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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2116 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 19, 2026

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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