What if the Vikings were Vikings FC?

That comparison is just sooooooo wrong.

Sure, lots of people played soccer when they were kids, but why isn’t it more popular?

One word: BORING

Soccer and golf are probably the two most boring sports to watch, even if people say they like to play. People in the USA don’t want to watch a game where a bunch of guys kick a ball for 60 minutes and finish with a score of 1-0. They want hitting, they want excitement, they want to see scoring (since that defines success).

Is the NFL perfect? No. Needs some changes or it will run down in a couple of decades. The players have gotten too big, too fast, too well padded. Makes injuries not just more common, but more serious. Reduce the padding and you’ll see less hits that cause injuries, because quite honestly with all the pads you can hit a guy, hurt a guy, and never even feel it yourself. There’s little negative feedback.

You should watch a game of Australian Rules Football sometime. That’s a fun game to watch.

NOTE: not hating on soccer. It takes skill and fitness way beyond my capability to play. Just stating the “why” it’s not as popular as Football.

Surely?

Good luck on Saturday night btw – you’re gonna need it! I’m gonna be watching the game from here (if there’s any room to move): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/10256435.stm

There is a lot of skill required. The problem is the field is to big. Way to much back & forth.
I’ve watched for ten minutes at a time without any threat of a score whatsoever. 3,4,5, good passes & then it gets broken up. Then it’s the same thing back the other way.

WARNING: The following article contains only PURE FACTS, thoroughly researched by an individual of requisite mental capacity. You will not, at any juncture, find anything pertaining to blind prejudice, entrenched naivety or subjective opinion:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123680101041299201.html

One of the less offensive excerpts, but one that shows just enough ignorance for a bit of a chuckle: “…and the margins of victory are almost always too narrow to afford any gloating”

Surely it’s not too hard to research this stuff, you know, as a journalistic responsibility (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Firm):

“The Old Firm rivalry fuels many assaults on Old Firm Derby days, and some deaths in the past have been directly related to the aftermath of Old Firm matches. An activist group that monitors sectarian activity in Glasgow has reported that on Old Firm weekends, admissions to hospital emergency rooms increase ninefold over normal levels.”

Soccer has a nasty tendency of taking gloating ‘way’ too far. I’m not condoning this behaviour whatsoever, but simply using it to illustrate the crushing stupidity of the guy who wrote that WSJ article.

Mnnneh. :(

Erm…I read it at work, whilst in an already bad mood. If it is parody then I guess I should applaud it – satire only works when the majority of people don’t realise it’s satire.

egg —→ face

:)

I have an odd relationship with Soccer – I love the sport and really enjoy watching it (in fact, I’m going off out to buy pizza for when some friends come over tonight to watch it, once I’ve finished this post), but the fans really irritate me. It might have something to do that my local clubs are Crystal Palace and Chelsea, but I just find them impossible to talk to about a game. Boorish and moronic if they win, hateful and biased if they lose, they get right on my nerves. I suspect that if I lived in some parts of the US, I’d have the same problem with football!!

Tonight’s game should be interesting, the US team have excellent chemistry (particularly their movement off the ball) and great athletes, but they don’t have that game changer player (in my opinion) of someone like Rooney (or Joe Cole if he plays in the middle of the pitch). My feeling is that the US will dominate position (~55% to England’s 45%), but lose 2-1 to a scrappy goal, and a goal from nowhere. Not hating on the US, just how I think the match will go. (By the Way, you remember what I said about Palace and Chelsea fans being boorish and moronic, that’s nothing on how the same imbeciles act when England win. I want to see England win the cup… but I really don’t want to see the fans if we do…)

Was pleased to see a mention of Matt LeTissier above – He is the definition of a game changing player, but his career finished (due to old age) before the premier league started to get coverage in the States. This is the best quality video I found on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-cK0nShbh8&feature=related
The commentary over the top is in Spanish, but at least the footage is watch-able. Most of the videos of him are really grainy and jumpy. Watch to the end for a few other special strikes

When people watch soccer, do they watch the player with the ball? This was something I realised a while ago, I glance at the ball player, but mostly look to see what is happening around him – who is closing him down, who is moving in to space, who is marking the moving players. The person above who said that Football is much more tactical above is right on a team level, but wrong on an individual level. Soccer offers much more scope for players to freelance (particularly in Holland’s “Total Football” era), whilst an NFL player for the most part has a clearly defined role on any given play. I love both sports (and will be taking photos of my local American Football team the “London Cobras” when we play on Sunday afternoon), but for different reasons. Soccer has amazing fluidity, whilst football has these intense tactical battles and brutal hits.

(and to go really off topic, I’d say Cricket is a great sport, but you need a reason to get in to it. My family are cricket mad, mostly hailing from Kent, but if I was foreign or grew up in a house that didn’t like the sport, I would miss so many of the games subtleties – a maiden over (i.e. the bowler bowls his 6 balls and the batsman fails to score on any of them) at the start of a one day game or 20-20 match is an amazing achievement, but it looks like nothing has happened. It’s only when you know that the other team would be looking to score 10-20 runs at that stage of the match that you appreciate how well the bowler has done. It’s kind of like appreciating the stops in a Football match where if you know the game, you can see the personnel changing or get why a timeout has been called. If you don’t, it’s another pause in a game that already has lots of small stops)