Stuff like this makes me proud to be an American, where soccer is totally ignored; instead we thoroughly enjoy successful sports where virtually everyone cheats, like baseball
Burn it to the ground.
However, the sport itself has nothing todo with the bigger picture here. It just so happens that it's the biggest sport in the world, hence worth so much money to $REGIME who will do anything they can to capitalise.
But it's the culture around the sport in the UK, and greater Europe, that's awful. Remember hooligan "firms" in the 1990s? Those things don't happen in a vacuum. Chiefly, the football culture in the UK is inextricably tied to the entrenched class system, in the worst ways, unfortunately - and I haven't seen the Premier League's televised pundits ever advise their fans to maybe, perhaps, actually be good ambassadors for the sport to the rest of us.
(Okay, Michael Owen is an exception - my perception is the rest are like Eric Cantona: officially reprimanded, but we can tell people are lapping up his then abhorrent personal conduct. The same way people support Trump, I suppose).
FIFA aren't running a tight-ship from the top. The tiers under them aren't coming close, and the conceptual levels below are only worse.
Or like yeah there are some example of players that were violent and crazy, as you can find in any place with a number of humans doing it, I'd say HSBC was laudering cartels money and funding terrorist, all bankers are criminals?
Actually one can argue that the rules in football haven't kept up with the evolution of humans. When they defined the size of a goal, the average adult male was a full 10 cm shorter than they are today. People are running faster and jumping higher.
The sport would be a lot more exciting if you increased the physical dimensions of goals and pitches, so you would have 10 goals in an average game instead of 0 to 3.
10 goals has never been an average, to reach that, the goals should be twice the size at least.
I don't thing the size of the goal or people getting taller / faster is the reason we don't see many scoring. A big problem for me is the amount of downtime and the amount of foulplaying. Schwalbes are a real skill. Players fall to the ground way too quickly.
Smaller field would make things more interesting.
Do note soccer is currently tremendously exciting for millions of fans worldwide. I understand you mean well, and everyone is free to suggest changes (some of them good), but the sport right now is very exciting for huge numbers of people.
Informally it's a tremendously easy and fun game to pick up. Any kid with a foot ball and some room can play with their friends. It's even how some players start.
I don't think excitement is the biggest issue with football. The biggest issues are probably corruption in the business organizations around it, violence due to hooligans, etc.
I've never met a football fan in my life that complains about there not being 'enough goals'.
What an american take that is.
In high scoring games, the best team on the day tends to win.
In low scoring games, there are more upsets, as a single moment can have a greater impact.
Therefore even if your team is objectively worse, you go to the game with some hope in your heart.
Making football into a high scoring game could ruin it.
I can easily see it being a class-related thing in the UK, but the wealthy and cultured are very much into football in, say, Italy and Germany.
I'm very glad that kind of sports-violence culture isn't a worldwide thing, and it makes me sad that the same sport can be innocent enough to be associated with suburban "soccer moms" in one place, while celebrating the wrong team can get you killed in another place.
I have a book that convincingly makes the case that physical exercise, sports, is a favorite tool of the fascist. To my knowledge, it's never translated from Dutch, but I think there must be research on this in English as well.
There is a lot to take away from it, simple things like organisation and schedule keeping to team building, sportsmanship and determination.
Cold winter morning / evenings on the pitch or at the lake made me a better person im sure.
I had to play football at the extremely low ranking state school I went to and found the whole experience utterly miserable. My son attended a public school and played rugby there and I enjoyed watching him play and he seemed to get a lot out of it, while the on the pitch experience was far rougher than football the culture around the game seemed far more civilised. Of course that could just be the context of the different type of school but I thought it went deeper than that.
Edit: A nice touch at our school PE department was that they were mostly ex Paras and they seemed to treat us more like recruits than schoolkids. There was one ex Royal Marine who while working us just as hard was at least good natured about it, whereas the others seemed to be in a state of continual anger.
In Argentina at least, football is linked to the people, low and upper class; it's a "popular" sport. In contrast, Rugby is linked to the elite; mostly well to do spoiled kids (in the public perception, at least). There were a couple of beatings/murders linked to spoiled rich kids who were Rugby players, enough that in our public perception today a Rugby player is definitely not considered a "gentleman" but a rich brat potentially prone to violence.
