Americans and Sports


Austin, Texas. Population around 900k. No NFL, NBA, NFL or NHL team. Only just getting a MLS team. College football stadium has an official 100k capacity, soon to be bumped to 112k.

Think something like 22 states (including Hawaii and Alaska in that) don't have an NFL team. It's likely why franchising and closed systems work for America. NFL is likely the peak money maker as they play the fewest games. Many neutrals can and will watch a game. Not many neutrals will watch MLB games as there's so many played in a season that you'll just about have time to watch your own team. Basketball might be a mix. Quite a lot more games than the NFL, but still half of what the MLB play so might get neutrals watching a big mid season match up.
 
Perfect.

This is the model isn't it.


Plus even if your team werent great in the NFL, you oculd have had a standout player in one position, and they could get chosen for a showcase game like the ProBowl, so you could still have a vested interest even beyond the season...
 
It's not very stressful to be an NFL fan. 16 games a year plus playoffs and for plenty of teams you know you're playing for a draft pick by Week 9. It's why we have to sit through months of pointless NFL Draft coverage at this time of the year. The desire for content far outweighs the actual on field action. Baseball is an incredible grind. 162 games and the average game length is over 3 hours. It's pretty much every day from April thru September and then the playoffs in October. It's not hard to see why today's short attention span American has made the NFL the #1 sport. It's still impressive that MLB attendances pre-Covid averaged around 30,000 per game. That's in the range of 65 million paid fans for the whole season. It remains very popular in old time baseball cities like New York, Chicago, Boston and St Louis and not so much in the south, even if most of the players are from warm weather states and Latin America where kids can play baseball outside for most of the year.

I love old statistical history like the wonderful TheStatCat site. Baseball has an incredible recorded history and you can find full player stats and game history going back to the 1880's. It took decades for the NFL and especially professional basketball to gain legitimacy. The NBA didn't even start until 1946. If you watch clips from an old football/basketball/hockey game from 1950 it looks wildly old and outdated compared to the current game, but baseball is just about the same.

I should also clarify as an American that I hate everything about the Super League. Every bit of why football is interesting is promotion/relegation and the novelty of the Champions League giving us just a handful of meaningful continental matches a season that are worth watching. I'm just glad when I really discovered the Premier League via my dial-up modem at age 20 that I was such a masochist that I was attracted to a relegation bound team in a city I'd never heard of because I first saw a highlight of a match where they conceded a devastating late equalizer (f***ing Des Lyttle) to another shit team on a MOTD type show shown in the middle of the night on a sports cable channel. Something about the madness in the crowd in a very old stadium struck me. So back when there were no live PL matches to be seen in the USA and nobody here knew or cared who the fuck Manchester City or Chelsea were, I was wearing my collared Lambton's jersey top and living and dying waiting for score updates for a club not even in the PL anymore on sporting-life.com and the early RTG type boards. Everyone I knew had no choice but to know about Kevin Phillips and had to ask why our intramural indoor soccer team was named FTM. I've never been happier with that decision even as we prepare for the likelihood of another season in the 3rd division.
I love hearing about stories like this. Cheers, marra. As an aside, in my (not very well considered) opinion, anyone who proposes following an American model for pretty much anything you care to mention needs working on....
 
Some of our American based posters might be best placed to shed a bit more light on this, @burchmackem, @NYMackem, @njmackem etc...

With your various sports, franchises, conferences, teams moving across country etc - Do Americans actually get it? Are they just sports fans, or do they have supporters?

Take for instance when the Dodgers left Brooklyn - what the frig happened to their fans? Did they even have any? Were people upset?

More recently the Raiders have bounced from Oakland, to LA, back to Oakland, and now reside in a swanky new stadium in Las Vegas. This is a team with 3 Superbowls to it's name. Have all their fans bounced along with them? The ever faithful cross the Sierra Nevada every other week to cheer them on?

Do season ticket holders exist? Would Phase 3 ever be a thing?

Do grown men cry when success/abject failure rears it's head in the post-season?

Do fathers pass their loyalties onto their sons?

Are weekends completely ruined when their team loses?

Do they care?
Went to Boston and was in a pub when the Red Sox played. It was very much England and football. Different generations shouting at the telly was very much like here.
Dunno if that's typical if all teams or cities.
 
I suppose it makes sense for a bit of European tribalism to have carried over.


