I will never understand how kicking or throwing a ball around somehow has mass appeal. Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
It’s the harmless version of “my tribe battles your tribe” for thousands of years, without the bloodshed. We’ve evolved to enjoy competition in general.
Not everyone of course. But I find sports fans to be not that different from chess fans for example, in their passion, armchair strategy, and sheer emotional ups and downs.
My personal favorite sport is Formula 1. It tickles all the same parts of our sports fans brains, but also tickles my nerd brain with the strategy, lap math, and all the precision and tech (apart from the fact that I personally looooove driving and Kart racing)
About the tech, you’d be amazed at the amount of tech involved in F1. Just the bandwidth used for telemetry. The supercomputer simulations performed during races, etc. and that’s just the computer tech.
F1 I sort of understand, there's a lot of aspects to it even though it is at the end of the day, a bunch of people driving in circles. The memes are good anyhow.
With foot/basketball, hockey, etc. there is no technical aspect if you don't get into pro tier shoe and ball design or whichever non-strictly rule defined straws one could competitively grasp at, but I guess most people relate through familiarity of actually playing it themselves? But there is a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there where to play it well enough for it to be actually fun you need to already be a fan and have a good grasp of the rules, otherwise it's just people running back and forth on a court.
Yeah I actually used to find soccer boring until I started watching it with my son, the sheer skill levels, there’s a lot of strategy involved. Yeah they don’t go into shoes or anything.
But for example, forcing a foul at just the right time, or causing offsides by positioning yourself, etc. those carry some level of strategy, at least how much I can grasp.
But the one common thing with every professional sport is the skill level for that particular skill in the sport is unlike anything we can comprehend.
I remember a friend recalling a professional baseball game he attended, and he described how those guys were warming up, and they were just playing catch to warm up their arms… they were able to throw the ball to within inches of the recipient’s glove every time from hundreds of feet away.
That sort of skill makes it enjoyable to watch human performance levels if you can appreciate how hard that particular skill is, especially if you’ve tried it.
Equivalents in F1 are how a race engineer will tell a driver to slow down by half a second over the course of a full lap to preserve their tires, and they more or less do it.
I like to think of it as the game within the game. There’s “the game” with the set of rules and lines, etc. But then there’s “the actual game”, where you can watch the strategy, the skill, and that’s at a completely different level. Similarly, once you can watch a football/soccer game and appreciate how someone is moving on the field without the ball, then I think you’re just starting to understand the game.
To me, that’s the technical aspects of soccer — watching the strategy play out, aside from where the ball is, or what the score is.
And then there's all the pretend injuries and exaggerating little scratches for the camera and ref. I don't watch sports but seeing that crappy behavior vs what rugby players go through is embarrassing to the footballers.
I was also surprised to hear the ref's conversation with the players (mic) in a rugby game on TV. Made it so much better to all the miming that goes on in football.
Also don't enjoy the ref slowly trotting across the field dramatically to go look at the video replay... Just get another ref to do it and report back or give the lead ref a damn phone to view it on.
The 'Dark Arts' in both games - while ultimately stemming from a lack of sportsmanship - are aimed at obtaining an illicit advantage.
In Soccer players are not generally penalised for pleading or arguing with the Referee - so an appeal to authority is the name of the game. In Soccer it involves performative diving in or around the box to try and earn a penalty, or get the marking player carded, all as a show to the Referee.
'Selling' falling fouls are a particular result of the 'advantage' rule however. Advantage means that if you are making a drive towards the goal and are fouled, but you stay on your feet and are continuing towards the goal, then you are deemed to be playing on the 'advantage' and the rules require the ref to not call the foul.
Thus, in real cases of foul, if you fall and exaggerate, the odds of the ref considering what they saw to be a foul are higher. The more you ham it up, the more likely thereafter that the Referee considers it suitably egregious to award a yellow or red card against the instigator. Even the top technical players of all time like Messi and Neymar are notorious for this.
Given there's no negative consequence to trying it on in Soccer, people will milk 30 seconds rolling around the ground to run down the clock or allow physios onto the pitch or the team to otherwise regroup. Sports like hockey have a specific penalty for this performative falling called embellishment.
Other examples of the 'dark arts' in Soccer include pretending to get elbowed in Aerial play, pulling on uniform to imbalance or slow a player, or even using your hands to keep a ball in play without the officiants seeing it. Even the best players in the world like Thierry Henry are not immune from doing this, as evidenced when France knocked Ireland out of the World Cup 2010 Playoffs due to Thierry Henry's handball in the 13th minute of extra time.
In Rugby only the Captains generally communicate with the Referee, and the onus is on polite and respectful dialogue and obeying the Referees word as final. Therefore in Rugby its less about gaining advantage with the Referee and more about disadvantaging the opponent. Thus they do things differently - things like raking players when on the ground - the deliberate scraping of an opponent's leg or arm with the studs of boots to cause injury - and biting, gouging, headbutting in the Ruck, pinching or punching when tackling, and thrusting when handing-off players so as to effectively punch them.
