gibingus

Beautifully put, Halx. (and what photo effect did you use to get your avatar like that?) Something is always happening on the baseball field, and the game loses something on television when you only see that foreshortened shot of the battery from deep center field.

Mass popularity of sports is a function of mass media (in this, I mean function in the mathematical sense). Some examples

Baseball, which became a professional sport in the late nineteenth century during they heyday of yellowsheet competition, is a perfect newspaper sport. Heavy in stats and box scores, long seasons and wide field. You follow the game all season long on paper. It's relaxed, but tension builds in a long slow beautiful way. Aside from that, the ball park experience is sublime... and that is where it became the American Pastime.

Professional (American) Football was a sleeper sport with no money potential until television broke through in the Fifties, about which time the leagues reorganized and changed the rules to make it the best sport for the medium. Although broadband is coming up, television still rules the culture, and the NFL is the biggest breadwinner around.

The NBA also fit well with television, but the league has problems that cause it's popularity to waver and never really top football. At the professional level, it is a team sport that is ruled by individual egos, not teams... in many ways, this is why NCAA ball retains higher viewer loyalty and is more popular in many markets. The rules are continually being adjusted to make it more competitive and more interesting to watch, so give it time.

Professional Hockey has never been big. It's just not friendly, so it attracts a hardcore, die-hard fan base. Come on, Edmondton? Calgary? Harsh, man. Hard to watch on TV, the puck is just a problem. But it is damn fast, tightly contained, intensely violent, and very exciting once you get your head around it.

But Soccer... soccer is a bad tv sport. It has all the challenges of hockey in terms of rules and bounds, but the pill (a ball instead of a puck) is slower, people run instead of skate, and the field is HUGE. That translates into low scoring, and fans like scoring (for those about to mention baseball, there is a huge difference between a low scoring game and a no hitter, and yes, everyone loves home runs). Honestly, you watch soccer, and it just looks like a bunch of tiny guys running around kicking a ball with no real object. There's nothing to grab onto, you can't see the whole field in the frame, and it's just frustrating waiting for something to happen... you know the object is to put the ball in the hole, but it never gets there. Then it ends up being decided purely on penalty kicks... which are just plain onesided and dopey. Overtime should be a briefer version of the full deal... would you really just watch a game that was only penalty kicks? If the answer is no, they should go.

So in short, the rules need to be adjusted to offer more meaningful scoring opportunities and help the game break into prime time. I say meaningful here, because we aren't looking for Cricket scores. The field should be smaller and the defensive rules need to be lightened up to enable some offense. All professional leagues do this to make the games more interesting, think of the three point line, the instant replay judge, the shot clock.... all these things are designed to make the game better for the fan.

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