby Union is a fantastic sport.

The Count hails from one of the few British colonies where rugby never took off. (Canadian rugby evolved into a game which is more like American football). So I expect he is comparing it unfavourably to cricket and (field) hockey.

If he is advocating Rugby League as the superior game, I will be surprised as he appears to be neither a chippy northerner nor an antipodean. I do think League would be a better gateway drug for converting gridiron fans to following a real sport.

Interestingly, a lot of the spread of Rugby Union beyond the Commonwealth is driven by a great many cultures having a traditional sport involving trying to advance a held "ball" over the try line while the opposition try to physically take it from you, and World Rugby is good at finding them and saying "this is the international version of the sport you are already playing - why don't you adjust your tactics to our rules so you can compete internationally".

League is the better sport to watch, as in union so much of the action happens underfoot.

Uh, isn’t non-commonwealth rugby Union mostly in countries with very heavy British influence to begin with?

Personally I prefer League (to watch, wouldn't want to personally play either) but yes I'd agree Rugby Union is still a very good sport to watch.

I think it would fair to say that other countries don’t play American Football because they can’t afford to so I guess that could be considered as them being inferior.

Soccer is a solid middle income country game. It’s why Argentina can be very good. France had the most players in the World Cup and it’s largely because Africa appears to be too poor to train their players domestically.

What nationalities are the coaches? It could also be a coaching issue.

I think it would fair to say that other countries don’t play American Football because they can’t afford to so I guess that could be considered as them being inferior.

I am at least curious to see what happens with the inclusion of Olympic (flag) football for 2028. One of the benefits of being host country is influence over choosing demonstration sports -- baseball/softball is also coming back like it did in Tokyo. It looks like the NFL (and CFL) will allow their athletes to play in the games, but of course flag is a very different game: unclear if NFL players would dominate like the NBA Dream Team. IMO it is a variant more likely to sell as a viable sport internationally. It looks like cricket, squash, and lacrosse will also make an appearance, but breakdancing isn't coming back.

There are lots of countries that are wealthy enough to play American Football- but soccer got to Africa from France, not the other way around.

I think arguably Europe is too poor to compete in football. And it’s not just a pure GDP. You probably do need an entire region dominated by the sport let’s call it 50 million people minimally to start to have filters big enough to have professional leagues (college football is probably fair to call professional). To play top level football you may need to have integrated black populations for for wide receiver, cb, and rb positions. It’s the one area where diversity is our strength makes some sense.

And then you need the more direct wealth of being able to pay for 20 coaches per side since you need a lot of coaches because there are 4 types of players (throwers, fast guys, big guys, kickers) plus guys who are mixtures. Sporting equipment is expensive for the game. You likely need emergency medicine to a greater extent.

The counter on why some countries play certain sports is basically a network effect argument. It’s more fun to play games that a lot of other people play so nations tend to keep playing the same games even if its sub-optimal.

The American mind wants to think that it’s our black athletes that would take over soccer because of superior fast twitch muscles, but Kickers and punters are like 98% white and Internationally soccers best players are at a minimum half white.

There are more than a few European nations where rugby is reasonably popular, no? Why would American football be that different? And it already fills the "big guys colliding into each other" niche of team sports for a lot of folks, lessening the chances of American football being adopted in a major way.

American football is ludicrously more expensive and has more specialized players. But typically rugby(and Canadian football) players find more success slotting into American football teams than the reverse, and I struggle to believe that high income countries can’t afford to build NFL teams.

But the other thing to point out is that the NFL is not, primarily, a sporting organization, it’s an entertainment platform. A limited number of teams isn’t going to expand, because the NFL’s success formula is celebrities+tabloid fodder+a big show that’s easy to televise- and thats a lot harder to replicate. Hardcore sports fans in the US are pivoting away from the NFL and towards things like hockey and soccer(college football is also huge, but it’s a class/cultural phenomenon).

Tua, for all his flaws and failures on the biggest stage, is pretty much a disproof that Samoans can't produce a QB. He might not have been able to stick around as a top-10 QB, but he played at the highest levels and lead the league in yards one season.

Ditto your theory that HBD dictates black players are necessary for RB/WR/CB, where some of the best players of the past decade are McCaffrey, Kupp, and Dejean.

I think what really makes American Football expensive is a need to have multiple development platforms for training specialized position groups. You need to be rich, big population, and potentially even diverse. American Samoa and Hawaii can produce some interesting players likely due to some genetics that are good for American football but could they produce a full team. I’m not sure they could produce a higher end QB or kicker which would leave flaws on their roster.