One may come off as more machismo or honorable than the other, but both are simply signifiers of poor sportsmanship and attempts to circumvent the mechanisms that attempt to make the games in question as equitable as possible. If anything, seeing the likes of Brian O'Driscoll get spear-tackled vs Arjen Robben chewing scenery all around him, the Rugby equivalent is exponentially more damaging to the players and the game.
I will never understand F1 fans. So many engineering hours and so much gas wasted just to drive in a circle a bit faster than the other guy. It's not even remotely applicable to any real task due to the myriad of arbitrary rules. At least football players are physically fit.
The F1 guys are probably as fit as a top footballer. They're dealing with black out levels of lateral G forces whilst slamming on the brakes within a fraction of a second of loser times or crashing out.
The MotoGP guys are far more fit - they have to use their bodies as counter ballast to make the curves. That's why MotoGP races are so short, they're at the limit of human endurance.
> The F1 guys are probably as fit as a top footballer. They're dealing with black out levels of lateral G forces whilst slamming on the brakes within a fraction of a second of loser times or crashing out.
I don't think it ever got to that point in F1, but CART (now IndyCar, but that's a different discussion) had to cancel a race because drivers were blacking out due to sustained G forces.
This. Just spend an hour go-kart racing and see how you feel. It's not just the physical exhaustion, but even more the mental fatigue that you have to fight against when driving at high speeds. Then multiply that by a hundred.
- The Drivers Championship (given to the driver that scored the most points in a season)
- The Constructors Championship (given to the team that scored the most points, but it's really rewarding the team/engineers for essentially building the best car)
I've played football (soccer for Americans) with people who were very good who didn't watch the game at all. Similarly for basketball.
People watch sports because it gives them an emotional investment in something that has a new result each week, is not scripted and shows incredible skill and fitness.
It's also a lot healthier than the people who follow politics like sport. They get moral when their team loses.
Do you watch TV, Internet videos, film, or read books ?
Agreed. I'm actually not a tribal person by nature. So I never actually "identify" with any particular sports team. It's usually a per-race narrative that I latch on to.
Like this most recent F1 race, the main thing I cared about was that the Williams team got on the podium (1st, 2nd, or 3rd). Because they were a hugely successful team in my childhood, so I wanted to see them succeed again after 15 years of horrible performance, often finishing absolutely last.
Next week, it might be another narrative I latch onto during the race. It absolutely is entertainment for me. I rarely ever care about any single team.
It's one thing to know you don't enjoy it for yourself.
But saying "I will never understand" sounds like willfull ignorance. It sounds dangerously close to not wanting to understand because you don't want to accidentally develop any sympathy for "the other side". Please don't fall into that trap.
What are you even on about, why would I need sympathy for an optional interest that is by all accounts pretty mainstream and well established worldwide? It's not a disability, it's not an endangered species, it's a billion dollar commercial industry. I just don't see the appeal.
In a just world LaLiga would get sued into the ground for disabling a public utility on a level equivallent to an international cyberattack. Oh but how will the poor millionaires break even with their overpriced streaming services if they can't destroy the internet to block some pirates? Jesus Christ, the audacity.
It's not that you _need_ sympathy, or that football deserves or needs your sympathy like it's a good cause.
It's just generally good to try to understand others instead of distancing yourself from them. I find F1, jazz, finance, and so many other things to be really boring and uninteresting, but I try to get the people who like those and connect with them. F1 people and jazz people are often more interesting than their interests; I haven't gotten there with finance yet. The world is more interesting this way, but you're under no obligation.
> In a just world LaLiga would get sued into the ground for disabling a public utility on a level equivallent to an international cyberattack.
In a just world LaLiga and FIFA would've been sued into the ground like five scandals ago, but I don't think gtowey was suggesting you try to empathise with them, but with people who like football.
I am in Spain (not spanish) and I find the obsession with watching sports very strange; in uk us au worse than here but here it indeed is bad. I do not like Musk anymore but did get starlink to not bother with this crap.
Honestly, it’s quite boring. Many games end 0-0 or 1-0 and they’re just good to have a siesta, barely better than white noise.
Even at the peak of my interest in football here in Spain, when I was ~18 and I loved playing the game (actually indoor 5 on 5, much more technical and IMO “better”) there’s no way I could stomach a game between two mid or low tier teams, it had to have FC Barcelona and/or Real Madrid. But my dad and plenty others did and do watch those games.
Then there’s the worse aspect of it: football attracts the worst kind of people; think hooligans. I know a bunch of people smarter than me that love football so it’s not a matter of “if you like football you’re stupid” but “if you’re stupid you’ll probably like football”. Then there’s football becoming the whole personality of many guys here, you quite literally can’t talk about anything else with them.
Come on.. anything of interest can be reduced to a few absurd actions absent of any context.
For example.
I don't understand how:
- moving pieces of wood around a board can have mass appeal
- Smearing colored paint on material can have mass appeal
- Smashing sticks against covered buckets can have mass appeal
