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Notes -
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'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.
Playing that way is a gamble though because you're surrendering the initiative to the other team. If you're unwilling to press your advantage they can bring their defenders forward to increase the pressure with little risk of an effective counterattack, use the extra men to more easily dispossess you and then take their time probing for an opening because you're too afraid to proactively tackle them, and any clearances immediately fall back into their possession to repeat the process. That leads to a barrage of goal attempts, and the longer that continues the likelier it is that one succeeds. It's frustrating for supporters of the defending team, but it's not boring or uneventful.
What makes matches boring is when both teams play conservative, possession focussed tactics where they retreat deep into their own half the moment they encounter any resistance to their advance, instead relying on a series of mistakes from the opponent to grant them an easy opportunity. That's what leads to a dearth of attempts and corresponding lack of intensity.
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