How did American football π become the most popular sport in USA than Football β½οΈ ? Football is the popular sport in almost every continent.
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Stats. Americans love stats. American football, baseball, hockey, basketball, etc all have lots of stats. Soccer has 4.
Even golf has figured out how to have lots of stats.
But soccer just doesn’t have very many, and that keeps Americans from getting excited about it.
Soccer is too low scoring. When you have a game that ends in a 0-0 tie that is decided by penalty kicks, it doesn’t get much attention in the US.
Soccer is seen as a slow game with limited action, football as action packed and exciting. Which is kind of funny given that an NFL game has about 11 total minutes of actual time when the ball is in play.
Americas first love was baseball. American football grew in popularity in the 20s with the leatherheads. I imagine there just wasnt much coverage of the soccer scene during this time. Maybe a newspaper article at most showing scores. Not much to drum up excitement unless someone immigrated to America and talked about it or visited europe. What we did have in america now was american football, rising in popularity; baseball. Which is widely popular already; and basketball which is also quite popular in the college scene at this time.
People saying soccer is low scoring or otherwise insinuating that soccer is too boring for Americans are just coming up with justifications for why soccer isn’t popular, without giving actual reasons for why it never became particularly popular to begin with.
I recommend [this video](https://youtu.be/CYxdulsZZBM), which delves into the history of various sports and why some countries are particularly fond of certain sports.
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“Football” is very old. It existed before the US, but the rules were not written down and different people in different places used different rules and even different types of balls. In the UK, “football” first started getting formal rules at universities, and different types of football clubs began to form. Eventually two particular sets of rules for the game became popular and they started to form into two sports, which would eventually become football (soccer) and rugby.
The game that was brought to the US from the UK as football was an early version of what we now know as rugby. In the US, schools and universities formed associations to start to formalize rules for the sport and eventually that became American football. Modern football (soccer) developed separately in the UK around the same time and spread across Europe from there.
American football is popular today because it’s considered faster and more exciting than many other sports.
American (gridiron) football is related to “soccer”. All ball moving goal games derive from a medieval game. Early gridiron football had scoring done by kicking the ball through a goal until some enterprising players decided that forward passing and running with the ball was superior.
Aussie football and Gridiron football derived from early rugby, which had a bigger presence in US universities. “Soccer” never had the same cachΓ© among the university set.
“Americans love stats” seems fairly anecdotal and generalized. That’s strange to say considering our math abilities are subpar compared to other countries. Sort of ridiculous.
Anyway if I had to fathom a guess as to why other sports had more STAYING power (not to be confused with why we played other sports instead to begin with, this I don’t know)… it’s hard to monetize a game with no commercial breaks.
Not sure we love stats (no more or less than others anyway lmfao) but we sure do love rubbing some coins between our sheisty fingers. A US football game has at least an hour of commercials. Isn’t the only break in futbol at halftime?
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