2023 - 2024 Football Thread - Page 83

On March 22 2024 19:35 WombaT wrote:
I see some of the benefits, but those benefits aren’t an inherent component of the other, more negative aspect of how US sport is structured.

Competitive parity and financial stability are the big ones, but you could conceivably have those in European football with binding financial controls.

You create too big a gap between your small, top league and the rest of the pyramid. Which kind of necessitates needing some parallel system to harness talent, especially in such a large nation. Which ends up mostly being the college system, and this puts the US at a big disadvantage IMO.

Of course there are exceptions, and it’s improved in recent years but you’re still having players going truly professional in their 20s, where elsewhere talented players are attached to pro clubs of some level from very early ages, and go pro much earlier, even if it’s lower in the pyramid.

I’m curious what you American fans on here think, from my experience most football fans are Europhiles who follow football over here, plus a big cohort of Latinos of various places of descent who are also pretty football crazy, but not a community I interact with much!

In my experience much of the fan base actually likes the traditional league pyramid, it’s what’s in place in the football they watch around the globe.

Pretty much forever in the States it feels that it’s been structured around the more general American sports fan sensibility, not the actual taste of existing football fans, if you get my point. I don’t know if the observation is accurate, but it’s my experience in Americans I’ve talked to. They like the fan culture (minus the ‘Ultras’) of European and South American football, they like the cultural divergence and how clubs have long unbroken links with cities, or political leanings and what have you. Barcelona is a great team, but it’s also a shining gem of Catalan pride, or Liverpool thrums with the English but decidedly separate Scouse identity. Or Argentina’s eternal rivals in River and Boca are the clubs of the upper crust and the working class despite being situated pretty close in the same city.

I could be talking total bullshit but hence why I’m asking, it’s a subject that interests me!

By want of a crude parallel I’m reminded of when Kespa moved to SC2 and basically just replicated the BW structure. Sure it had worked in BW very well, but SC2 had had a very differently focused scene up to then, a different audience and was much more international, as well as being much more player-focused rather than team focused.

In the same sense it feels the US football structure is kind of as it is because that’s historically how their big sports are structured, rather than being what that fan base actually enjoys about that specific sport, so too I think did the Kespa era kind of impose a structure based on a similar maxim, but not necessarily one that dovetailed with a chunk of the SC2 fan base. Especially the people who became fans with SC2 and hadn’t been following since BW

On March 23 2024 00:34 FlaShFTW wrote:

I would say that as a Yank, I love the whole ultras and chanting aspect of football, which is what really drew me into the sport. In America, chants and "team pride" is boring. Plus I came from being an NBA fan with it's obscene 82 game schedule per team, it was too much for me to actually follow actively and I would find myself only caring about the first 3 games of the season then losing interest quickly, only for interest to pick up again when playoffs started (if my team was in playoffs).

Football (and F1) are very viewer friendly products. No ads, just 2 hours straight of whatever event you're watching (minus half time for football). There are only events on the weekends (and weekdays if you follow a European competing club), and they're so spread out that it makes it easy to care for every game and prevents burnout.

With regards to the development system, I agree that our talent funnel is not great. Yes, it's either college, or imports from foreign regions (like the influx of European basketball players recently). But the latter is built on the basis that America has the best league in the world and the highest salary for players, making it the most attractive destination for high profile and skilled players. There is no other professional league better than the NBA or MLB for those respective sports. Thus, feeding the league with new, high quality talent, is quite easy for them. But the MLS is a lackluster league, and it still tries the same strategy: take foreign players and bring them into the league to supplement your own talent. But America's talent is also weaker (as football is not the main sport here). If you removed all foreign talent from the NBA or MLB, those leagues would still be high quality leagues which can provide a compelling product.

I do wish MLS was also a relegation based system, but we simply don't have enough players interested to make this into a strong pyramid. At best, it would likely be just a few divisions, which maybe is fine for a starting block and building from there, but I think there needs to be an actual football revolution in America for our country to take the sport more seriously. We have too many sports that we care about: basketball, American football, baseball, hockey, golf. Americans pretty much only watch the World Cup if America is playing, and otherwise pretend the sport doesn't exist otherwise (pretty much how I felt until I started more closely following).

On March 24 2024 10:11 gTank wrote:
Germany is a beast now, who would have known that not taking washed out of form players and instead drafting great talents that perform so great right now would build up to be a really dominating team?