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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2585 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.

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 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".

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).

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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