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CLICK HERE to Register for a free account and login for a smoother ad-free experience. It's easy, and only takes a few moments.It'll never happen. Never. It's just too boring. Not trying to antagonize the soccer fans here but it has no chance.dr said:If we are ever going to embrace soccer here, we're going to need a much better product on the field and maybe just a little pr.
Believe me I'm no Soccer fan. I find it almost as entertaining as Ladies Senior Citizen Bowling on cable access but I respect the people who enjoy it.BelichickFan said:It'll never happen. Never. It's just too boring. Not trying to antagonize the soccer fans here but it has no chance.
BelichickFan said:It'll never happen. Never. It's just too boring. Not trying to antagonize the soccer fans here but it has no chance.
Soccer is the up and coming sport in the U.S.A. and always will be.upstater1 said:That's like saying baseball will never catch on either. Believe me, soccer is a lot easier to get to enjoy than baseball. Try showing appreciation for the intricacies of baseball to someone who doesn't know much about the game.
I think a lot of soccer can be boring, and the kind we get in the US is about as interesting to me as NFLE. I never watch either.
But the world cup is incredibly exciting. There's just so much tension and desperation on the field.
I guess we all have our opinions but I find the world cup incredible boring. I'll have it on it there's no other sports on but that's it. And this comes from someone who was born in England and liked soccer until I was 12 as much as I like Football now.upstater1 said:That's like saying baseball will never catch on either. Believe me, soccer is a lot easier to get to enjoy than baseball. Try showing appreciation for the intricacies of baseball to someone who doesn't know much about the game.
I think a lot of soccer can be boring, and the kind we get in the US is about as interesting to me as NFLE. I never watch either.
But the world cup is incredibly exciting. There's just so much tension and desperation on the field.
dr said:Soccer is the up and coming sport in the U.S.A. and always will be.
Yep, it was up and coming back in 1980 when I played in high school. It's 25 years later now.dr said:Soccer is the up and coming sport in the U.S.A. and always will be.
BelichickFan said:It'll never happen. Never. It's just too boring. Not trying to antagonize the soccer fans here but it has no chance.
primetime said:Because every other sport is already established. Hahaha.
Tom Brady, holding midfielder -- Outstanding overall athlete who has the grit to win balls and the vision to distribute them.
I don't know about that. He's not fast enough to play midfield, or really soccer in general. He's playing the right position in the right sport already.
It's really not fair, because the best soccer players in the US tend to be the third-tier pro guys, behind sports like basketball and football (and even some hockey and baseball). Most youth soccer players in the US double as track athletes (or other sports in different seasons, but track seems to be the main one), and usually find track to be their true calling. If we took all our best athletes and trained them from youth to be soccer players and soccer players only, like Brazil does, there's no doubt we would field a team that would blow any challengers out of the water.
Really, most soccer players hover around 5'10" and 160-170 lbs. The smallest corner in the NFL has a good 10 lbs on your average soccer player, and the same goes for basketball players (who have a dozen inches and a couple dozen lbs. on them). A team with physical freaks like Lebron (who's as tall as Peter Crouch, one of the tallest strikers in the world, but is much faster, stronger, and can jump much higher) could outjump and outpace just about every other team out there.
Then again, the same goes for the other European game. Train a team of NFL all-stars to play rugby for a years and I don't think they'd have any problems handling the British Lions. Those guys are big and fast, yes, but they're not the freaks that guys like Urlacher, Ray Lewis, Rodney, and so on are.
lutontown_fc said:I could lecture you on how rugby players from the two different discilpines (rugby league and rugby union) struggle to cross the divide between codes - let alone some NFL player - but I dont think I will.
Has soccer's popularity grown at all since 1980 ? I would be shocked if it had. It's a very easy sport to pick up and play and is popular to the rest of the world for historical reasons (because they grow up with it) but it's not an inherently interesting sport.PlattsFan said:It'll almost surely not be as big as the NFL, the NBA, or MLB any time soon. But I'd bet in the next decade it'll be bigger than the NHL in the US.
BelichickFan said:Has soccer's popularity grown at all since 1980 ? I would be shocked if it had. It's a very easy sport to pick up and play and is popular to the rest of the world for historical reasons (because they grow up with it) but it's not an inherently interesting sport.
That's fine, football may not be inherently interesting either. That wasn't my point. My point was that soccer will never be popular. If you want a point of reference, I'll say it'll never surpass the NHL in spectater popularity.PlattsFan said:My point is that almost no sport is "inherently interesting." They all take acculturation to appreciate. Football is unspeakably boring to most of the world. Baseball is, too. Soccer is fascinating and exciting to them.
In fact, of all the major team sports in America (football, baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer), football is far and away the least popular world-wide. And it's not for lack of trying on the NFL's part. It's popular here because we "grew up with it," no?
primetime said:Oh, that's a lecture I'd love to hear, especially when I've played rugby in both disciplines (as well as sevens).
You train a side of 13/15 top NFL players in the intricacies of the game of rugby for a year straight and I guarantee they handle any team you want (the best players from New Zealand beat the Lions in 2005 and you're saying, if America was to train its top athletes in rugby, that we couldn't - with a far, far larger pool to choose from - handle them?) Keep in mind, the Eagles only lost to the Wallabies 26-22 in 1994, fielding a team with very few internationally renowned athletes on it.
Rugby players who play for those teams are physical monsters, yes. But the NFL and the NBA have the largest pool of the most freakishly athletic human beings on the planet. If you were to train them in the game of rugby, they would be dominant. Yes, it's a tough sport to learn, and even tougher to excel in. But why are non-Americans capable of learning it and Americans not?
It goes both ways, too. There are many All-Blacks, Wallabies, and Lions from each of the four unions (as well as many league players) capable of playing in and excelling in the NFL, if they had been or were trained to play in it.
lutontown_fc said:Being such a keen fan of rugby. and a player to boot you will be aware of the cross code games between the champions of England a few years back then?
Then, im sure you will be able to explain to me why the Union team smashed the league team at their own game and vice versa - it wasn't even close.
Seems to me that the USA still has a relatively large pool of players to select a 'soccer' team from - still waiting for some kind of success there.