How did American football 🏈 become the most popular sport in USA than Football ⚽️ ? Football is the popular sport in almost every continent.
In: 1
I think it also has a lot to do with what you were exposed to when you were a kid.
Example: I grew up playing American football and baseball. I know some of the basic and extensive strategies in the games and can dissect some of it while watching and I know most of the nuisances regarding the rules. As such I continue to enjoy watching the sports and have started teaching my kids the same.
Conversely, I never played soccer or hockey. And while I enjoy watching the high stakes (World and Stanley Cup and playoffs) games, I feel confused a lot of the time as to why this penalty was called or what went wrong that play, and have a general lack of in-depth knowledge of the sports which kind of translates into a feeling of not having a stake in the game.
I think there are several reasons:
* American football allows for a ton of advertising.
* American football is a lot more violent than soccer.
* Lots of money is thrown at American football. Marketing for soccer is, at best, almost non-existent.
* Soccer is considered a great “kid sport.” But “grown-ups” lose interest once their kid has outgrown the U leagues.
I work with a lot of Americans and I’ve found they only tend to like sports they are among the best at, if not the best at, and I feel like it comes down to the patriotism that’s drilled into them from an early age. It’s almost a “We’re the best at this, no one comes close so it’s therefore the best sport” or “We created this, so it must be the best”
I’m not saying there is anything wrong with that by the way.
NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL I believe are the biggest sports in the US. I might be wrong.
Let the downvotes commence….
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.
Because there are less players flopping around on the ground pretending to be hurt to get a penalty call. Some of those soccer players should get an academy award. 😂
According to [this](https://www.aspenprojectplay.org/youth-sports/facts/participation-rates), about the same number of kids in the US play soccer as play (American) football. So, as measured by participation rates, they are equally popular.
I feel like a main reason behind the different level of popularity is how each sport is played. ‘Soccer’ has much less breaks within the game, hence much less opportunities for inserting commercials. It becomes much more profitable to show NFL/College football than soccer.
It’s my understanding that the NFL (American football’s major league) saw a huge spike in soccer’s popularity so started dumping boat loads of money into high-school and college level sports providing the fields, gear, and going down the “hook’em when they’re young” path that cigarettes were doing.
At the same time, the US men’s soccer leagues were an absolute mess due to 2 competing professional leagues that sort of merged, but didn’t really, and still haven’t gotten their stuff together. They keep infighting instead of building their league.
This is also why the US women’s soccer team is really good, because they got started later as a separate independent organization that didn’t have the infighting of the men’s league, whereas the men’s league keeps shooting itself in the foot.
Anecdotally, here’s why I prefer football over soccer (to watch, soccer is more fun to play). Soccer is an hour of the ball moving back and forth across the field and sometimes it goes in the net. There’s not much variation minute by minute. I know a lot of people complain because football is so stop and start, but for me, it allows tension to build in a way that soccer doesn’t. As long as you know the basic rules, there is a lot more anticipation.
I watched 3 games this weekend where the winner was determined in I think the final minute. That tension is what makes it so exciting. 2nd and goal, 25 seconds on the clock. 3rd and goal, 20 seconds on the clock. 4th and goal, they need a touchdown to tie. They got the touchdown! Do they go for a standard point after to go into overtime or do they risk going for the 2 point conversion to win? I’m on the edge of my seat. Soccer is much more binary. They score or they don’t and then they keep dribbling and passing.
I would argue that U.S. football’s popularity is due to it being massively supported at the college/university level. Allegiance to a pro team may change but you are loyal to your college team for life, and everyone at the school supports the team.
Latest Answers