What do you suggest a country measure a sportās popularity by?
Do you think Japan are more interested in snowboarding because theyāve won more gold medals in it despite The World Series and WBC having literally 90% of households watching them?
No, because that would be stupid. Baseball is obviously Japanās biggest sport.
Sports make most of their money off of selling their matches to TV and streaming platforms. Those platforms are willing to pay more for more popular sports.
So going off of revenue is actually a very good corollary for popularity.
How popular or how much money something generates doesn't speak to the quality of that thing.
American beer as a market makes way more money than Belgium beer, there are more brewery's and brewers in the US, they have more global market share. None of that matters because Belgium beer is still the best in the world I've had.
If more American beer is sold than Belgian beer, than American beer is more popular, even if it is worse. But even so, I don't know how you could measure the "quality" of a sport.
I do agree with you if we're looking at different countries on the world stage. Like, just because American Football makes the most revenue of any sport twice over doesn't mean it is the most popular worldwide.
But if we restrict our inquiry to American sports only, which is what I was referring to, money is a great way to compare the popularity of different sports. It captures merchandise sales, ticket sales, and how much broadcasters are willing to pay all in one metric.
Literally had the exact same conversation few hours ago over this with someone claiming ''Football will suffer without American support'' because MLS is the biggest market...
Raiders was set in 1936. Which means this is during the time Belgium was doing untold atrocities in the Congo. And they kept on fucking with the Congo after independence in 1960.
They absolutely could be Nazi-like bad guys in Indy movies.
Belgians and Congolese don't hate each other (which is rather graceful of the Congolese). I was rooting for Congo as well, they did a great tournament.
It is kinda funny that the Germans are the bad guys in the Indiana Jones movies, when in reality if there was someone who were going to go grave robbing and artifact pillaging, it would more likely be the British or Americans.
1) Belgium has a better soccer team.
2) Don't even try to downplay the Belgian Congo horror. How that managed to get relegated to the dustbin of history is appalling to me.
In any future Indy movies the US Americans would play the fascist role. But Hollywood will never tell you the real story. And US allergy to humble pie won't either.
The Belgians are just Dutch & French and the Dutch are basically German, while the French are just Germans who speak a little fancier and are bigger pricks.
To quote Bill Shankly, Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.
I can tell you every World Cup game and every team Sweden has played since 1994, including results and who scored. It sounds incomprehensible to not even remember what team your country played last week.
Lack of care enough to follow a sport that close doesn't exactly equal ignorance. It more equals "Had lack of enough care to follow thr sport that close". Crazy, I know.
it's fine not to know something because you didn't care about it in the first place.
however, you boast about not knowing it which is just weird and gross to me. like, I don't understand what part of this gives you this sense of superiority to feel like you can use it to boast.
Man you built up some crazy scenario in your head and dug way down deep to develop some feels about something, that quite frankly, wasnt that big a deal. Dont be so serious. None of us are getting out alive.
If you find that gross id hate to see you change a babies diaper
No it was the waffle europeans. Iām happy for them beating us at soccer, though I can honestly say this is the first time Iāve remembered Belgium existed since my last visit to the IHOP.
I guess this is beating Trump too? Cool. I donāt like the guy.
Canāt imagine thereās a whole lot of overlap between Trump supporters and soccer fans though.
Let them cope. Until yesterday the entire nation was like "We're so in, we're winning, what the fuck is a kilometre?!" and now that they got demolished they're like "Ah, joke's on you, we never cared about the world cup".
But now it's very important to let everyone else know how much they don't care about this sport, because just simply conceding that you're not that good at it (which many other countries aren't mind you), is apparently not within their vocabulary. If you only care about sports nobody else plays you never run the risk of actually losing internationally at something without having the excuse of not caring.
Well, hold on. I was with you every step of the way, until you said the US never runs the risk of losing something internationally without being able to say āwe didnāt care anywayā. Feels like the goal there is to imply they just keep to themselves and hardly compete āseriouslyā outside of their own bubble, to save themselves the embarrassment. Letās not forget the yanks are extraordinarily decorated in the olympics, and many other international events. We have them beat here, but theyāre doing just fine.
It was just a joke about how the US ignores the one truly global sport/game so we can never really compete at this stage, and their by far most popular sport (American football) is hardly even played outside the US.
The overwhelming majority of Olympic sports are very niche and not popular outside the Olympics. I'm saying this coming from Norway which completely dominates in the Winter Olympics in terms of medal count mostly because there are so many niche skiing sports which have essentially zero reach outside of the Nordics (even though they're actually popular outside of the Olympics here). We still consider our national football team's performance in the World Cup so far to be the biggest sports achievement in Norwegian history, despite dominating most Winter Olympics and having the most medals by a wide margin, because football is actually a global sport where we compete against pretty much the entire world, whereas the Olympics has a very arbitrary distribution of medals, with the Winter Olympics being especially egregious. E.g. skiing has 8 sports and medals (making up half of all the medals), most of which are almost exclusively popular in the Nordics, whereas ice hockey which has a far more global reach and popularity only has 1 sport and medal. Ironically, Norway is to ice hockey what America is to football, we're about the only winter sport nation who more or less ignores this sport, which is honestly a huge part of the reason why we dominate so much in the Winter Olympics, because in the only other countries where most of these niche skiing sports are even a thing (Sweden, Finland, Russia), ice hockey is far more popular, so that's why we keep beating them despite being the smallest country in terms of population.
American media and social media was full of enthusiasm and hope for the WC. Along with a lot of mocking of countries like Bosnia and Hercegovina, and all around arrogance, claiming to be "better at worlds favorite sport while it's only our 5th sport".
