Why Don’t Other Countries Play American Football?
February 3, 2013 in Daily Bulletin
The team that wins the Super Bowl tonight will be able to call itself the world champion of American Football. Yet this title is only slightly less misleading than the title of Miss Universe – a competition which we only invite our own solar system to – since no other country really plays American Football. Joshua E. Keating looked at why this was:
- It can’t be because the sport is American. Baseball is American and that has a global fan base. Nor can it be because of how rough it is. Rugby is rougher.
- The biggest reason why other countries don’t play American football is because of cost. With basketball you just need a ball and a hoop. Baseball requires a ball and a bat. American football requires all of the gear and equipment for all the players.
- People might also be put off by the complexity of the rules.
- Efforts to promote American Football across the oceans have mostly failed. This is because players who do well go to the United States, robbing the fan base of other countries of their favourite star – the very same fan base that could make the game popular.
Read more about the various efforts to export American Football over here.
Source: Foreign Policy
I think it’s combination of factors. First off, don’t underestimate the power of the pick-up game: Soccer is popular all over the world in part because all you need to play is something you can kick (not necessarily a ball, though it helps). Basketball, which has perhaps been the most successful of American sports to internationalize (with the possible exception of billiards/pool, though for entirely different reasons), is similarly easy to start a pick-up game (a basket and a ball is all you need). Hockey has been successful in internationalizing only in cold weather, where pick-up games only require skates (things that tend to be widely owned in northern climates anyway), a stick/broom and something small that’ll slide on ice (read: anything). In southern climates, hockey remains nearly non-existent because you need to invest in a ice rink first.
To be sure, American football is relatively easy to have a pick-up game as well, all you need is something to carry and a willingness to knock-out the occasional tooth. Except that a pick-up game of American football is really not that different than rugby, at that point. The true game of American football requires the investment in all the equipment, plus a lot of practice and organization to correctly pull off all the plays.
In other words, American Football requires a lot of investment, both capital investment in the equipment and a time investment to get a large group of people to coordinate themselves to such a high degree. Compare that to soccer. If you want to teach a culture to play soccer, you drop a ball on the ground, point at either goal and say get the ball in the goal, and you can’t use your hands unless you’re the goalkeeper. Sure there are other rules, but that simple explanation is 90% of the game. Any similar such simple explanation of American football and you end up just sounding like rugby.
You know you make a good point about billiards/pool. Any thoughts on what special circumstances made that popular across the world? As you point out its not particularly easy or intuitive to set up.
Potentially one of the problems is the name – since a game also called Football is already the worlds most popular sport, both in terms of viewer numbers and people playing (jumpers for goalposts anyone?). Plus if you want to run up and down a field being stomped on by beefy dudes, Europe and the Antipodes already have Ruggers and Aussie rules footy – both of which are sans the poncy armour.
Also, it’s something of a misrepresentation to say American Football is common in Britain, since the game of Lacrosse is far more popular in the UK – and that’s hardly a well known game. I would rather say that given the relative ease with which football football can be played by anyone, anywhere, at any time, it’s much more likely that soccer will become increasingly popular in the States rather than American Football becoming popular elsewhere.
There is a american football league in Portugal.
And there’s a cricket league in China. That doesn’t mean that it’s actually really played there…
I’m not a sports enthusiast by any means, but I’d imagine that certain internationally popular sports such as hockey also require specialized gear and equipment for all the players. What’s so massively costly about American Football gear (vs. hockey gear) that it would be the primary reason why the sport hasn’t taken off one bit even in generally wealthy territories like China, East Asia, Canada or Europe?
I think one thing that has been left out is the effects of colonization. Games like cricket (which admittedly don’t require specialized equipment) spread to other countries because the British went and colonized and spread the game. So to your point about Hockey I think the Europeans help spread it.
America though hasn’t really had colonies beyond the Phillipines, and so it never really had an opportunity to spread the game. It’s probably a combination of the cost and that international context.