American football is expensive but it’s within the realm of what Western Europe could afford- after all it took off in America when we were a lot poorer than they are now. Could Europeans fill out a full team? Probably, a number of those countries are very competitive across a range of different sports.

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Soccer is an awesome sport. It has rules that are simple enough that everyone can understand them- but at the same time, they don't let everyone get away with murder. It's not highly scripted. It isn't a sport that rewards sheer mass over athleticism. Anyone except the wheelchair bound can play, anywhere, anytime. It's the world's sport for a reason, it beat out rugby and cricket for a reason.

Tiny nations could not put up a fight in America’s sports even if they played them at the same rate.

Tiny nations do, however, do this. The rugby powers could field good American Football teams if they wanted to, probably quite quickly. Plenty of small european countries already field good basketball teams- Serbia actually pushed the US to the brink for olympic gold. And Latin American baseball players are extremely common.

Soccer is an awesome sport. It has rules that are simple enough that everyone can understand them- but at the same time, they don't let everyone get away with murder.

Except offsides, which will never be understood or make sense.

Inferior to what? Team sports do not excite me usually, especially very long team sports (I barely have patience for basketball, anything longer is a nope, maybe highlights only). But I assume by "American sports" you mean egghand, which Americans insist to calling "football" to piss off Europeans (a noble goal, but doesn't make it make sense) and baseball? The latter is so boring that it should come with a warning label "may cause prolonged coma, do not attempt without medical supervision", while the former is more exciting, to the point it looks like a bar brawl but without the fun parts like alcohol and singing. Of these three, football (which Americans in line with the Good Ole England tradition long abandoned by the English call "soccer") is the most entertaining, and this is very well confirmed by the experience. Games like baseball or rugby exist everywhere, and they have some popularity, but you would find orders of magnitude more kids (or amateur adults) playing football than any of them. The market has passed its verdict.

I don’t believe the market has passed its verdict. There is a first mover advantage in sports and soccer spread first so a lot of its popularity is because people grew up with soccer.

But part of my argument for soccer being inferior would still fit in under your market test. Other countries are in fact poorer than America and soccer is cheaper to play and be internationally competitive than Americas leading sports. You can reasonably say soccer is more popular elsewhere because they are poorer.

There is a first mover advantage in sports and soccer spread first

Modern football rules were finalized in mid-19th century. Rugby rules were finalized at the same time. Baseball became popular in US at the same time. There was no "first". Of course, all of those games had historical precursors reaching into the ancient times, but whatever criteria do you use, it is not possible to establish one was "first".

Other countries are in fact poorer than America

Assuming they are (though that would be highly dependent on definition of "poorer" - by GDP per capita both Norway and Switzerland beat the US) I am not sure what this has to do with anything. Rugby is not much cheaper to play than football (if you don't count medical bills of course).

You can reasonably say soccer is more popular elsewhere because they are poorer.

No, not reasonably, Vast majority of players do not play it as high-stakes competition, any they very well can afford the basic equipment and training, They just don't seem to want to. Netherlands may be slightly below US by the GDP per capita, but it doesn't mean they can't afford a baseball bat or an egg-shaped ball. So no, it's not popular because they don't want to play it, not because they can't afford to.

Actually soccer, rugby, and cricket spread out from England at about the same time, but soccer got the widest adoption and displaced the others, in both rich and poor countries alike. Rugby and its descendants(like American and Canadian football, or Australian rules football) are dominant in most anglosphere colonies, but not in Britain itself.

I think it’s fair to say soccer is an inferior sport

I'll bite: how're you defining "inferior"?

There is a critical flaw that competitive games need to avoid: a competitor or team purposefully running out the clock rather than trying to play. Such as passing the ball back and forth with no serious attempt to advance or a combat sport in which one person constantly disengages and retreats. Most sports have rules contrived to prevent this boring lack of play. Combat sports have scoring penalizing "timidity" and allowing referees to stop the fight and forfeit someone who consistently refuses to engage. But the refs don't have to since no one would do that knowing the consequences.

Soccer lacks such wise game rules and reaps the expected outcome. It is a poorly designed game that allows and enables this sort of bad gameplay. You are ahead or tied and can't accept risking a loss due to how the tournament is structured? Then burn time passing the ball back and forth. Spend half an hour doing effectively nothing. Fans and interesting gameplay be damned.

