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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2892 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"?

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.

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.

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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