Otto Kretschmer
Banned
Wank American Football so that it' as popular worldwide as Association Football and make Association Footbll a niche game.
AHC: American Football dominant worldwide
- Thread starter Otto Kretschmer
- Start date
Not going to happen, especially in poorer countries.
Soccer wins by default thanks to heap gear, simple rules, lesser risk of injury.
Soccer wins by default thanks to heap gear, simple rules, lesser risk of injury.
Baseball also requires lots of equipment yet is popular in much of the Caribbean (Castro was a baseball fan for instance) and poorer countries like Nicaragua. And back in the early 20th century, American football didn't have a lot of equipment. It's easy for kids to play a pickup game of football in their backyard with no equipment--just have two quarterbacks and two other guys who might be linebackers or receivers or runningbacks.
I think the issue is more that when baseball spread because of American influence in the early 20th century, American football wasn't a major sport and even WWII when it was somewhat bigger it didn't spread much.
I guess baseball had that ability to spread because, while it has the need for gear, it doesn't feature heavily armoured gladiators knocking seven colours of the proverbial out of each other. I'm not an expert or a fan but I guess the equipment requirement for baseball is at a similar level to that of cricket, which is popular to the level of idolatry in India/Pakistan/Sri Lanka/Bangladesh.
Another thing: didn't gridiron suffer a number of fatalities or serious injuries in its early days (far more than anything in its cousin, rugby union/league) and didn't it come perilously close to being banned? I'm not sure this is the case, but if it was, perhaps that was something that also put off widespread acceptance?
Yes - Football suffered a bit of a pr disaster due to a series of high profile deaths in the first decade of the 20th century. This was before the game was a blue collar sport and when it ws played largely on college campuses and so these deaths were amongst the children up the elite at the time, and this caused a stirr. Harvard, I believe, actually banned the game, and there was a movement for other schools to do the same.
And herein, I think, is a bit of why the game didn't catch up on much the rest of the world. Though the "it takes a lot of equipment" is often held up as a potential reason, and it certainly sounds good, it doesn't really pass the smell test upon closer observation. After all, the game wasn't actually played with a lot of equipment during the late 19th and early 20th century - the equipment only started to come in after these deaths - and even today its completely possible to play a backyard game with nothing more than a football, and some yard markers.
So that can't be it.
So what's the reason? Well, like many other sports at the time, the game was tied very closely to the elites of a certain nation, and only them perculated down to the rest of the population. At this same time, Britain was far more prestigious than the United States, controlled a lot more territory, and so its games were more likely to be taken up in the different corners of its empire and then spread out from there.
And if people wanted to play a game that was similar to Football, they already had an option: Rugby (or, to be more exact, two: Union and League Rugby).
Furthermore, during the early 20th century when many sports were begining to sweep the globe, football wasn't even the most popular game in the United States. That would have been baseball, and that game did spread (though mainly only to places within the US' sphere of influence). By the time the United States eclipsed Britain as the premier power in the world, economically, militarily and culturally, baseball was actually still the most popular sport in the US and the one which was most closely associated with the nation. Football didn't eclipse baseball in the US until the 1960s, and by that point the world sports market was pretty saturated, with Soccer/Football being the dominant game or a national variant (Aussie Rules, Gaelic Football, etc). There just wasn't a lot of places that American Football could expand into: even Canada had a similar national game.
Rugby (especially union) is so complicated, it baffles the players. It differs in that (legal) physical confrontation is mainly focused on the guy with the ball rather than the apocalyptic mass collisions you get in gridiron. That said, both rugby and football are now facing a similar problem with concussion and cases of early onset dementia that gridiron has painfully experienced.
Perhaps it’s time for a new sport to supplant all three...?!
Default to the backyard touch or flag variant that most kids learn how to play and then ramp them up to "pro-flag football" and you would take care of this problem. As others have pointed out there are other problems, most notably it becoming dominant even in the US fairly late, but this problem is fixable.
Twisted Solution of the late on the scene problem: U.S. Olympic committee (or other cool position) chair Al Davis.
Isn't gridiron the same American football?
Well, I am German and thus football is something completely different for me anyways.
I never understood why Americans even named American Football so, seeing as they don't actually playing the ball with their feet.
I’m a Brit so football for me is the ball game played with your feet as well! Gridiron takes less time to type!
Just to complicate things, where I’m from in the UK (Wales), rugby is often known as ‘football’. But that’s another story!😂
Because Soccer and Rugby (and American and Canadian football, for that matter) all developed out of a proto-Football game that was played in boys boarding schools in the early 19th century (and that in turn developed from earlier varities of Football that were played as early back as the Medieval period).
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Fair enough.
I just had thought that today there would be more language distinctions between the games.
Well, there is, to an extent. It's just that its very specific to a location.
Generally speaking, if there is a local variety of Football (so, Australian, Gaelic, Canadian, American) that is just known as 'Football' then Soccer is used. And if you are referring to one of these local varities, they usually have their own nickname - so you ahve Aussie Football, American Football/Gridiron, Gaelic, etc. But it can get a bit confusing if you don't know what the 'standard' form of Football is in a specific region.
George Carty
Banned
Arun Kapil on his blog did a series of articles explaining why American football was so unexportable:
- Reflections on American football
- Reflections on American football – II
- Reflections on American football – III
If American troops popularized the game more in places like Japan and Korea I can see it somewhat taking off like Baseball did. However during those year 30s-50s Baseball was still the "national pastime".