Playing that way is a gamble though because you're surrendering the initiative to the other team. If you're unwilling to press your advantage they can bring their defenders forward to increase the pressure with little risk of an effective counterattack, use the extra men to more easily dispossess you and then take their time probing for an opening because you're too afraid to proactively tackle them, and any clearances immediately fall back into their possession to repeat the process. That leads to a barrage of goal attempts, and the longer that continues the likelier it is that one succeeds. It's frustrating for supporters of the defending team, but it's not boring or uneventful.

What makes matches boring is when both teams play conservative, possession focussed tactics where they retreat deep into their own half the moment they encounter any resistance to their advance, instead relying on a series of mistakes from the opponent to grant them an easy opportunity. That's what leads to a dearth of attempts and corresponding lack of intensity.

Soccer is inferior because 98% of possessions do not advance the game state.

In American football, every play advances the game state. Even if nothing happens, 2nd and 10 is meaningfully different from 1st and 10. 3rd and 10 from the 20 is a very different game state from 1st and 10 from the 20.

In basketball, about half of all plays end in a score (arguably this is too much).

Let me bend your ear briefly on why modern basketball is the worst of all sports.

First, it is the only major sport with a freakish morphology requirement. The best predictor of success in basketball is your height - the average for pro players is the 99th percentile. The only other team sport where you see this is volleyball, which nobody cares about, so it's fine if it caters to a small group. But basketball is the sport for many demographics, and yet 98-99% of people can never go pro no matter how hard they work or how skilled they become.

Second, the rules are stupid. Running with the ball in your hands is not allowed, except you can take a few steps I guess? Especially if it leads to a cool dunk! (Pretty sure that's the actual reason, people like dunks so they bend the rules to allow them). On a more serious note, the modern style of play has devolved to take advantage of these silly rules. Many plays I see in modern games are just a big player bull rushing with the ball in their hands for three steps, then leaping through the air and tipping the ball up while in midair. There's no teamwork beyond setting picks, no finesse, just a big flying body that the defender is not allowed to do anything about. If the ball goes in great, but if the defender gets in the way it's usually a foul and free throw so just as good.

Third, shooting baskets is stupid. It requires kids to spend thousands of hours on a movement skill that has no application to anything else whatsoever. Seriously, can someone come up with any other action in life that is remotely like shooting baskets? How much of our kids' time is wasted on this junk?Also, there's relatively little interaction involved in shooting baskets. I should say, there is interaction if the defender is taller and can put their hands over you, in which case you simply can't succeed no matter how good you are (see point one), but most of the time it's just a skill check roll to see if you get the points or not. What, in every similar sport, is a battle of wits between offense and defense, in basketball is often just a roll of the dice. Player XY hits 3 pointers from this distance at 38% chance. What fun! (BTW, how are there professional players who can't hit free throws? What an embarrassing sport!) The result of this is that basketball is a highly statistical game - the opposite of soccer, upsets and comebacks in basketball rarely happen, because there are so many scoring plays, and scoring is so easy. By minute 5, you can already see which team is better, and the same ratio of points will likely continue for the rest of the game. Everything about basketball is boring.

All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor soccer arenas.

spend thousands of hours on a movement skill that has no application to anything else whatsoever.

Unlike hockey, where the skill of using a shaped stick to throw things will pay dividends over their lifetime lol

I used to play soccer as a kid, and I now kick stuff around my apartment with precision to clean up, so that was good.

I broadly agree that elite level basketball is boring to watch and stupid because solving for the game at that level is too heavily controlled by height.

I would have to disagree that shooting basketballs lacks usefulness outside of basketball. It’s hand-eye coordination which seems important for a lot of things in life. Perhaps it’s over optimized in some ways for shooting but in general sports that promote hand eye coordination seem to be good.

I will admit it's not a particularly useful skill, but I use a basketball throw to toss things in the trash/some other receptacle while yelling "Kobe!" significantly more often then I do anything resembling a football pass, swinging a baseball bat, or kicking a soccer ball.

Tossing a thing into another thing is 100% a widely applicable skill. (Ignoring, for the moment, that basketball players knowingly use biomechanically inferior technique for free throws for aesthetic reasons, and that playing basketball isn't actually teaching you the best and easiest way to do it's central skill)

Learning to shoot a basketball has some utility, in the same way learning any skill has utility. But throwing a baseball or football is a much more translatable skill, and biomechanically what our shoulders are designed to do. The proper movement for shooting a basketball is almost unnatural in comparison, which is why most kids do it wrong until they're corrected and properly trained.

