Comment by moffkalast
4 months ago
I will never understand how kicking or throwing a ball around somehow has mass appeal. Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
4 months ago
I will never understand how kicking or throwing a ball around somehow has mass appeal. Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
It’s the harmless version of “my tribe battles your tribe” for thousands of years, without the bloodshed. We’ve evolved to enjoy competition in general.
Not everyone of course. But I find sports fans to be not that different from chess fans for example, in their passion, armchair strategy, and sheer emotional ups and downs.
My personal favorite sport is Formula 1. It tickles all the same parts of our sports fans brains, but also tickles my nerd brain with the strategy, lap math, and all the precision and tech (apart from the fact that I personally looooove driving and Kart racing)
About the tech, you’d be amazed at the amount of tech involved in F1. Just the bandwidth used for telemetry. The supercomputer simulations performed during races, etc. and that’s just the computer tech.
But it isn't even my tribe vs. your tribe anymore since players got to the highest bidder rather than to their country / state / city team.
Probably in the days of tribal / city warfare, warriors could be bought too.
F1 I sort of understand, there's a lot of aspects to it even though it is at the end of the day, a bunch of people driving in circles. The memes are good anyhow.
With foot/basketball, hockey, etc. there is no technical aspect if you don't get into pro tier shoe and ball design or whichever non-strictly rule defined straws one could competitively grasp at, but I guess most people relate through familiarity of actually playing it themselves? But there is a sort of chicken-and-egg problem there where to play it well enough for it to be actually fun you need to already be a fan and have a good grasp of the rules, otherwise it's just people running back and forth on a court.
Yeah I actually used to find soccer boring until I started watching it with my son, the sheer skill levels, there’s a lot of strategy involved. Yeah they don’t go into shoes or anything.
But for example, forcing a foul at just the right time, or causing offsides by positioning yourself, etc. those carry some level of strategy, at least how much I can grasp.
But the one common thing with every professional sport is the skill level for that particular skill in the sport is unlike anything we can comprehend.
I remember a friend recalling a professional baseball game he attended, and he described how those guys were warming up, and they were just playing catch to warm up their arms… they were able to throw the ball to within inches of the recipient’s glove every time from hundreds of feet away.
That sort of skill makes it enjoyable to watch human performance levels if you can appreciate how hard that particular skill is, especially if you’ve tried it.
Equivalents in F1 are how a race engineer will tell a driver to slow down by half a second over the course of a full lap to preserve their tires, and they more or less do it.
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I will never understand F1 fans. So many engineering hours and so much gas wasted just to drive in a circle a bit faster than the other guy. It's not even remotely applicable to any real task due to the myriad of arbitrary rules. At least football players are physically fit.
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I've played football (soccer for Americans) with people who were very good who didn't watch the game at all. Similarly for basketball.
People watch sports because it gives them an emotional investment in something that has a new result each week, is not scripted and shows incredible skill and fitness.
It's also a lot healthier than the people who follow politics like sport. They get moral when their team loses.
Do you watch TV, Internet videos, film, or read books ?
That's just another form of entertainment.
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Insanely ignorant.
It's one thing to know you don't enjoy it for yourself.
But saying "I will never understand" sounds like willfull ignorance. It sounds dangerously close to not wanting to understand because you don't want to accidentally develop any sympathy for "the other side". Please don't fall into that trap.
What are you even on about, why would I need sympathy for an optional interest that is by all accounts pretty mainstream and well established worldwide? It's not a disability, it's not an endangered species, it's a billion dollar commercial industry. I just don't see the appeal.
In a just world LaLiga would get sued into the ground for disabling a public utility on a level equivallent to an international cyberattack. Oh but how will the poor millionaires break even with their overpriced streaming services if they can't destroy the internet to block some pirates? Jesus Christ, the audacity.
It's not that you _need_ sympathy, or that football deserves or needs your sympathy like it's a good cause.
It's just generally good to try to understand others instead of distancing yourself from them. I find F1, jazz, finance, and so many other things to be really boring and uninteresting, but I try to get the people who like those and connect with them. F1 people and jazz people are often more interesting than their interests; I haven't gotten there with finance yet. The world is more interesting this way, but you're under no obligation.
> In a just world LaLiga would get sued into the ground for disabling a public utility on a level equivallent to an international cyberattack.
In a just world LaLiga and FIFA would've been sued into the ground like five scandals ago, but I don't think gtowey was suggesting you try to empathise with them, but with people who like football.
Because you are acting like smug asshole. People don't like smug assholes, and you aren't helping the world or yourself by being one.
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I used to think like you about sports. Until I started doing more sports, like bouldering (although at a pretty basic level).
I appreciate watching e.g bouldering competitions now simply because I can appreciate the difficulty more.
Had I stuck with playing football I imagine I would have had a similar experience now.
Even worse when half of it is just people arguing over arbitrary rule interpretations.
Planning around rule interpretations is part of the strategy (if you’re good) (usually)
I am in Spain (not spanish) and I find the obsession with watching sports very strange; in uk us au worse than here but here it indeed is bad. I do not like Musk anymore but did get starlink to not bother with this crap.
It's a fun game
Honestly, it’s quite boring. Many games end 0-0 or 1-0 and they’re just good to have a siesta, barely better than white noise.
Even at the peak of my interest in football here in Spain, when I was ~18 and I loved playing the game (actually indoor 5 on 5, much more technical and IMO “better”) there’s no way I could stomach a game between two mid or low tier teams, it had to have FC Barcelona and/or Real Madrid. But my dad and plenty others did and do watch those games.
Then there’s the worse aspect of it: football attracts the worst kind of people; think hooligans. I know a bunch of people smarter than me that love football so it’s not a matter of “if you like football you’re stupid” but “if you’re stupid you’ll probably like football”. Then there’s football becoming the whole personality of many guys here, you quite literally can’t talk about anything else with them.
This last bit is a team sports thing, not a football thing specifically. Which sport it is (or several, sometimes) depends on the country.
You find baseball more fun than soccer because the scores are higher? What about Waterpolo?
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I've seen some incredible, riveting 0-0 matches, 1-0, etc.
Come on.. anything of interest can be reduced to a few absurd actions absent of any context.
For example. I don't understand how: - moving pieces of wood around a board can have mass appeal - Smearing colored paint on material can have mass appeal - Smashing sticks against covered buckets can have mass appeal
Agreed. I don't particularly feel inclined to watch millionaires kick a ball around.
What irks me are the grown, drunk people that get infected with hatred towards the other team and its fans.
And break stuff of people who have nothing to do with it like happens so often after this crap. I saw it many times in the Netherlands.
It's (hopefully) unscripted drama. People enjoy drama.
Bread and circuses.