Why America Loves One Football and Not the Other Football

It doesn't matter that American soccer teams have been getting consistently better over the last decade. America still prefers their football over 'the other football'. It's a phenomenon since the rest of the world loves it. The FIFA World Cup gets around 3 billion viewers. Why?

If you trade in politics, conservatives will say it's too much of a team sport with not enough individualistic glory. Liberals will say Americans are just really stupid and don't know much about the rest of the world. But the real answer is colonization and sphere of influence.

Soccer as we know it today became popular in Britain in the mid to late 1800s. It was then spread through the British Empire which was vast, "remember the sun never sets on the British Empire". Sons of the elite locals, sent to British schools, then adopted it as a favorite.

But America was a British colony too, right? Except America gained independence in the late 1700s. We then spent about a hundred years canceling everything that was British out of spite--which is why American English spells everything differently. (Is it canceled or cancelled?)

So soccer simply came too late to have been adopted by Colonial America and too early to have given us time to get over the effects of colonization. Instead, America took the ball and ran with it, pardon the pun, in codifying American football.

Around the same time that soccer was taking off in England and the elites of other countries, America's elite university students at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton were building on a rugby/soccer-esque game. The semi-homegrown nature and elite status helped it gain momentum.

Of course colonialization isn't the only theory out there. There are others including: that America simply isn't good at it, and so we reject it; we're obsessed with the god-like size of football players; and there's a lot of faking injuries.

These don't play out. America does love celebrity culture, and there's no greater peacock than a soccer player. Football players only averaged 6'3" and 250 pounds in the last two decades, but we've loved the game longer. And Americans are the most dramatic people alive.

But soccer is on the rise in the U.S. With the new information regarding CTE--brain injury resulting from repeated hits and concussions--more parents are opting to have their children play soccer rather than Pop Warner. So don't give up on Americans! We're getting there.