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Notes -
Interesting, in my experience watching American football I'm basically unable to tell when the action will resume in a given space of milling around. I assume you pick that up fairly quickly.
In my experience, women go for soccer very quickly, but they only remember the good-looking players (I have an American friend who still occasionally asks about Olivier Giroud) or the villains of a given team. It's easier for sports-agnostic women to experience sports as personal drama between men - see also the explosion of F1 interest.
I think the connection to baseball is a meaningful one, even if cricket is probably closer than baseball to the abstract idea of American football you're portraying. American sports are, generally, optimized for ultra-intense fan engagement with lots of statistics, whereas old-world sports tend more towards "may the best man win, old chap" with relatively less structure around that. Personally, I sort of appreciate that the stats wonks in soccer aren't really that useful, but it also means that there's very little to actually think about beyond watching the games and scouting transfers. Tactics are incredibly important to a team, but you've discussed them to death by Monday.
I can see the Fire Emblem metaphor, though I think the "war simulator" thing has been tortured to death (I could also give a spiel on how soccer and rugby are closer to small-unit infantry tactics - let alone that soccer fans engage in much closer activities to war than any professional athlete...) and we should accept that the war-related psychological inheritances that sport activates in us have almost nothing to do with what happens on the pitch.
Yeah you get the tempo pretty quickly (and you have an actual play clock that tells you when you have to go by).
You'd think so but the major lesson from the World Cup was that bitches over here love Haaland (because he's goofy). America football players offer more of a variety of good looking men (because each position requires a different body type) and the outfits show off the gents butts more. Both have sex appeal lol.
I love Soccer's evasion of stats and rules loose nature. I also love American sports nitty gritty and optimizable nature. Just as I suggest to Americans to enjoy the looseness of Soccer I think Football also has some value for things in the other direction.
So it's interesting, I think American Football most resembles a war simulator, European Football most resembles an actual fight. The simulator makes some things clear and explicit. Things have to happen, ambiguity is artificially reduced. People take turns slugging each other in the face. In contrast you have a free flowing game where nobody wants to get punched in the face, you push and pull, ebb and flow until you can safely strike without cost - or something slips up and things happen quickly. Things are rarely clear. Sometimes it just ends when it ends vs. goes on forever etc etc.
I bring this up not to explain which most resembles the territory, but point to which map is on display. You can enjoy both stylized maps without ever having seen the territory.
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