Would turning the hoop sideways fix the sport?

All basketball arenas should be renovated into indoor-soccer arenas.

Don't forget that indoor American football also exists.

The only other team sport where you see this is volleyball, which nobody cares about, so it's fine if it caters to a small group.

Volleyball even innovated the Libero to provide a jobs program for shorter players.

I think I’ve seen three argument for why it’s inferior.

  1. The better team should win the game more consistently. I saw some data today that soccer has the lowest % chance of favored team winning the game. Upsets do make sports more enjoyable but in soccer the outcome is too heavily on random luck versus ability. You also see this with like Cape Verde being able to draw powerhouse teams which shouldn’t happen in a better game.

  2. The game doesn’t utilize the human upper body. A good game some how incorporates an athletes upper body. It’s literally half the human body.

  3. All sports some how mimic war. Soccer has the least application to war of any sport. We don’t have any weapons that involve kicking stuff. This is sort of similar to not using the upper body. But in war we throw stones, spears, arrows, etc which most other sports mimic in some way. War had a lot of hand to hand combat.

Come to think of it, there's something somewhat anti-humanist about soccer's no hands rule. Being able to accurately throw things is kind of humanity's whole thing (beyond language/complex social structure). If we were a video game class, it would be our special racial skill. Kicking is beta prey animal shit.

(Soccer fans, please note this is tongue-in-cheek. I've enjoyed watching the world cup. I like your game)

If we were a video game class, it would be our special racial skill.

Not IQ?!!?!? What?!?!?? Or communication?!?!?!? Throwing things? Really?

I don't want to downplay how OP we are at throwing things but I'm not typing this comment on a thrown projectile lol

You also see this with like Cape Verde being able to draw powerhouse teams which shouldn’t happen in a better game.

If it were "too much luck in football compared to other sports" then they wouldn't be able to do it every damn game. Cape Verde fielded a good team, and their results reflect that.

Also, there just aren't sports where a single match selects the best team from two world-class teams with a reasonable degree of reliability. Pro baseball and basketball both use multi-game series in their playoffs, and the best-of-1 single-elimination format of the NCAA basketball playoffs produces so many upsets that you call it "March Madness".

All sports some how mimic war. Soccer has the least application to war of any sport.

You clearly haven't met European football fans.

I agree. The perfect sport is one where both teams show up to the pitch, the computer decides who is better, and the victory is awarded to the superior team. You don't even need to get your cleats dirty.

I get your sarcasm but in sports there is a line between matchup decided between “random number generator” and “better team wins”. The ideal game has a balance between the two. Soccer I think is probably a little closer to “random number generator” chooses winner. I feel like Spain absolutely dominated that game and it was almost a tie. That’s not a good outcome.

And yet, after drawing with Cape Verde, Spain won the tournament, holding the world champions to a single shot. The nature of football is that it evens out over the course of a campaign, without being boringly predictable. (Also, with regard to your second point, football players use their upper bodies a ton when competing for the ball - to keep balance, hold space, know where the other player is, control their movements, etc. You don't notice it, because it only becomes really obvious to a new viewer when it turns into a foul. There's a reason the players don't look like cyclists).

In fairness, Spain had 12 goals blocked, which only happened because Argentina has the best keeper in the world.

In fairness too Spain did not shoot well. They had a lot of shots but I didn’t record Martinez making a great save. It felt like all the shots were right at him. But in general what’s the conversion rate from shot to goal - 15%? Which is an 11% chance the game draws. Maybe that’s too high?

Hockey and baseball have a similar issue and they deal with it by playing 7 game series.

There's other ways in which sports can suck though.

  1. Players do things that barely relate to one another. This is the reason Quiddich in Harry Potter is a stupid idea from someone who probably doesn't understand sports as a concept. But baseball also does it; the pitcher, the batter, the basemen, the fielders do things that outside of the direct level of ball itself, barely have anything to do with one another. Sure, the pitcher is is in direct opposition to the batter, but how does the pitcher affect the fielders?

  2. The sport is so optimized that large parts of the intended spectacle have become irrelevant. I don't know much about basketball but from what I hear people saying, that's its state now.

  3. Having so many players that are focussed on only one physical aspect because that's the only thing that's asked of them. Baseball and american football do that. In american football, you got your QB that's usually fairly well rounded, then you get a mix of big mofos and sprightly gazelles. In baseball it seems at this point all that people care about is pitchers (and star batters; I know, they play a position on defense, but that's just to keep them busy).

