Image commercially licensed from: Unsplash
By Daniel Finch
Growing up in the United States, it’s fairly common to think that American sports are the peak of entertainment. The pace of the game in basketball, the brutality of football, and the intelligence of baseball are all appealing aspects to those who watch. Simultaneously, sports like soccer and rugby are put down as boring or different and, therefore, uninteresting.
When was the last NBA game you watched from beginning to end without getting up to make yourself a sandwich or walk the dog? When was the last NFL game where you spent more time watching than analyzing the game whilst commercials ran? As for baseball, when was the last game you really sat down and watched from first pitch to last? All of this does not include playoffs when the players really amp it up a notch.
As a test for yourself in the future, buy an NFL Sunday Ticket, NBA League Pass, or MLB Extra Innings package and watch out-of-market games. When you do this, they remove all local advertisements and do not fill it in with other ads. Instead, you are met with current camera shots of the court (so you can watch the t-shirt cannon people!) or a rotating sign of that league’s logo. It wasn’t until experiencing a game like this the tone will realize how many commercials you are stuck with.
On the other hand, find some time to watch a Premier League match. Don’t worry; you’ll have 15 minutes to get something done in the middle, like making that sandwich or walking the dog. But be careful; it is exactly 15 minutes before halftime. The first half is just over 45 minutes of nonstop “action,” like every sport. Soccer has its peaks and valleys, and then halftime for exactly 15 minutes, followed by 45 more minutes of nonstop action. There really is no comparison in terms of watchability.
The common refrain from American sports fans is that it sucks to watch a sport that could end up 0-0, and that’s it. Imagine no goals being scored at all and no team winning. But also imagine the same match with 22-goal opportunities, just no goals. Also, it should be pointed out that part of American sports that makes it interesting (the high scores) is just made up. If each goal counted for 7 points, then all of a sudden, the Premier League is more interesting. So, in the 2023 NFL season, there were just over 4.5 touchdowns scored per game; in the Premier League, just over 3.15 goals scored per game. Now, let’s compare that to the total time in play. In the Premier League, it is a modest one hour when the ball is in play, and in the NFL, it is a mere 11 minutes.
Basketball isn’t much better with commercials. Is there anything worse than a game that has been moderately uninteresting until the 4th quarter when one team comes back and makes it close, only for there to be a series of fouls, timeouts, and reviews to make the length of the 4th quarter equal to the whole rest of the game? Well, you know, you have to stick in that Arby commercial during that 30-second timeout with 10 seconds left in the game.
Unfortunately, American sports just don’t have the staying power outside of the States. This is due to their lack of actual play, plus their nonstop need to add more commercials. For teams backed by huge companies, with stadium rights in the hundreds of millions and sponsorships up there, too, it seems as if force-feeding the public commercials shouldn’t be the number one priority. Yet here they are. Professional sports seem to be at an all-time low in America, and it all comes down to force-feeding the viewers.
Published by: Aly Cinco