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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2633 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.

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.

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.

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.

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