Counterpoint, baseball is boring as fuck to watch and sucks

Football is literally one of the most complex sports that exists in the world, where every play has basically 8-10 highly specialized things by professional athletes happening at once, including one of the most difficult singular sports position of all time (quarterback). You can literally spend a half hour breaking down each piece of a single football play because there is so much going on on the field.

I am not a huge fan of football culture, as the tendency in the past was to oversimplify the sport, and there isn't really any excuse for how damaging it is to the players nor the pervasive ownership culture that exists within it, but football in theory is one of the coolest and most unique sports of all time, and I am absolutely looking forward to flag football in the Olympics.

baseball is also the only sport to have 10 cent beer night.

Counterpoint: the MLB's disgusting efforts to facilitate the "defecting" of talented Cuban and Venezuelan baseball players.

I love baseball but MLB is getting harder to watch with the amount of ad creep I’ve noticed in the last season or two. It’s sounds strange but I’ve actually gotten into MLS in the last year since it feels like the least advertising-intensive sport right now. I actually dropped watching the NHL because covering the ice in ads started bugging me too much.

Football is a trash sport for trash people.

Wow I don't see people who watch baseball tailgating in the parking lot getting blackout drunk and swinging on each other?

Almost certainly, but I'm gonna go against the grain and say I would rather watch football than baseball. Concussions are objectively more exciting than watching someone gradually destroy their rotator cuff.

At professional levels, the amount of risk workers are willing to take for money is a labor issue and should be mostly left to unions.

At amateur levels, all sports carry injury risk and many outdoor sports carry a real risk of death. I don't think we should ban football any more than we should ban hiking, climbing, or surfing. There should be some safety regulations and participants should be well-informed of the risks.

College football gets tricky because some programs are hugely lucrative and others (especially at lower divisions) are truly amateur.

when i am made People's Undersecretary for Sports and Culture, the PFL (People's Football League) will be converted to flag football immediately and it will be a million times more fun to watch, skyrocketing my popularity with the masses and helping me secure the ultimate prize: the Ministry of the Interior

Death to America

There’s a ritual and tradition component to it as well; you inherit the fandom of your family etc

It's the closest thing we have in the U.S. to native religion.

For me it’s the same as watching a ballet, but without the predetermined outcome of narrative theatre/dance. In the process of this, I need a protagonist I relate to. The easiest emotional connection I’m going to form is to my hometown teams given my mnemonic and experiential connection to it, especially having lived prior to the genera death of monocultural and regional identity in the US.

In the case of my alma mater and college sports, I tend to relate it as imagine your local sporting club association football team, but attach it to an entity that plays a gigantic part in educating you, housing you for your first time alone (in a walkable community no less), feeding you, facilitating your first experiences as a young adult away from home, setting up your professional network and several adult friendships — and in my case — hooks up your first big-boy job, licenses and the high pay that follows. So yeah, I’ll buy the sweatshirt and hoot like a doofus for my alma maters’ bottom-wrung Big Ten and PAC 12 teams every January and March. Hell, I’ll wear the free suits they gave me every quarter while I’m at it.

i'm a huge sports fan so i've thought a lot about this and imo it comes down to alienation. being a fan of a team gives you a "we" to be part of that i (and probably a lot of other people) don't have and desperately need

Death to America

If anything the fandom has become more generalized, commercialized and less intensive. My grandfather and his friends used to literally bellow at the TV on Sundays as if he was there live and they could hear them, and they literally wouldn't give you time of day if you were a Bears fan, because basically everyone who watched football had also played it at some point in their life.

Now, because of gambling, even lazy nerds are able to get in on it, but their amount of individual dedication to any given team, or even a single sport itself is not there. Sports may be the most important aspect of people's lives, but people have never been more adjacent (as opposed to participants) in sports.

Hell yeah I'm a baskie

baskie

Death to America