No football, more futball!

WilyBadger

I'm an American, yet I rather like soccer. I'm pleased as punch that my old hometown is about to have their offical MLS team, the Seattle Sounders FC! Now if only my current hometown, Phoenix, could have their own, I'd be sitting pretty.

But to most Americans, soccer is something that happens to other people. So here's my question.

How would it be possible to twist the timeline in such a way that American football is about as popular in the USA as soccer is in OTL, but soccer is as popular here as it is in the rest of the world?
 

Youdontwanttoknow

Easily done. As American football is just a deviation to the great game of Rugby Union, just have less of a change on the rules and/or no change to Rugby Union (see the Rugby Union disputes and the formation of Rugby League as an example) thus making American football duller (to a non-American its already dull enough)

Duller American football and a couple of high-profile rich buisness-like men supporting soccer should do the trick nicely!
 

WilyBadger

Youdontwanttoknow said:
Easily done. As American football is just a deviation to the great game of Rugby Union, just have less of a change on the rules and/or no change to Rugby Union (see the Rugby Union disputes and the formation of Rugby League as an example) thus making American football duller (to a non-American its already dull enough)

Duller American football and a couple of high-profile rich buisness-like men supporting soccer should do the trick nicely!
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Ha. I'm an American and find it incredibly dull. Two minutes of standing around. 10 seconds of action. Three minutes of figuring out what just happened. Repeat.
 

Hannibal.Caesar

WilyBadger said:
Ha. I'm an American and find it incredibly dull. Two minutes of standing around. 10 seconds of action. Three minutes of figuring out what just happened. Repeat.
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Amen to that, brother. I'd love to have soccer be more popular in the States. Of course, it would be then necessary for St. Louis to have a team ASAP... :D
 

kojak

So what you're asking us to do is make football the dominant sport in the United States and American football the dominant sport in the rest of the world?

That's an ASB if I ever saw one. I'm scratching my head trying to even begin to figure out how this can be done plausibly.
 

mishery

WilyBadger said:
How would it be possible to twist the timeline in such a way that American football is about as popular in the USA as soccer is in OTL, but soccer is as popular here as it is in the rest of the world?
Click to expand...

Keep it stuck as a university game. Have soccer replace baseball as the game kids played in the park, on the street etc. You could have the various different colleges coming up with different rules so end up with several variants of American football varying from say from one very similar to rugby union and one more similar to the current game. I suspect though, the US would have always wanted games that it could claim as its own.
 

mishery

Youdontwanttoknow said:
Easily done. As American football is just a deviation to the great game of Rugby Union, just have less of a change on the rules and/or no change to Rugby Union (see the Rugby Union disputes and the formation of Rugby League as an example) thus making American football duller (to a non-American its already dull enough)

Duller American football and a couple of high-profile rich buisness-like men supporting soccer should do the trick nicely!
Click to expand...

Dull - Rugby union - a couple of seconds of action then a lineout then an infringement so penalty kicked to touch so another lineout out, scrum, scrum collapses another penalty, kicked to touch a couple of seconds of action, infringement at the ruck, another penalty, kicked to touch, lineout etc. Dull. 80 minute game with 33 minutes of ball in play time. Average of 37 lineouts, 15 scrums and 12 penalties per game (IRB figures). So very little actual action.

The reason football is the world's game is simply it is the best game, simple rules but endless tactical variation, amazing skills and you don't need to fit a particular physical frame to play and you can play it almost anywhere. It's about gambling your time on entertainment and as far as sports go, your best return is football. I grew up playing and watching rugby union but saw the light. Rugby league is better than rugby union but still falls well short of football.
 

Marius

The reason soccer is so popular is because its a simple game, all you need is a ball, and four jerseys or something similar to act as goal posts, and the rules are all relatively straight forward.

Personally cricket and rugby union are my favourite sports, but sometimes I enjoy watching the odd football game.
 

