I'm late to the game but this question has been bouncing around in my head and I wanted to give my opinion as a sports fan. I also coach my son's soccer team so to be clear, I have nothing against soccer.
The real question is: Why isn't soccer more popular in the US?
Soccer is a very wide game. It's easy to understand and easy to start playing. Don't touch the ball with your hands and kick the ball into the goal. It's easy enough that six year olds with coed teams can start playing and have fun. It explains the huge youth participation in the US.
Soccer, however, lacks depth. Games likes baseball and football have deep strategy and specialization that soccer/basketball/hockey just can't match. It's checkers vs chess. You can develop widely different skill sets in these games.
Basketball is soccer/hockey on speed. The games are a progression of incremental advantage. Each goal scored is another adrenaline shot for the fans. It's a long chain of dopamine hits. It allows for momentum shifts.
It's no wonder then that the majority of athletic talent in the US is funneled into one of three sports in the US: football , baseball and basketball.
The big conundrum is: Why is hockey so much more popular than soccer in America? I think it's because it's a condensed arena, faster game play and has lots of aggressive plays. Whatever the answer may be, I think it will prove key in answering why soccer just hasn't caught on professionally in the US.
I don't hate soccer. I'm definitely going to be watching some world cup games. If I had a magic wand, I would implement the promotion/relegation system for every major league sport in the US. Let the owners take a haircut if they have bad teams! I think it's an excellent system which really make the owners have some skin in the game.
I just don't think soccer is compelling enough of a game to draw eyeballs away from the big three.
Nostalgia aside... these things aren't really that great and are overpriced for what they are. TI sustains itself on basically extorting high schools and colleges to use that.. because most of the teachers just used these.
I'm not sure such a device really improved any understanding of the underlying mathematics that I was taught. In fact, in more advanced mathematics these machines can't even keep up.
I also reduced the use of those phrases, but more because they don't do much other than making the text longer. Except for things like "in my experience" or "as I understand" to signal that they're not meant as factual statements.
Computing has made intimate sexual relationships worse.
Dating apps are skewed: men receive little attention while women have an overwhelming amount of attention.
Porn satisfies our most base sexual functions while abandoning truly intimate connections.
The ultimate goal of sexual unions has been demonized and turned into something to avoid. That being children. After school specials since the 80s have made pregnancy a horror to avoid instead of a joy to grasp.
AI is just the latest iteration of technology increasing the divide between the sexes.
The more complete version of this line of reasoning is (which I've seen more than once, but no links to hand, sorry) is:
After solidly internalizing the messaging of "teen pregnancy is the worst thing ever" & "sex leads to teen pregnancy", there's no "switch" to make those thought patterns disappear without a trace at the point at which it's "ok" (by whatever metric is relevant to the individual) to participate in sex, child-rearing, etc. So individuals find themselves dealing with long-term guilt at having sex and/or aversion to having children, neither of which is "rational" according to their values but which nonetheless is real and affects their behavior.
> After school specials since the 80s have made pregnancy a horror to avoid instead of a joy to grasp.
Pregnancy can be employment-disrupting, and a horror if you're not financially ready to raise a child. Teen pregnancy can end one's future, one's educational and career prospects, before it even begins. The steady and nearly-uninterrupted decline in teen pregnancy from its peak in the early 90s is an absolute miracle of sex education.
The birth rate for women 20-24 was cut in half from 2005 to 2023, and the birth rate for teens under 20 dropped by 2/3s[1], which is frankly amazing progress.
Somewhat off topic for the thread, but I would love more kids book recommendations for expanding their mental model of the world if we can keep them coming…
It might have been more like C&H or Far Side at one time, but by the time of the 80s when I first started reading the funny pages, Peanuts was just another mundane strip.
The spaceship beaming people up in Defender always looked like it's proportions were off. As a kid, I remember seeing the spaceship and thinking it looked like a metal glove.
Better would be a docker container for an IRC server. Something using a modern approach where you could have link attachments, replies for message threads etc. An IRC slack alternative.
The real question is: Why isn't soccer more popular in the US?
Soccer is a very wide game. It's easy to understand and easy to start playing. Don't touch the ball with your hands and kick the ball into the goal. It's easy enough that six year olds with coed teams can start playing and have fun. It explains the huge youth participation in the US.
Soccer, however, lacks depth. Games likes baseball and football have deep strategy and specialization that soccer/basketball/hockey just can't match. It's checkers vs chess. You can develop widely different skill sets in these games.
Basketball is soccer/hockey on speed. The games are a progression of incremental advantage. Each goal scored is another adrenaline shot for the fans. It's a long chain of dopamine hits. It allows for momentum shifts.
It's no wonder then that the majority of athletic talent in the US is funneled into one of three sports in the US: football , baseball and basketball.
The big conundrum is: Why is hockey so much more popular than soccer in America? I think it's because it's a condensed arena, faster game play and has lots of aggressive plays. Whatever the answer may be, I think it will prove key in answering why soccer just hasn't caught on professionally in the US.
I don't hate soccer. I'm definitely going to be watching some world cup games. If I had a magic wand, I would implement the promotion/relegation system for every major league sport in the US. Let the owners take a haircut if they have bad teams! I think it's an excellent system which really make the owners have some skin in the game.
I just don't think soccer is compelling enough of a game to draw eyeballs away from the big three.
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