How come soccer and tennis never caught on in the states? Also why hasn't there been an NFL team vs a Soccer Team and vice versa. Just to prove which is the better sport? Details inside.
2h 38m ago by lemmy.world/u/Patnou in nostupidquestions
We take the NFL team put them in futbol uniforms and they do their best at soccer to see who is better at the sport best 3 out of 5. Then we take the soccer team put them in football (NFL) gear and play the best the states got in the NFL? That way we can finally put to rest which is the better sport. Plus this would attract a shitload of fans of each sport and each team only gets 1 month to train. Whoever comes out best the the US will concede soccer is the hardest and best sport. If the soccer team win then it will truley show which is real football
I'm not dogging on soccer players at all, takes some real stamina and conditioning to do what they do... but if you put them on the field with even the worst NFL team, someone is gonna get hurt. Most people don't realize just how powerful even the average NFL player is... then you put them up against someone like Ray Lewis (picking retired player to avoid favorites) it's going to end bad.
To put it in simpler terms, it's like asking why we don't see which boat does better in the Indy 500?
Edit: I missed the second half of your question, but I also believe most NFL athletes would have the conditioning and stamina to at the very least compete in a soccer match.
I agree someone is going to get hurt but nfl players on average are going to get gassed long before a soccer player.
Right, I agree. Conditioning is wildly different in both sports. 4 seconds of sprinting and physical impact 90-120 times versus 90+ minutes of jogging and sprinting is no comparison.
NFL athletes would have the conditioning and stamina to at the very least compete in a soccer match
A few might not be utterly exhausted and wishing for death, but running around attempting to play soccer for ninety minutes is not the same as succeeding. Even Wide Receivers and Defensive Backs with some soccer experience aren't going to hang with any professional team; that's just not what they train for. Then there's the skill issue. It would be like asking which Indy car would do better in the America's Cup. ;-)
Oh yeah, sorry, I didn't fully flesh out that thought, was cooking dinner.
You're right, obviously... but by "compete" I simply meant it would go exponentially better than the other way around.
Poor choice of words on my part, apologies.
Yeah, no worries. One of the beauties of soccer is that playing it is not hard, but playing it competently is, and playing it at a high level is insanely difficult.
Don't get me wrong though, in spite of the perfectly good reasons not to be, I still love American football, and you're right that the other way around would be a literal bloodbath.
I was one of the football players who would've been hating life, if not outright died. That being said, I did enjoy going out and playing a bit of soccer just for the cardio. Reminds me of a line I heard long ago... "Play away...just remember, even boys can play."
But I'm kind of enamored by this thought experiement... what if we took both teams and put them in a third arena... say track and field or something? Should be a fair way to accurately test athleticism without favoring either side in overall scoring. Sure, certain events would favor certain builds better...but overall I think it could balance fairly well.
Well, I'd say that tennis did catch on. Ashe, McEnroe, Agassi, Sampras, the Williams sisters, Billie Jean King, Evert; they all had major followings as pros. It's also a very popular sport to play at all levels of skill. It does have ups and downs, but in terms of pros, it's a pretty consistent sport to be able to make a living at, which isn't true of very many single player sports that aren't fighting.
Soccer, yeah, it's way behind in terms of draw. There's a shit ton of opinions about why that is, but I've never really put any time into considering them because I'm not a team sports guy at all, and soccer/futbol is low on the list of what I'll sit and watch for any period of time even when I'm in that mood.
As far as the thought experiment of pitting the players against each other, you'd run into three conflicting training and selection paradigms. I dunno if you've ever played both, but holy fuck do they take different bodies to do well at.
Even a running back or wide receiver is going to out mass most Soccer players, and most Soccer players would have trouble with the extra gear even if they didn't get tackled. So you run into each sport being dominated by people that are physically less capable at the other one at pro levels. At amateur levels, that isn't as drastic, but you'd see the players from the other sport gassing out early.
Besides, the argument about which sport is "better" has nothing to do with the players. They're all peak level athletes in the pros, so that's not relevant. People will argue about it, but people are mostly idiots that will argue whether vanilla is better than chocolate just because they think whatever opinion they hold is superior even when there's no competition in the first place (they're entirely different things, not opposites).
Tennis has kind of a snotty reputation besides being slow and boring. Surprises me that it's still fairly popular. Ended up in Palm Springs the night before a big tennis tournament and almost had to drive on to LA. Everything was booked. Pickleball is crowding tennis but not getting rid of it. Ironically, if I make it through the US Open Pickleball lottery, I would have to play Ivan Lendl...the tennis player.
I hear you, however I also want to deliberately misinterpret part of your statement. https://tennisone.tennisplayer.net/club/lessons/brown/speed/depth.phpTennis as far as the speed of the ball is concerned is one of the fastest ball sports around, with professionals serving over 100+mph serves.
The NFL team would be miserable and probably have soft-tissue injuries, and eventually would not be able to stop the soccer players from navigating around them like cones, assuming they ever could. Assuming the soccer players could learn the byzantine rulebook in a reasonable timeframe, they would be instantly broken into little pieces and do nothing of note. No one would enjoy either contest, and we would learn nothing.
As for why they didn't catch on, first I'm not so sure they didn't, as tennis in particular has always had its place in the American culture, though its association with the "country club" class may have limited its ceiling. American soccer has its issues, and it is not pressuring the "traditional" American team sports, but attendances are healthy, sponsorships are good, and quality of play is decent, with a starting 11 being roughly comparable to the bottom half of the English second division. Roster rules would mean an MLS club would quickly get ground into dirt in that English second division, but matchday 1 might be pretty competitive. Taking your question more generously, though, competition from baseball, followed by organizational disarray, followed by competition from college gridiron football, followed by competition from professional gridiron football, accompanied by the "not invented here" syndrome, left it seen as a sport for immigrants and then as a safe yet cheap option for suburban children. Meanwhile ice hockey and basketball were also carving out their markets.
Televised World Cups and Pele started to erode that some, but more organizational disarray left the country without a proper professional league from 1984 until 1995, and when it was restarted it was intentionally done in a manner to control costs and favor management, which it ironically was able to do because it could always argue the players could seek employment in other countries.
Roster rules would mean an MLS club would quickly get ground into dirt in that English second division, but matchday 1 might be pretty competitive.
Interesting, what are those roster rules?
There are so many. Some highlights though:
- There’s a salary cap of $6.5M, which is actually more “League One” than Championship, but there are loopholes to exploit (Beckham rule and its offspring most prominent among them), and MLS is full of Americans and Western Hemisphere players who are good but would never get UK work permits so their wages are a bit depressed compared to second and third tier British players.
- Maximum senior roster of 30 players, of which 10 are (nominally) supposed to be on the equivalent of 1800 pounds/week. Exceptions here as well, but in broad strokes the bottom of the roster is WAAAY cheaper than even the middle.
- Several of them are supposed to be 24 or younger, further limiting the pool.
- There is an internal market to trade them around, but teams can only have an average of 8 non-domestic players. Rules slightly vary for the US teams versus Canadian.
- The league is legally one business, and holds all contracts. The “owners” are investors in the league who have a contractual agreement to manage a team. It happens much less often than it used to, but you occasionally see things that appear to be league office meddling in player movement.
Can't really speak to tennis, but the other stuff probably because watching a team score 0 points is kinda lame.
It starts young. I feel like only girls played soccer and tennis growing up lol. Boys definitely wanted to play football cuz it was “cooler.” And it WAS seen as the cooler sport lol always has been