How did American football 🏈 become the most popular sport in USA than Football ⚽️ ? Football is the popular sport in almost every continent.
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It’s in part due to the American character of preferring to do things in a unique way, and in part historical accident.
The mid-19th century saw the codification of the rules of various games, as faster travel made it more possible for more far-flung locations to send teams back and forth to play each other, leading to the need for consistent rule sets, rather than the more localized versions of games that had developed over time. This gave rise to the great division between Association Football and Rugby Football in the UK, rather than 100% reconciling the varying ways of playing “football” that had existed before, with the seminal moment coming when the Blackheath club from the FA as it was being formed in 1863, followed by the formation of the Ruby Football Union in 1871.
The US was going through a similar development at the same time, not entirely separately, of course, as information certainly flowed back and forth. Cricket had been codified significantly earlier, in the 18th century, and was played in the US as well as in Britain, under basically the same rules. Baseball, as evolved from Rounders, had begun to be codified around the 1840s, and there was a concerted effort on the part of some figures in the US to promote it over Cricket as the preferred stick and ball sport, very much *because* it was a different game than was more usually played seriously in Britain. For quite a while in those mid-19th century days, both sports were played in the eastern US, often by the same people. There was controversy, for example, whether the first legendary figure in Baseball history, Jim Creighton, sustained the injury that led to his death while playing Baseball or Cricket, since he’d participated in public matches in both in short succession.
Association Football, more similarly to Cricket, was picked up by the US as described by the Football Association more or less whole wholesale. The game was played in the US, and actually rose to significant levels of popularity in the 1920s, where the American Soccer League was quite successful. Unfortunately, it fell apart in the early 1930s under economic pressure from the Depression, and with massive fighting between the league and the governing bodies of the USFA and FIFA. Wikipedia describes the demise, “the spectacle of a U.S. athletic association conspiring with a European organization to undermine a U.S. athletic league alienated many U.S. sports fans by creating an image of soccer as a sport controlled by foreigners. These fans turned their backs on soccer, relegating the sport to the position of a minor league”. This seems pretty accurate, based on my readings.
American Football was originally driven by the universities of the east coast, in particular of the Ivy League, then expanding throughout the country. The professional version of the sport didn’t really take off for far longer, a half-century after major league baseball had become established. Those amateur competitions among the colleges, unlike how Association Football was taken from Britain without alteration, didn’t much care about the way things had been codified elsewhere, and went in their own direction. By the 1920s when the APFC (later the NFL) was formed, the game was quite different from Rugby and vastly more popular than Rugby in the US. As the NFL survived and eventually thrived, the game continued to evolve at a much faster pace than other sports.
That evolution had fueled the major change that defined American Football compared to the other variants that had evolved from those early local and uncodified games: the forward pass. Officially part of the college game starting in 1906, the forward pass was part of the efforts to reform the US-specific version of the game, which had become more dangerous as it became more organized. More than a dozen American Football players died in 1905 alone. Originally controversial and unusual, the forward pass slowly became the primary way the ball was moved in American Football, and marked it as a unique sport.
I’m sure that in the multiverse, there are plenty of versions of the US where soccer won out, with Gridiron Football failing to reform itself and being banned, or the ASL becoming a big success that went on to overtake Baseball in popularity. But with Gridiron Football hitting on a unique rule change that ultimately worked out, and professional Association Football being killed off for several decades, this is where we ended up.
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