But American football with "just a ball" comes awfully close to Rugby.I don't want to get all basebally on this, but I think the barrier for entry in the immediate post war era would just be a ball.
As in, if you pardon my computer-translated French to imitate the then-recently liberated French,
"Pourquoi ne jouons-nous pas au rugby?"
Or am I misunderstanding what you mean?
I think we would need to look at basketball, which is a North American sport and has done moreIf we're going to talk about exporting North American sports we'd have to look at baseball, where at least it's significantly different from it's competitors to find a niche in random places like Italy, the Netherlands, and all over East Asia.
than "find a niche in random places".
Come to think of it, basketball comes close to football when one considers the arguments of "Why
football and not American football?". Things like:
It has a low entry cost. Not quite as low as football, but all you need is a ball that behaves correctly and
something to mark the goal with. The semi-traditional two schoolbags don't exactly match a proper football goal in effect on the game and my argument here is that you can play something recognisable as basket without the hoop. It just takes a little more effort, which is part of the argument.
It is deceptively simple.
It does NOT have to be violent, which despite the argumentio ad masculinity is a selling point.
One can practise it by oneself, with just the ball, and it would still be recognisable as "practising football/basketball".
There is also the hard to dispute fact that American football developed from football, and by the timeI was trying to think of a scenario where America was more internationally-engaged early on in its history leading to a kind of analogue to the British commercial expat clubs phenomenon you got with football in South America and Europe.
it had diverged enough from rugby that someone said "Maybe I should wear a helmet.", football had
already begun spreading across the world.
On the other hand it sort of points towards the key matter, doesn't it?But then I remembered that when natives actually got control of those clubs IOTL, like with Genoa CFC, they thought 'Fuck cricket, we're playing football from now on'. So it's hardly any guarantee of perpetuating things.