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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.
Soccer is an awesome sport. It has rules that are simple enough that everyone can understand them- but at the same time, they don't let everyone get away with murder. It's not highly scripted. It isn't a sport that rewards sheer mass over athleticism. Anyone except the wheelchair bound can play, anywhere, anytime. It's the world's sport for a reason, it beat out rugby and cricket for a reason.
Tiny nations do, however, do this. The rugby powers could field good American Football teams if they wanted to, probably quite quickly. Plenty of small european countries already field good basketball teams- Serbia actually pushed the US to the brink for olympic gold. And Latin American baseball players are extremely common.
Except offsides, which will never be understood or make sense.
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