I used to wonder if Italian communities in the likes of NYC still followed football from 'the old country'.
I remember when Madonna first came into money she got her dad cable or satellite so he could watch Italian footy. AC Milan iirc. Guy Richie apparently was surprised at his and her Italian football knowledge during a WC.
American here. I agree that college football is the closest thing you'll find. Particularly in the South where schools like LSU (Louisiana State) and Georgia are significantly more popular than the Saints and Falcons. Alabama/Auburn are in a world of their own. I'd reckon if the stadium was large enough, they could have 200,000+ fans at every game. The people there are often not even alums of the school, but through family bonds or simple local tribalism live their entire sporting lives through the fortunes of their football team. In those parts, the schools have been around far longer than the NFL. Other than MLB which has a well established history as old as English football, college sports have been around much longer than the pro sports. Basketball has the same pull in Indiana, Kentucky and North Carolina but not really anywhere else. The NBA has won that battle since 1980.
One big reason it makes sense is that the players actively chose to attend the school. Leaving aside all of the sleaze that comes with recruiting 14-17 year old kids, it's reasonable to believe the guys you are cheering for want to be attending and representing your school. In American pro sports, you go where you are told via the draft until you qualify to be a free agent and even then the vast majority go to whoever offers the most money. Young players can get traded and have no say in the decision. Does some star athlete from Miami or LA really want to live in Detroit or Kansas City?
I'm well in to my 40s now so I can't speak for the current crop of kids, but I can definitely have any day of the week ruined by the baseball team I've supported my entire life (my day was in the shitter by noon yesterday, stupid early game) and most of my weekends since 1997 have been ruined by a club in a country I've only traveled to once in my life. But I know I'm a rare breed.
“....they call Alabama the Crimson Tide, call me Deacon Blue...”
Chicago White Sox. I grew up in the small part of the Chicago area considered to be White Sox territory and not Cubs territory. There are a lot of similarities both on and off the field between Newcastle-Sunderland and Cubs-White Sox (north side-south side). Or at least there were until the Cubs finally won the World Series in 2016. I hate them.
The White Sox were the lot who threw a game decades ago werent they? Decent Fillum about it.
 
Last edited:
Plus even if your team werent great in the NFL, you oculd have had a standout player in one position, and they could get chosen for a showcase game like the ProBowl, so you could still have a vested interest even beyond the season...
How awful.
It's not very stressful to be an NFL fan. 16 games a year plus playoffs and for plenty of teams you know you're playing for a draft pick by Week 9. It's why we have to sit through months of pointless NFL Draft coverage at this time of the year. The desire for content far outweighs the actual on field action. Baseball is an incredible grind. 162 games and the average game length is over 3 hours. It's pretty much every day from April thru September and then the playoffs in October. It's not hard to see why today's short attention span American has made the NFL the #1 sport. It's still impressive that MLB attendances pre-Covid averaged around 30,000 per game. That's in the range of 65 million paid fans for the whole season. It remains very popular in old time baseball cities like New York, Chicago, Boston and St Louis and not so much in the south, even if most of the players are from warm weather states and Latin America where kids can play baseball outside for most of the year.

I love old statistical history like the wonderful TheStatCat site. Baseball has an incredible recorded history and you can find full player stats and game history going back to the 1880's. It took decades for the NFL and especially professional basketball to gain legitimacy. The NBA didn't even start until 1946. If you watch clips from an old football/basketball/hockey game from 1950 it looks wildly old and outdated compared to the current game, but baseball is just about the same.

I should also clarify as an American that I hate everything about the Super League. Every bit of why football is interesting is promotion/relegation and the novelty of the Champions League giving us just a handful of meaningful continental matches a season that are worth watching. I'm just glad when I really discovered the Premier League via my dial-up modem at age 20 that I was such a masochist that I was attracted to a relegation bound team in a city I'd never heard of because I first saw a highlight of a match where they conceded a devastating late equalizer (f***ing Des Lyttle) to another shit team on a MOTD type show shown in the middle of the night on a sports cable channel. Something about the madness in the crowd in a very old stadium struck me. So back when there were no live PL matches to be seen in the USA and nobody here knew or cared who the fuck Manchester City or Chelsea were, I was wearing my collared Lambton's jersey top and living and dying waiting for score updates for a club not even in the PL anymore on sporting-life.com and the early RTG type boards. Everyone I knew had no choice but to know about Kevin Phillips and had to ask why our intramural indoor soccer team was named FTM. I've never been happier with that decision even as we prepare for the likelihood of another season in the 3rd division.
:lol: Aye, you're obviously nuts enough to be one of us. Class post marra.
 
Last edited:
I think there is a lot to learn from American sports.

They manage to make it so that any team can go from being the absolute worst to the absolute best in just a few years.

