Reading that over a billion people had watched a recent USA sports match (basketball) wasn’t a big shock, as everybody knows it is the world’s second sport.
Living in Kazakhstan confirms its popularity, given the love teenagers have for playing. At least, those who don’t spend every waking moment playing computer games.
Coming from the UK, where basketball is a minority sport at best, albeit flourishing in this context, seeing these stats leads to the question: why aren’t USA sports popular in Britain?
Basketball, ice hockey, and the USA version of football are played in Britain and enjoyed by quite a lot of people. This pales in insignificance when compared to other sports such as soccer, darts (by now the second most-watched sport), cricket, rugby, and professional cycling.
Surely sports, which dominate American culture, are worth more than a brief mention in a column on the inside back pages of a sports paper in the not culturally dissimilar United Kingdom?
Snobbery plays a part in this. The UK, while disintegrating (in the eyes of many), still bafflingly clings to its self-proclaimed greatness and often tends to see the rest of the world as wannabe Brits. Certainly, the USA, who some English people still insist is jealous of the UK. Quite why is confusing, at best.
In a sporting sense, the British, with their noses in the air, don’t see USA sports as valid in that some of them, the NFL, baseball, and ice hockey, partly developed from English sports. They are, by definition, therefore, inferior. The USA dominates contemporary cultural discourse and for the same reason stated above, Brits subconsciously hold on to what they have but America doesn’t, i.e, its longer history. Giving that up would be tantamount to a confession of ‘inferiority’, something not in the DNA of an average proud Englishman.
“Baseball is just glorified rounders”, people might hear said on the Oxfordshire village greens. An odd reflection, in that only really school kids play rounders and everybody else sees it as bland, meaning surely they would take to a more exciting version? MLB, anybody?
Rounders is a great game for kids, yes, but that’s not the point here.
In the case of rugby, its fans enthusiastically remind any Brits who confess an interest in the NFL that rugby players are tougher because they don’t wear padding. Ironically, this is an observation often made by lads who wouldn’t last 20 seconds into a game of either. It’s also grossly mistaken, rugby is a tough sport, but they simply don’t tackle like your typical linebacker, who would probably use the average rugby player as a toothpick.
America tends to label its major sporting events as World this or World that when no more than a handful of the players are from outside the USA, let alone the teams.
Cricket isn’t fully global, not even as the world’s fourth sport. It has a World Cup, in which 20 countries have taken part.
It is though, a very international competition compared to the baseball World Series, with its one participant nation. Canada can be added in some cases – accepted.
Keen fans of USA sports would rightly remind people that no non-USA American football, baseball, or basketball side would have a prayer of beating even their poorer teams. Point conceded.
It does, however, outline another reason why British people don’t take to American sports. This idea that the USA hosts events that only it can play and only it can win, compared to the leading English sports, which in most cases are played around the world. This, in turn, means that every year there is a healthy rivalry between England and, say, Australia, Germany, India, or South Africa. Something to get really excited about.
No suggestion intended that the NBA or Super Bowl are nothing to look forward to. It’s just that they lack the international dimension that many patriotic sports fans crave, and the few English people tuning in to watch basketball do so for the spectacle only. They don’t often have any affinity with the protagonists, and there is an absence of any sense of belonging, a huge part of soccer and rugby.
Soccer teams are family, some say the bonds are stronger than a marriage, and it would be unthinkable that Arsenal fans were to go and ‘have an affair’ with Tottenham.
An English soccer team called Wimbledon folded in 2004, and the remnants were sold to a city near London called Milton Keynes. Few, if any, of the fans of the former Wimbledon followed their team to its new home and were proud to start another Wimbledon later on. It took them years to get their professional (league) status back, but the fans stuck with them.
Meanwhile, their buyers, Milton Keynes Dons, are seen as a ‘fake’ team, spitefully referred to as ‘Franchise United’. Almost nobody likes them. Sporting teams in the UK are flagships of the community, not businesses to be bought, sold, and moved. Very few people can relate to the idea of sporting franchises, which outlines another disincentive to follow USA sports.
Growing up in the UK, mainly a soccer fan, interspersed with a love for American football, and making it to school quarterback in the days when the NFL was on English prime-time TV was something to be proud of.
Staying up all night to watch the Super Bowl, which should be a 60-minute match, was harder because it really was all night. The stop-start nature of the game was off-putting to say the least. Adverts seemingly every few minutes, officials discussing nearly every play, time-outs, and occasional injuries deflating the spectacle. Some can handle it, others can’t be bothered.
In the UK, advertising before and after sporting events is part and parcel, but not during the game. Americans may be used to it, whatever they say when asked, but people in Britain are not.
There are few better sights in sport than, say, Tom Brady, launching the ball 70 yards right into the hands of a guy running close to a sub-10-second 100 metres. All this surrounded by players trying to stop him, millimetres from the touchline, with the pressure of millions watching, on a fourth down in the fourth quarter with the scores tied.
Not many Brits agree with me though. Whether it’s our fault or not, and our problem or not, we just aren’t that interested.
Sorry, America!
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