Tyr

American football's main routes come from the American universities right?
Could it not become seen as a game purely for the upper classes- nothing for the common man to bother with?
 

mishery

That is what I was suggesting above. Perhaps with addition that different universities adopt different rules. Perhaps as many of the Ivy League folk will go on to positions of power they might promote the game, so perhaps you end up with a variety of footballs with each variety localised at least initially in the area of a particular university. Standford would play the football perhaps that was played at Cornell as that is where many of its initial set of academics came from and so on for other universities.
 

Tocomocho

I don't have much idea in this subject, I must admit... but I remember reading something* about how the sports development in 19th century USA was mostly a New England and near regions thing, and how the people promoted more "American" sports there with the idea of not having "British" sports taking root there instead. It was a nationalist anti-British decision, much like those changes in grammar and spelling around the same time...

Thus, baseball was particularly encouraged to the detriment of cricket, which had been quite popular in the States around 1800, actually. American football might have been encouraged in the same way to diminish the implantation of both rugby and later European football at a time when the British Empire was introducing it all over the world.

Then, assuming this idea is correct, the way to make European football (sorry, I can't type that crappy word beginning with 'S') more popular in the US would be either to make the average American less hostile to Britain with an earlier British-American approach (no 1812 war? weaker Victorian Britain?) or to have that New England movement expanding less. This case could work in a less united States. Either becuse they never stay together, or because there is not a civil war and the union remains more loose, or because there is a Confederate victory. In fact, Turtledove has baseball as a marginal sport from New England only in TL-191. Maybe in that scenario football could take over North America too, or at least in the strongly British alligned Confederacy.

*I think the first time was in an article of S. J. Gould. Though that doesn't explain why football isn't anything popular in Canada either...
 

WilyBadger

kojack said:
So what you're asking us to do is make football the dominant sport in the United States and American football the dominant sport in the rest of the world?

That's an ASB if I ever saw one. I'm scratching my head trying to even begin to figure out how this can be done plausibly.
Click to expand...

No, no. The idea was to have American football be a marginalized sport just about everywhere with soccer being as popular in the US as football is in our timeline.
 

Hannibal.Caesar

Leej said:
American football's main routes come from the American universities right?
Could it not become seen as a game purely for the upper classes- nothing for the common man to bother with?
Click to expand...

Such a POD would become difficult once public universities begin to become common in the US. With the spread of public universities, it would be difficult to contain the rise of American football. Like Leej said, we'd need to have American football have an elitist air about it so the average person would compare it to polo or something.
 

bekosh

To make this work, you need to make football duller than soccer and I just don't see how you could possibly do that. :p

C'mon what could be more boring than 60 minutes of watching a ball get kicked around with nobody scoring? And then end the game with a tie? WTH! :mad: At least finish the game!
 

Hannibal.Caesar

bekosh said:
Yes that would be worse. Warn me if you ever find a sport like that.
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An average soccer/football game is 90 minutes long. :rolleyes:

I'm an American and I find American football boring as all hell. Hike, run/throw, fall down, wait five minutes, wash and repeat. Yawn.
 

bekosh

Hannibal.Caesar said:
An average soccer/football game is 90 minutes long. :rolleyes:

I'm an American and I find American football boring as all hell. Hike, run/throw, fall down, wait five minutes, wash and repeat. Yawn.
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Oh.:eek: My bad.
In my defense, the last time I paid attention to a soccer game was 1985.:eek:

My preferance in sports are 1)Ice Hockey. Go Admirals! 2)Football. Go Packers!

Back on topic. For marginalizing the sport, perhaps the son of a well known family is severly injured or even killed in the course of a game. The public ends up with the impression that it is a dangerous and violent game and it's popularity plumets.
 
Tucker Dwynn

Tucker Dwynn

WilyBadger said:
I'm an American, yet I rather like soccer. I'm pleased as punch that my old hometown is about to have their offical MLS team, the Seattle Sounders FC! Now if only my current hometown, Phoenix, could have their own, I'd be sitting pretty.

But to most Americans, soccer is something that happens to other people. So here's my question.

How would it be possible to twist the timeline in such a way that American football is about as popular in the USA as soccer is in OTL, but soccer is as popular here as it is in the rest of the world?
Click to expand...

I just got my Sounders FC Season tickets... do you?
 
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