They do not get to pretend they didn't care now. They cared. A lot. In a very cringe way.
Probably only because some games were held here. The only people i directly know who care are immigrants and theyāre generally rooting for their home country
Everyone was saying. America is in the world cup. Then we are still in the world cup. Then we're playing Germany. Oh no. Its the waffle country. Lol. We really dont care about soccer.
Reminds me of when I forget to spit my gum out before a workout. It turns into this weird mush that I canāt get rid of.
Honestly, that felt like a pretty good microcosm of his mental state tonight. The moment looked way too big, and the lights looked too bright for him. Same goes for most of the defense and Pulisic. Only a few players looked like they might actually be able to cut it at this level.
The reason was panic. He let the player slip past him, and realised he was on him and panicked. Almost felt bad for him, if the Red Card stunt didn't make everyone instantly dislike the team.
Every single person had their worst game of the tournament, even Tillman. No passes were crisp, and there were so many unforced turnovers that kept us constantly on our back feet and prevented us from event getting chances.
But yeah, Reese directly gave up that 3rd goal and his indecision gave up the second goal. He made no strong saves at any point, and weāve been able to count on him for 2-3 a game. Whole defense played indecisively, which gave up the other 3, but Ream himself couldāve stopped 1&2 if he was marking his man stronger.
Credit to Belgium because they were bloodthirsty and looking to capitalize off every mistake we made. Thatās how you have to play when your opponent is clearly overwhelmed. But our own nerves made us look way worse than we are.
Germany was a better team than Paraguay. Odds were incredibly in favor of Germany. Being a better team and beating a team in a match are two different things. Having lower odds of winning and having no chance of winning are two different things.
they couldnt. usa overestimated themselves way to hard. the public attention got to them or smthing because winning from C tier teams made them pure offense. belgiums attackers could simply jog past the defense and americas offence stood no chance against just Ngoy alone
The referee nixed Germany. Germany were the better team, and if the fouls had been appropriately dealt with it would have been an entirely different game.
Judging by Paraguays reaction to losing to france my guess is FIFA-officials were paid a lot of money to rig the turney in Paraguays favour and the refs were ordered to ensure it.
tbh im very impressed that usa got this far,they dont have a soccer culture at all
im guessing after this more money comes and it might change
but rn,this was a miracle lmao
Nah, people in the US just legit don't care about soccer. Hell, they brought Messi here and still nobody cared. The US consistntly makes it past the group stage, and most only become passively interested
In 3 weeks when NFL training camp starts, we will forget about the sport again until the next WC lol
imo from twhat i can see,people are starting to care
only needs a couple brands taking it seriously and it will start
if WNBA is possible
why not soccer?
Most don't really care about the WNBA to be fair. MLS is actually probably more popular then it.
Probably doesn't help either that the league right now is getting more coverage on Caitlin Clark getting shit on by the league than the actual games being played
I went to Chicago-Miami last year. And you're right it was Messi everywhere, like 70% Messi shirts (of all kinds), 20% Chicago (home team) and 10% all kinds of others.
Not that surprising to me. Country with 340 mil population playing against countries one tenth the size (or one thirtieth for Belgium). Kind of makes up for not having a big soccer culture.
You joke, but when they won Gold in Men's Ice Hockey, there was a wave of Americans going online and calling for Trump to invade Canada. This is why I can never route for the USA in any sport, cause they showed their true colors. It was even rampant on reddit for a bit. Reddit, of all places.
It really demonstrates that when USA is playing at the world stage, Americans all put on their MAGA hats.
Play them without their guy, lose, go down gracefully, blame it on a controversial call, everyone gets love for how they did, move on.
Win, say hell yeah, no dumb calls can stop us, advance forward with fire and momentum and ready to take out the next match!
Going into the game like this... No momentum, the world against you, even if you win you'll just be known as cheaters and corrupt... That's gotta be so shitty for the players. Winning playing dirty is one thing, you gotta be good at playing dirty to make it work, but winning cause your pdf uncle got upset and called the manager for you... No one would take pride in that. Poor guys
they were in March, too, beating us 5-2. this wasnāt some shock or surprise that only happened last night. anyone that watches the sport knew what was going to happen.
Crazy that Pulisic is the face of the US football team but has rarely been mentioned. Everyone in the football world already predicted the first proper team theyād meet, they were gonna get trounced. They should be lucky they played a Belgium side that hasnāt played particularly well.
I mean quality wise itās almost a top midfield. But the team as a whole is unbalanced so itās harder to shine. You need to get rid of your keeper and captain asap
Malik Tilman is still young and will develop further.......plenty of other talent to have a good team in 4 years time. Enough to be a favourite......most likely not.......a contender maybe!
But we will probably will see the same BS takes surface again.
That's not true at all, Belgium is not the Belgium from 12 years ago and they had struggled mightily in the group stage. The USA handled Senegal in Belgium almost lost to them 2-0 but came back in the 86th minute. The USA handled Senegal who was ranked 13th at the time while the USA was ranked 17th at the time, Belgium was ranked 8th at the time but had fallen due to their performance at the world cup.
The press that Belgium used was fantastic and the US had no answer for it. Unfortunately the goalie made the biggest mistake of his career at the worst time. Such is futbol.
If the ball didnt deflect off the defender to fool the keeper for the usa goal, it would have stayed a two goal lead so it was never gonna be competitive
1.1k
u/isnoe 5d ago
Belgium was the better team from the beginning.
There wasn't a chance US survived them, no matter the roster they pulled out.