However, I'd draw the comparison between a large crowd of rugby supporters leaving a match and a similar sized crowd of football supporters. I used to live near the Easter Road football ground in Edinburgh and that was pretty unpleasant and threatening on match days (particularly when Glasgow Rangers were playing...). I've never encountered the same level of sheer nastiness from a rugby crowd (and Edinburgh gets a lot of them) as from football crowd.
I remember once getting the last train from Glasgow to Edinburgh the day of an Old Firm match - one set of supporters at one end of the carriage, the other set of supporters at the other end and a few of us non-combatants sitting in the middle desperately trying to pretend that nothing was happening. That was fun.
NB Scotland does have a weird sectarian angle to football which doesn't help - although I don't think this is nearly as bad as it used to be.
I was thinking more about the actual players. It's also not a real statistic, just public perception: that Rugby players are spoiled rich kids prone to beating up other kids if they don't like the color of their skin.
It was just a bit sad to read, as it sounds exactly like something my grandfather would say. He's in his mid-to-late 70s now and still eaten up by things that happened in his childhood and early 20s (things that plenty of other people go through and don't allow to destroy their entire life).
His inability to deal with it in a healthy way has made the last 5 decades of his life miserable, and it kills me to see another person go through this as well.
I understand this is not a simple task for the average Aspie, but please try to understand what happened and integrate it into your outlook in a way that allows you to function as a healthy adult.
That being said football is a source of joy, entertainment, and camaraderie to hundreds of millions of people around the planet. There's really no "lack of any redeeming values in football". You should perhaps come to a grassroots football match, away from the multi-billion dollar dirty business the sport at a highest level has become, to see that.
(I don't like football either; neither watching nor playing, but I don't mind if other people engage in it.)
It wouldn’t surprise me if the USA men’s team would become world champion within a few decades. The sport is growing rapidly in Spanish-speaking areas, Spanish-speakers are the fastest growing linguistic group in the United States, the country is sport-minded, and the USA men’s team already is ranked 11th in the world (https://www.fifa.com/fifa-world-ranking/men?dateId=id13505) (ahead of Germany!)
The former seems reasonably plausible, if the trends you mention hold true.
- Iceland (population 350,000 or so) reached the quarter finals of the European championships, a tournament with, probably, stronger teams in the finals than the world championships. Only 13 teams from Europe can qualify for the latter. Looking at the world rankings, all of those are in the top 20 of the world, and, for example, Serbia, at 23 wouldn’t make it to the final 32.
- South Korea ended fourth at the world’s, mostly by wanting it more.
I don’t see why the USA wouldn’t be able to better than those, certainly if they get a bit of luck on their side.
Remember, Greece won Euro 2004 but have struggled since, often not even qualifying. Greece are not a good team. Period. By the same token, just because the Netherlands failed to qualify once or because Germany were knocked out in the first round of a world cup, that does not make either a weak team - they just had an off-day.
All said, i agree with the original point - i won't be surprised if the USA men's football team is a force to reckon with in the next decade. Same goes for the Canadian men's team.
The Greek team from today and from 2004 do not share a single member, do they?
Of course, you could argue that some institutional factors persist?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_women%27s_nati...
That’s reflected in the fact that, currently, 8 of the top 10 countries are from Europe (the other two are the usual suspects Brazil and Argentina)
One difference is that, unlike in chess, there still are many uneven matches. If you’re Liechtenstein, Andorra, or Gibraltar, for example, you’ll play lots of qualifiers against Spain, France, Germany, and the like (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Nations_League corrects that a bit, giving such teams much better chances to tie or even win games). You don’t see such things in chess.
I remember both John Oliver and South Park covered these topics.
Not trying to switch topics or go whataboutism but I'm genuinely concerned about the massive corruption and exploitation around the modern sports industry that's somehow become acceptable nowadays, with FIFA being the richest and most corrupt non profit in the world.
This current situation reminds me of the "bread and games" popularity near the fall of the Roman empire.
(Of course, where they got that wealth is another question.)