Teams are competing on a much more equal basis, the best players can end up at any team.

It would be good if football could emulate some of that without the "closed shop" element.
 
All about the tailgate baby!!
American Football College and Pro's have that diehard following. Yes every sport has a minority of hard core followers. If we talk about the masses Cost time and product is on what everyones mind. The Americans again not all truly do not get the European passion in Football the American Owners are in it for power and Money nothing else they do not care about the supporter which is sad really.
 
But even then, isn't that something that's fostered through their education in their late teens/early twenties? Do they stick with that varsity team? Surely you're not born into it?
The college football museum thing in Atlanta is huge - stadiums hold upto 100k. Most of the lads I work with all follow their college teams rather than an NFL or NBA team
 
It's also surely better for aspiring kids to learn and develop through going to university rather than through the academy system which just drops 99.999% of those who go into it with nothing to show for it.
 
It's also surely better for aspiring kids to learn and develop through going to university rather than through the academy system which just drops 99.999% of those who go into it with nothing to show for it.
Unfortunately many of the college players do not get a meaningful education as they take classes designed to keep there college eligibility but there classes do not allow them to progress to gain a college degree. Many football players are released in January after the college bowl games. The NFL treats the college game as its development league.

 
I remember when Madonna first came into money she got her dad cable or satellite so he could watch Italian footy. AC Milan iirc. Guy Richie apparently was surprised at his and her Italian football knowledge during a WC.

“....they call Alabama the Crimson Tide, call me Deacon Blue...”

The White Sox were the lot who threw a game decades ago werent they? Decent Fillum about it.
It wasn't just one game, I think it was several games during the World series finals in 1919, in collaboration with organised crime. They were known as the Black Sox for their misdeeds and most of the players involved got banned for life.
 
From a Canadian perspective: the Maple Leafs are one of the most valuable franchises in the NHL, worth well over a billion, and they do have a passionate hard core of supporters. I think the last time they won anything was in the 60s and yet their games are always sold out (or were before the pandemic). So the owners quickly cottoned on to the fact that there's no penalty and plenty of profit to be had in selling all their best prospects and jacking up ticket prices.

At the other end of the spectrum, there's Arizona, a place where nobody cares about ice hockey and who get one of the lowest attendances in the league, and whose owner makes a tidy profit because of the league's profit sharing scheme.
 
Some of our American based posters might be best placed to shed a bit more light on this, @burchmackem, @NYMackem, @njmackem etc...

With your various sports, franchises, conferences, teams moving across country etc - Do Americans actually get it? Are they just sports fans, or do they have supporters?

Take for instance when the Dodgers left Brooklyn - what the frig happened to their fans? Did they even have any? Were people upset?

More recently the Raiders have bounced from Oakland, to LA, back to Oakland, and now reside in a swanky new stadium in Las Vegas. This is a team with 3 Superbowls to it's name. Have all their fans bounced along with them? The ever faithful cross the Sierra Nevada every other week to cheer them on?

Do season ticket holders exist? Would Phase 3 ever be a thing?

Do grown men cry when success/abject failure rears it's head in the post-season?

Do fathers pass their loyalties onto their sons?

Are weekends completely ruined when their team loses?

Do they care?
They haven't got a clue, pretty much sums it up when they prefer NFL and baseball instead of 'Soccer'
 
American Football College and Pro's have that diehard following. Yes every sport has a minority of hard core followers. If we talk about the masses Cost time and product is on what everyones mind. The Americans again not all truly do not get the European passion in Football the American Owners are in it for power and Money nothing else they do not care about the supporter which is sad really.
As an American, I can confirm the college sports teams (football and basketball) are the closest thing to regionally local, rabid fandom. As others have stated, many college football teams dwarf their similar regional NFL pro teams in follower size. For example, University of Michigan boasts the 3rd largest stadium in the world @108,000 capacity... And they pack it for home games.
Logon or register to see this image


As for basketball, college is preferred to the NBA far and wide. The quality of the game is purer and the kids play defense all game (unlike their pro counterparts that play catch and shot around and lax defense.)

Also, the annual end-of-season NCAA college men's basketball tournament (fondly called "March Madness") is an absolutely fantastic tournament that crowns a national champion from a field of 64 teams selected on regular season results and metrics. The tournament takes place over 4 week period and includes big university teams (majors) as well as smaller college teams (mid-majors), the latter of which can often make Cinderella-story runs in the tournament and surprise many. Lots of games, lots of great play and upsets and great entertainment. It's also the most heavily-betted sports event in America.
 
Last edited:

Back
Top