CS707 wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:CS707 wrote:
American soccer culture is built around emulating the Europeans. It's the only major US sport where people would openly admit the European equivalent is much superior.
Well, I'll say first that you're certainly right that American soccer founds know that American soccer is not that good, and they generally welcome all the stuff they like from World Cup soccer.
But I'll also say that there's a lot of Latin American influence. You can say it all originates in England, and so Europe influenced Latin America, but Brazil/Argentina/Mexico have a lot of direct influence on US soccer fans.
Europe, not necessarily just England. The major European leagues are generally considered superior to any of the South American leagues and developmentally US soccer typically looks to Europe for its cues. Latin American leagues are pretty niche internationally speaking. Mostly because of the massive economic advantage Euro leagues have. The best Latin American players end up in Europe.
To be clear, I'm referring to the fact that it spread from England to the rest of Europe, which is why:
a) the world uses an English word "football" to refer to the sport
b) many variations of "football" exist from the British Isles and their colonies (Association, Rugby, Gaelic, American, Canadian, Australian)
Truly, it's like the rest of the world just picked one version of the game out of many from the Anglosphere to be their favorite sport.
Now, obviously that doesn't mean the British are the best are the best at the sport at this time, just like they've been surpassed in plenty of other sports they invented (lawn tennis, golf, etc). If you're a young British athlete and your specialty can't be played inside of a pub, you should probably move to a lower latitude.
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