American football and baseball are an Anheuser-Busch InBev psyop to normalize getting regularly drunk because those sports are otherwise unwatchable

Football is literally one of the most complex sports that exists in the world, where every play has basically 8-10 highly specialized things by professional athletes happening at once, including one of the most difficult singular sports position of all time (quarterback). You can literally spend a half hour breaking down each piece of a single football play because there is so much going on on the field.

I am not a huge fan of football culture, as the tendency in the past was to oversimplify the sport, and there isn't really any excuse for how damaging it is to the players nor the pervasive ownership culture that exists within it, but football in theory is one of the coolest and most unique sports of all time, and I am absolutely looking forward to flag football in the Olympics.

baseball is also the only sport to have 10 cent beer night.

Counterpoint: the MLB's disgusting efforts to facilitate the "defecting" of talented Cuban and Venezuelan baseball players.

I love baseball but MLB is getting harder to watch with the amount of ad creep I’ve noticed in the last season or two. It’s sounds strange but I’ve actually gotten into MLS in the last year since it feels like the least advertising-intensive sport right now. I actually dropped watching the NHL because covering the ice in ads started bugging me too much.

Football is a trash sport for trash people.

Wow I don't see people who watch baseball tailgating in the parking lot getting blackout drunk and swinging on each other?

Almost certainly, but I'm gonna go against the grain and say I would rather watch football than baseball. Concussions are objectively more exciting than watching someone gradually destroy their rotator cuff.

when i am made People's Undersecretary for Sports and Culture, the PFL (People's Football League) will be converted to flag football immediately and it will be a million times more fun to watch, skyrocketing my popularity with the masses and helping me secure the ultimate prize: the Ministry of the Interior

Death to America

At professional levels, the amount of risk workers are willing to take for money is a labor issue and should be mostly left to unions.

At amateur levels, all sports carry injury risk and many outdoor sports carry a real risk of death. I don't think we should ban football any more than we should ban hiking, climbing, or surfing. There should be some safety regulations and participants should be well-informed of the risks.

College football gets tricky because some programs are hugely lucrative and others (especially at lower divisions) are truly amateur.

There’s a ritual and tradition component to it as well; you inherit the fandom of your family etc

It's the closest thing we have in the U.S. to native religion.

For me it’s the same as watching a ballet, but without the predetermined outcome of narrative theatre/dance. In the process of this, I need a protagonist I relate to. The easiest emotional connection I’m going to form is to my hometown teams given my mnemonic and experiential connection to it, especially having lived prior to the genera death of monocultural and regional identity in the US.

In the case of my alma mater and college sports, I tend to relate it as imagine your local sporting club association football team, but attach it to an entity that plays a gigantic part in educating you, housing you for your first time alone (in a walkable community no less), feeding you, facilitating your first experiences as a young adult away from home, setting up your professional network and several adult friendships — and in my case — hooks up your first big-boy job, licenses and the high pay that follows. So yeah, I’ll buy the sweatshirt and hoot like a doofus for my alma maters’ bottom-wrung Big Ten and PAC 12 teams every January and March. Hell, I’ll wear the free suits they gave me every quarter while I’m at it.

i'm a huge sports fan so i've thought a lot about this and imo it comes down to alienation. being a fan of a team gives you a "we" to be part of that i (and probably a lot of other people) don't have and desperately need

Death to America

And yet, there is a reason AB sponsors their local team and named its stadium.

Through hex bear dot net I will educate the lumpen proletariat that they're actually morons for enjoying sportsball

Sorry but american football is ridiculous and it's a billion dollar industry that uses and abuses thousands of people and leaves the participants with permanent brain damage, and it is actually okay to point out that the end result of all of this hooplah is an enterprise that's barely worth watching. The sports watchers are not a minority you need to ensure we're not speaking over, they're an incredibly huge part of culture and nobody is going to be hurt by somebody expressing their dislike for american football

I do, in fact, hate sportsball. The equivalent time you spend watching football is objectively better spent yelling at a liberal on Twitter

No. Sports is not where America's problem is. The US is absurdly evil and violent when it comes to pretty much anything else, but at sporting events you actually look restrained and pretty chill.

Nah lol. Americans will not only flip cars and set shit on fire when their team loses the superbowl, but the same people who do that kind of shit will complain when BLM does the same shit because the cops murdered someone. And setting aside fan rowdiness, American sports are incredibly exploitative of the players, cheerleaders, workers etc. Stadiums are huge drains on the public funds of the cities that build them. I could go on. American professional sports are a torment nexus.

Yeah, America may not be shit when it comes to praxis, but that means that the football games are about the same. I live in the most hardcore football city in the entire US, but can firmly say that other nations (UK and Brazil are the two nations I think of) make us look like babies during sporting events. Even during the messy matches where there's a massive upsetting loss, the worst that happens is some cars get torched in America. Whereas other nations will literally prevent you from bringing newspaper into the games because of how commonly it's used as a serious weapon in the right hands.

The fact that Americans invented a sport with inbuilt ad breaks is genius, and the fact that they took a sport and cut out all the bits where people aren't breaking their skull and somehow it's still boring is a different kind of genius.

If anything the fandom has become more generalized, commercialized and less intensive. My grandfather and his friends used to literally bellow at the TV on Sundays as if he was there live and they could hear them, and they literally wouldn't give you time of day if you were a Bears fan, because basically everyone who watched football had also played it at some point in their life.

Now, because of gambling, even lazy nerds are able to get in on it, but their amount of individual dedication to any given team, or even a single sport itself is not there. Sports may be the most important aspect of people's lives, but people have never been more adjacent (as opposed to participants) in sports.

The only thing exciting about baseball is statistics and hotdogs.

Hell yeah I'm a baskie

baskie

Death to America

This tracks with the op hypothesis, the British are the biggest drinkers in the world and have a sport that you drink to that lasts 5 days.

With all respect to Cuba, it's a massive L for them, baseball is the worst team game in existence.

Also massive disappointment for US version, you would think if you give clubs to bunch of belligerent people like Muricans they would at least make proper use of them but no, they proceed to do nothing and pretend to be Clint Eastwood (for some reason baseball players tend to make that constipated face when notice cameras on them).