text
Trump:
It should be called football. This is football, there is no question about it.
We have to come up with another name for the NFL stuff.
Trump:
It should be called football. This is football, there is no question about it.
We have to come up with another name for the NFL stuff.
It does astound me that with all the violence and pageantry and billions of dollars spent on American football, their sports riots pale in comparison to the UK. Hell, I think us Aussies even have them beat on that front.
I think it’s because they’re not very natural sports. I’ve always got the sense that the american sports, with the exception of basketball which has a pretty strong street culture, are all hyper corporate.
That’s not to say that club football doesn’t have biiiig money involved but all the clubs sprang up naturally around localities originally, there’s a natural distribution, a grassroots and a historic link to the people.
I think European crowds are also quite different. The european sports crowds know how to be one entity, working together, a collective. The american sports crowds always feel like a bunch of individuals, they don’t feel like they even know how to properly connect with one another and form one out of many.
Maybe I’m talking out my ass too though it’s 3am and I’m tired
American fan culture seems incredibly tame. You just consume product, buy the merchandise, get drunk, do what you’re told and that’s that. In the rest of the world fans take things much more seriously. They’re rioting, brawling and stabbing eachother. They fight the other firms, the police and club management. American sports teams are traded among oligarchs like collectables and moved around the country. Nobody would be able to move Millwall FC.
Are football fans sometimes problematic? Absolutely. But at least they’re an authentic working class subculture that doesn’t take it lying down every time oligarchs or politicians try to regulate them.