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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   3009 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.

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).

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.

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