Sure, the pitcher is is in direct opposition to the batter, but how does the pitcher affect the fielders?

By choosing his pitches to the batter in an attempt to get the batter to hit in such a way that it's easier to field or will lead to a double play.

This is the reason Quiddich in Harry Potter is a stupid idea from someone who probably doesn't understand sports as a concept.

I recall that JKR intended the snitch as a satire of this exact problem with penalties in Soccer, which have such outsize impacts on the game that you can play the entire game and have it all be irrelevant because of a single play.

And then people unfamiliar with sports tried to make quidditch real, giving ammunition to ‘JKR made a fictional sport, not a real one’.

College Quidditch teams are just the latest in a long line of "upper class white kids invent a new sport because they like playing sports but aren't very good at the existing ones." This is essentially the entire history of most modern organized sport, actually. Soccer, college football, marquess of quensbury boxing rules, BJJ, Rugby, marathon running. All originate in their modern form in the search by upper class white kids for an athletic outlet that isn't already dominated by the lower classes.

This seems off. Both association football and rugby come from an attempt to write down the rules of the folk "football" games, which were played by boys and young men of all classes, to support organised inter-school play, and the The Marquess of Queensbury is obviously trying to do the same thing for a different pre-existing sport.

Marathon running was invented by a French academic in order to provide an on-theme marquee event for the first modern Olympics.

Both association football and rugby come from an attempt to write down the rules of the folk "football" games, which were played by boys and young men of all classes,

All the forms of football (Association, Rugby, Gridiron) were originally called "football" because they were played on foot rather than because you kick the ball. ((Hence the stupidity of the "handegg" sneer))

Prior to the emergence and dominance of the various Footballs, when we talked about sport and sportsmanship, we were largely talking about aristocratic pastimes: horses, hunting, hunting on horses. Football was played on foot, as opposed to the Sport of Kings, Polo. Horse sports require both a lot of money, for the horses, and access to a lot of land. They're unavailable to the urban professional class.

The urban professional classes had a rising sense of their own importance and wanted to demonstrate their athleticism, but they didn't have horse-and-land money, they needed something accessible. This shows us the contrast that they were part of building: the upper class students at British boarding schools or American colleges were upper class, but not Aristocrats, they weren't as capable of participating in the existing cultures of sportsmanship at the time, which were oriented around horsemanship and hunting. So they elevated these townsfolk games, codified them, and made them into something socially valuable in which they could participate.

For Soccer in America, the same dynamic actually recurs in the 90s, when Soccer emerges in America as an athletic alternative to the dominance of football and basketball. The "Soccer-mom" term of the 90s didn't just refer to a mom, it referred to a suburban upper-middle class white mom. Why did her kid play soccer and not football or basketball? Football was too violent, basketball too "urban," (I mean everyone knows white men can't jump). Soccer emerged as a youth sports alternative that was less violent, classier, more European, but most importantly it was just a sport that poor kids and black kids didn't play. This is reflected in the fan dynamic, being a fan of European soccer leagues has long been a blue-tribe coded kind of sports fandom, a sports hipsterdom that allowed not just the players but the fans could sneer at American sports. This dynamic is how we wound up with the "pay-to-play" model that everyone involved with American Soccer has been kvetching about since the World Cup, but people don't understand how it came to be.

Marathon running, long distance running, jogging, are all popular in America primarily as and because they are upper-middle class pastimes. It's got huge advantages as a status-class marker: no contact, solo, primarily about discipline and determination rather than talent, historically finishing is the primary status symbol rather than winning. No large law firm or investment bank lacks a Marathon-Guy since the jogging craze of the 80s; while historically few law firms have a powerlifter or a wrestler (though Crossfit and BJJ might have changed this by now). You can't walk through an office in Boston leading up to April and not hear about someone training for the Marathon, I've never walked through a law firm in Boston and heard about partners training for the Mass state USAPL. You can see this dynamic in long distance running continue as the popular distances have extended, ultramarathons are the new marathons, because the ultras are still competitive for upper-class white boys with discipline and character, rather than the province of professional Kenyans. Finishing an ultra is still worth more than comparing times because so few people run them at all. Sport exists, is popularized by upper-middle class whites, comes to be dominated by other groups as the prestige of the event grows, upper-middle class whites move on to a new sport to enjoy as a pastime.

Jogging craze among yuppies => NYC and Boston Marathons become prestige events => Kenyans come to dominate the major marathons because prestige means monetary reward => yuppies start talking about ultramarathons.

