Kind of difficult for Spanish Clubs to do that eh? The part you bolded in my post was a direct response about Spain's La Liga. It used to be even MORE skewed towards Real and Barca.
And the reason why you knew them was American television (and Toby Charles). Maybe I should have said 50 years instead of 40.
Didn't say that at all actually. Though the selections ARE merit based, just different. Didn't say that at all actually. I was speaking to your point about how the owner can buy their way in. Well, simply having money doesn't guarantee you anything here, just like with p/r leagues ... though, there is a clear correlation in both. Weird take as you seem to be projecting a bit ... But I will say that doing this spreadsheet arguing would do most clubs in the world of p/r a solid ...
I'm going to say that currently and going forward MLS is a big driver of the sports popularity in the US among kids. The 30 and over crowd, they are more into soccer due to it being easily/readily available on weekend mornings, and weekday afternoons ("working from home") on the TV. The under 30 crowd has grown up with MLS. They are also more inclined to use "non-traditional" forms for consuming media, sports, entertainment, etc. than the older generations are. I would also not discount the impact and influence of the FIFA video Games which are hugely popular in the United States and all around the world. In cities/areas that have a MLS team, the youth outreach and partnerships with the local youth Soccer Clubs has raised the visibility of MLS. those kids go to games, and the MLS team/club becomes theirs, much like if their local area has an NBA, MLB, NHL,and/or NFL team(s). With most teams having free academies, that goes a long way. The USL has started to fill the void in areas that don't have an MLS team. Now that USL has stabilized and is growing and building this will only get better. I didn't. Soccer Made in Germany wasn't shown on our local PBS station. I imagine that was the case in many markets across the US too. I learned about soccer mostly from the 94 World Cup, the odd Premier League / First Division games on ESPN in the late 80's/early 90's. Mostly I learned about it from playing FIFA, and then doing research about the teams.
I think that MLS is a big factor, but that the ability of kids to watch EPL, La Liga and Bundesliga in their own homes just by turning on the TV set, and thus get turned on to the sport, is the biggest one. More than half the states in the United States don't have a single MLS team. Millions of people live hundreds of miles from the nearest MLS stadium.
FWIW, my HS friends and I got into the 1996 MLS season, despite living a fair distance from any MLS club.
Handball, indoors and outdoors. Field hockey. Volleyball. They do play rugby, but not as apro sport. Deutsches Team startet mit Hammergegner in die Rugby-EM sport.de|1 day ago Amateure gegen Vollprofis, Aufsteiger gegen Seriensieger: Die deutsche Rugby-Nationalmannschaft steht nach der Rückkehr in die Europameisterschaft direkt vor der schwerstmöglichen Aufgabe.
I got into MLS despite no local team. It still felt a heck of a lot closer to home and “mine” than European soccer. Try as I might I just can’t truly care about a foreign club even if there’s still some entertainment to be had from a neutral perspective.
Uh...yes.........for like nearly 30 years...... EA (same company behind the FIFA games) has Madden NFl Football, and NHL Hockey. They used to make NBA Live and Triple Play Baseball, but the NBA and MLB licenses are now with other studios. MLB The Show and NBA 2K are extremely popular games here in the states as well. Madden NFL is extremely popular in the US and there are money tournaments held for it.
So they had the know how of making a sport a digital entertainment, but missed the golden opportunity to put into their portfolio a global wide market for soccer.
Huh? EA makes the FIFA soccer video Game which is available globally.......amd has been around since the early 90's and the Sega Genesis/MegaDrive and Nintendo SNES/Super Famicon days. Konami makes the Pro Evolution Soccer game, which again is available globally....
Geography and the popularity of the sport did that. To be comparable to Europe, each US state would have to have a fully professional league. Instead, the year before MLS started play, there were four professional clubs in a country the size of continental Europe. We still have amateur teams playing in regional conferences that may cover as much land area as France and Germany combined -- and if you try to make the regions any smaller, there just aren't enough teams capable (competitively and logistically) of playing at that level.
Are handball, hockey and volleyball as 'big' in the German sporting landscape as rugby and cricket are in the UK's sporting landscape? I honestly don't know but, in the long run, American Football might be a sport to fill a stadium in Germany? Rugby is also, like American Football, a 'contact' sport, is there any contact sport in Germany? Rugby is very big in France but also it is fairly 'big' in Italy and some other European countries, Germany, or perhaps the Netherlands might be the ideal European countries for American football to get a foothold in Europe?
The one thing that in my opinion prevents American football to be able to catch the attention but of a very small group of people is the built in constant break up of the action. It may be more tuned to American viewers used to have interruptions every 5? minutes on tv for commercials, but to Europeans it's annoying as hell. Almost every popular ball game in Europe has a constant flow of action going both ways.
I believe that Germany filled the stadium for an NFL game last season. NFL Europe was heavily German based.
Germany's American football league was founded in 1979 and has four levels of pro/rel. Here are highlights of last year's German Bowl XLIII, played at Eintracht Frankfurt's stadium.