Football ("soccer") is a sign of U.S.A.’s moral decay

Soccer is a sign of the USA's moral decay, but two centuries of genocide, war crimes, terrorism, plundering others wealth, torture, rape, ..., well not so much.

Then how come indoor lacrosse never made it? Scores were 15-13 almost every time !

Diving (flopping?) never really existed in the English game, until players from the Continent started arriving.
British refs fell for it hook, line and sinker for a while, until replays on TV showed how everyone was being conned.
The first ever dive that hit the headlines was by a German Tottenham player in about the early nineties. Replays showed no contact, but he went down like a sack of bricks.
The British Press picked up on it, and the player was ridiculed everywhere he went for the rest of that season. In fact, you mention his name to any football fan in England over the age of thirty, and they will say that he was an expert diver first, and a good footballer second.
Diving is still very much disliked in Britain, and nearly every new footballer coming over from abroad soon gets to realise that their life will be made hell if they play silly buggers on the pitch.

Oh, the German footballer who showed the world how to dive?

Jurgen Klinsmann, now Coach of the USA team. A cheat, through and through.

It was normal for fans to take number cards when he was playing, and when he went down, they all held them up like the judges do in figure skating.
Personally, even though the man was a good footballer, I wouldn't give him house room as he is one of the first real cheats to do this stuff in football. He has a lot to answer for.

Here he is during a 90's World Cup Match. The defender hardly touches him, but not only does he do a leapimg dive, when he hits the ground he waits a split second and then does a breakdance move, just for extra effect.

The defender was sent off by the totally hoodwinked referee.

Ah, so it's all fairly recent. Am starting to change my mind..

The thing I see (in my reading) is that football is a fast game that would change seemingly for the worse if if kept slowing down - or that seems to be the general referee take in this WC. They can give yellow cards for flops, but there seems a counter effort to not be too card-happy, so they tend to get waves instead, at least sometimes.

Competitive ball games are a wasteful use of futility,
unless u bet on them, but its faster n easier to flip a coin.

Such sports as SCUBA Diving, hunting, fishing, gunnery practice
or archery have some value to them.





David

The US is, just like any other nation, under pressure from the forces of globalisation, and football is the most global sport there is. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that football is growing in the US...

there are drivers of soccer in the US that are not related to globalization. One reason youth soccer is popular is that it lacks violence. Another is that it is cheap to play, another is that it has a lot of running of american fat kids, another is that parents love that girls and boys can play together and that girls get a chance to be as good as the boys at a sport.

You are right that there could be many factors, and your points may explain why parents push their kids to play soccer but not why the kids want to play it. They want to play it because they were prompted to play it by their parents perhaps, but also because it's in fashion. Similarly, why are adults playing it and watching the games?... Probably not because they had a soccer mom. I would venture that emigration (one of the 'forces' of globalisation), travels abroad, exposure to internet, etc. also played a role in making the US sport scene a little less parochial and more global.

Goaaaaaaal! France 1, Nigeria 0.

You should add internet trolling.

But ! 2:0

2 mn to go... this one is done. 3 more to go... :-)

I actually dont know that adults play it much. Our local sports complex has 5 baseball fields and 5 soccer fields and the soccer fields are much less used. A lot of the teams I do see on them seem to be mostly of mexicans.

On the soccer fields people are actually moving, you know, playing, while on the baseball fields everyone is asleep.

Some of those latinos might have the US nationality though. This article (from 2010) reports slow but steady growth in adult soccer practice, and mentions WCs but also cable/satellite TV growth as factors:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/24/sports/soccer/24soccer.html

Yeah, the diving sucks. I'm willing to blame the continental Europeans as well.

I'm not sure what you'd change your mind about.

I submit adults in the US play more soccer than they play football or baseball.

could be. here is an article about it being popular in NYC. Does not seem to be the case where I live though.

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20120923/MEDIA_ENTERTAINMENT/309239979/soccer-is-the-new-golf#

France looked awesome in beating Nigeria. A TV expert was a bit underwhelmed, saying that Germany will beat France.