White kids at old Ivy League schools invent modern football(s) as an interscholastic pastime => football becomes a national professional sport with teams at every high school and a path to riches => poor kids dominate the sport because they see it as a path to scholarships and money => white kids at old ivy league schools discover Soccer, Lacrosse, etc and develop those into interscholastic pastimes

This is too long already, so I'll just cede that the Marquess of Queensbury was a slightly different dynamic and I'm a little wrong on that one.

If they aren’t good at playing sports I don’t believe it’s because upper class kids are worse at playing sports than lower class kids. But you have a lot more lower class kids so even if the lower class on average produces half as many great athletes per capita their share numbers mean they will dominate.

I think it’s likely true that on average upper class kids are taller than lower class kids and intellect does matter more than people like to admit in sports so upper class kids should be producing at a higher % athletes.

But true elite athletes are still a small % of elites that you would still want to create new games you can be the best at.

It's not that upper class kids are, on an individual basis, bad at sports, that's neither necessary nor sufficient for the argument.

It's that people recognize, implicitly, the various advantages from playing sports, but individual kids aren't all good enough to play at a high level. Playing sports in an academic setting is good, has numerous social and physical and credentialist benefits. It's good for your body, your mind, your ego, your social life. But if you can't make the team in high school or college, you often don't even get to play, and even if you do play casually you're strictly inferior to the players on the varsity squad.

College quidditch (and rock climbing and historically lacrosse and ultimate frisbee etc...) is the lindy form of college athletics: a bunch of students forming a club and creating rules to hang out and play sports, and eventually organizing games against other schools until it builds enough to be a real tournament sport.

It's finding an outlet to express your athleticism when the ordinary forms of athletics that already exist are closed to you.

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College quidditch is also notable for being ridiculous and inane as a sport. They run around with brooms held between their legs, even.

Like ultimate frisbee is not that.

Yes but the inanity is what keeps athletic kids who can play a different sport out of it. It's similar to the comment I've seen that Juggalo culture is one of the last real subcultures remaining because it is so off-putting that it is difficult for the Sociopaths to push out the Geeks and the MOPs aren't interested.

Unfortunately the readers seemed not to notice, tried to implement it as literally as possible, and the grouching comes from HPMOR!Harry and his big flashing BUY A CLOCK sign.

(3) is why I think NFL is the game of games. Sports are basically practicing war. Football is most like modern combined warfare where completely different weapons and systems need to work together to accomplish a goal and no one system can be as powerful as combining different systems working together.

Football has a lot of specialization that can fit the elites of different body types.

A country in war would not be good at war if they were really good at making tanks but didn’t know how to make a plane. Similar a country really good at producing fast gazelle running people but bad at producing big strong guys would lose to a country that can produce gazelles and strong guys.

In American football, you've got your quarterback that's usually fairly well rounded, then you get a mix of big mofos and sprightly gazelles.

Compare the old system of one-platoon/ironman football, under which substitutions were strictly limited and therefore all players had to be competent both on offense and on defense. Presumably, the replacement of this system with unlimited substitution and two or three totally separate platoons of players has contributed to the specialization of players in the modern day.

It's quite unclear how bat and racket sports mimic war, or why we should care either way.

Range weapons. The ability to control a projectile and maximize its speed to kill your enemy.

The purpose of sports is to practice war.

The fact that the team with the best stats can easily lose in soccer makes it more similar to war.

That's actually not true- the handful of sports whose ancestors were clearly documented functioned as a substitution for war. A lacrosse match substituted for a battle.

I'm not aware of any range weapons which work on projectiles thrown at you by the enemy. In fact, I'm not aware of any range weapons that are used with bat or racket like implements at all. Perhaps you can enlighten me.

The purpose of sports is to practice war.

Citation, uh, needed.

What's your question? Other than 'who will chomp down on my terrible bait'?

You may have noticed we had a soccer tournament that ended yesterday. So a lot of people on the internet - myself included - have been thinking about soccer versus American Sports.

So it’s not bait. It’s just me thinking on the subject. And it’s basically that soccer is in fact an inferior sport but it’s weaknesses are also why you can have an international tournament.

I mean, he's not wrong on soccer's inferiority...

But the real best sport that cannot become a real world cup sports because it's too advanced is hockey, and even then, there's 3 countries that can field an all-star team, and a few more that can field at least an NHL-level team, if not an all-star one.

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