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Albatross wrote:

dogma wrote:I definitely think that one of the reasons Americans tend to 'not get' soccer is that it has a far higher emphasis on field play than any of the more popular alternatives. Americans, in general, seem to view sport as a function of scoring, rather than scoring as a function of sport.

Ah! This! This is what I was getting at, you just put it better. 'Functional' is probably better than 'artless' as a description, in all honesty. It seems like the entertainment is derived from scoring, as opposed to the play.

So, take the goal out of the game. Completely remove that objective from the game itself. Keep the art and all that. Make it more like figure skating, where an indivdual judges opinion is all that matters.

The game will lose something primal to its nature, but at least it will be artful.

Albatross wrote:

dogma wrote:I definitely think that one of the reasons Americans tend to 'not get' soccer is that it has a far higher emphasis on field play than any of the more popular alternatives. Americans, in general, seem to view sport as a function of scoring, rather than scoring as a function of sport.

Ah! This! This is what I was getting at, you just put it better. 'Functional' is probably better than 'artless' as a description, in all honesty. It seems like the entertainment is derived from scoring, as opposed to the play.

This is not really true. We love the scoring but the scoring is nothing to us if it's not well played or exceptional. Bird or Magic weaving through opposing players to sink a basket is art in and of itself. The 80 yard long bomb toss that gets caught just before running out of bounds gets our blood up.
The difference I see is the time scale. Baskets are made up to several times a minute, football is dissected into downs. So it becomes more like do you like to watch sprints or a long distance run. In soccer there is just too much field play for our shortened attention spans.

Notice I don't use baseball in examples because baseball is as boring as golf.