1. Myth: America needs its best athletes, like LeBron James, playing football for the United States to truly be competitive with the rest of the world.
Although American football would surely improve if young people consistently chose it over playing football, basketball, or baseball, large size and strength are not as beneficial in football as in others. sports. The best player in the world, Lionel Messi, is 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighs 148 pounds. The Argentine probably doesn’t know how to dunk, but in soccer he has no problem getting around defenders of all shapes and sizes.
2. Myth: Football needs to get rid of the offside rule and added time.
While removing offside would likely increase the score, it would also hurt the game by rewarding cherry picking and boom balling. Skillful midfield play would be lost, as gameplay would be stretched from one end to the other. As for downtime, it’s a necessity in a game with so many stall tactics. These are two fundamental principles of the sport that will not change. Rather than worrying about the rules, just enjoy the game as it is played.
3. Myth: Sure, the World Cup is a big event, but soccer will never be a mainstream thing here.
Unless you define “mainstream” as “on par with the NFL,” football is already there. Despite being a glorified minor league compared to other soccer leagues around the world, MLS has higher attendance per game than the NBA and NHL. On television, NBCSN’s coverage of the English Premier League gets better ratings than the NHL during the regular season on the same network, even though most games start before half the country wakes up.
4. Myth: Nobody collapses like a football player.
Have you watched a basketball game? Failures in the NBA became so bad that the league began fining its players. In all sports, players embellish to fool referees. Even in the NFL, they often exaggerate any type of contact to get a personal foul or make interference calls. Football tried to thwart the flop by handing out yellow cards (even though no referee did so at this World Cup). The flop is a problem in football, but it is naive to think that this is the only sport where this happens.
5. Myth: Football is not American.
Weird Ann Coulter talks about the game aside, football couldn’t be more American. Schoolchildren learn about the origins of America: the underfunded and underequipped colonies band together to rebel against the big, bad Brits. Today, the United States is usually the superpower in almost everything it does. But when we look at the men’s national team, we once again adopt the “scrappy underdog” label, watching our (mostly) underpaid heroes become more than the sum of their parts when they don the hideous jersey that Nike makes them wear.
6. Myth: Football is boring.
This one is actually kind of true: football is boring sometimes. The Netherlands-Argentina match is a perfect example. But football is held to impossible standards: no sport is always exciting. Baseball features about an hour per game of pitchers simply looking for a sign, while football players spend more time in the huddle than playing football. Americans love these sports because of the boredom-breaking excitement, and there is perhaps nothing more exciting in sports than a game-winning goal late in a game, like John Brooks’ header led the United States to a 2-1 victory over Ghana last month.
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