Baseball is a sport of the proletariat because it is (a) heavily unionized, (b) most commonly watched while skipping work, (c) dirt cheap to attend, and (d) affording you ample opportunity to radical your coworkers in between innings.
Football is a trash sport for trash people.
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.
Football is a sport for nerds who were shamed out of their other nerdy hobbies. There's collectables, data and statistics, fantasy leagues, and like you said every game is back-to-back complex interplay of strategy and tactics. I prefer different nerd shit, but I respect those nerds.
bruh there's 8 minutes of action in a 3.5 hour broadcast of an nfl game. no amount of complexity or amazing feats of athletics is gonna make up for that
Death to America
You could do the same math for a game of chess, or any other activity where you get some time to think about your next move.
and none of those games/activities are hugely popular spectacles which form the cornerstone of people's social lives. football is way, way more popular it should be based on pure entertainment value
Death to America
If you're interested in football (or any similar activity where there are built-in pauses to strategieze), the pauses are largely entertaining, too. It really comes down to whether you understand/care about what's going on.
I am absolutely looking forward to flag football in the Olympics
Genuinely would like to see this,. Although with as many players moving as quickly as they are, I suspect we're still going to see a lot of injuries. Hopefully far fewer TBIs, though.
Counterpoint: the MLB's disgusting efforts to facilitate the "defecting" of talented Cuban and Venezuelan baseball players.
Simple human trafficking. But not the kind you'll ever find the western media complaining about.
Counterpoint, baseball is boring as fuck to watch and sucks
Once you get into the pitching, baseball is at least as suspenseful as football from a play-by-play perspective. I'll agree that extra-innings can get kinda rough. But, especially with the intro of the pitch clock, its pretty well paced and compelling.
baseball is also the only sport to have 10 cent beer night.
Also the only sport to have a Disco Demolition Night.
American football is a device for giving all participants brain damage it should be banned completely
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.
Brain damage in football is not a risk, it is a guarantee. All participants will inevitably suffer CTE.
College and even more so high school football should not only be banned, all people who have had a hand in promoting and promulgating them should be gulaged.
Living in a European city with three rival soccer teams for my entire life, I feel I can say:
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. You get a bit tipsy and maybe if you're feeling particularly rowdy someone throws a punch. This is not what the rest of the world means by violence.
unironically yes. football is so fucking boring. america deserves such a dogshit spectacle as it's national pastime
Death to America
American football is objectively a boring sport.
A 60 minute game that takes three hours because the ball isn't in play most of the time
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.
I've always sort of wondered the obsession and deep emotional connection some people have with sports.
The best I can come up with is its part tribalism, but more so I think it's experiencing vicarious success. If you put in the emotional work to follow your team, especially with a displaced loyalty during losing seasons, their successes are your successes by proxy, but it also distances you from their failures.
Success irl is hard to come by and this is a chance to feel success without actually working very hard towards it, other than the emotional investment
Idk does anyone have any other thoughts why some people get so attached to their team?
There’s a ritual and tradition component to it as well; you inherit the fandom of your family etc
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
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.
It's the closest thing we have in the U.S. to native religion.
Baseball 
Ameican Football 
lol if you think getting drunk regularly wouldn't be normalized without trash sports
Midwest emo was an inside job
I can see straight through your pro-hoopball propaganda. Bait harder baskie (actually don't bother, everybody knows you're just flopping).
Hell yeah I'm a baskie
baskie
Death to America
You are lik little babby watch this turns on cricket test match
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.
I think there’s a great opportunity for an in-depth Marxist analysis of how sports have gone from being a fairly minor aspect of social life in the US 100 years ago (even 50 years ago, really) to becoming one the of most important thing in the lives of tens of millions of Americans.
Also baseball is awesome and exciting if you take the time to follow the pitch-by-pitch strategy.
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.
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Vaush posts go in the_dunk_tank