Soccer/Football

Ive tried to post a video here but it doesent work, even if i only do the end of the URL.
Check out "Johann Cruyff Tribute".

There is actually some scholarly work that relates to this subject.

As someone who studies American and European culture and Transatlantic Culture and relations, i believe this concept of beautiful football comes from a time before we had consumer societies. Soccer dates back to the 1860s onwards, and was extremely popular before world war two, a time when we did not have developed consumer societies yet (The Marshall Plan made sure we got them after WW2, great for communist containment).

The German sociologist Werner Sombart did research on this in the early 1900s and concluded that Americans measure success in money and hard numbers, such as number of farm animals a farmer owns, the size of an estate etc. In Europe, social mobility was still extremely low, so success was measured differently. A beautiful building, a painting etc. Aestethics cannot be measured in hard numbers.

I still believe this is true to some extent even today, as i recently spent time at a University in West Kentucky. People seems to appreciate excess more, where many Europeans (and maybe also many urban americans) find it vulgar.

When it comes to sport, Americans are stat crazy. Baseball especially can be recreated almost perfectly using only statistics, and basketball and football is not far behind. Soccer however is a fluid game, not rigidly timed like football, and many many situations are different. A tackle is not a tackle, it depends on what came before and after. Situations (plays) glide into each other and overlap. One can for example not always point to a single moment when a game was lost or won because of this. I believe that this is why it is not that popular in the US, as Americans like to be able to measure success with tangible numbers still. In football, a 0-0 game can be extremely dramatic and fans can walk away thrilled, while a 1-1 game can be boring most of the time.

This stuff interests me, so forgive my nerdyness.