Unfortunately, as a life long fan of football in the UK, this rings true from the opposite side, and I'm sorry you had to go through that.
However, the sport itself has nothing todo with the bigger picture here. It just so happens that it's the biggest sport in the world, hence worth so much money to $REGIME who will do anything they can to capitalise.
Association football, itself, in isolation, is a fine game. There's nothing inherently bad about it. If actual friends of mine want a kick-around then sure, I'm game.
But it's the culture around the sport in the UK, and greater Europe, that's awful. Remember hooligan "firms" in the 1990s? Those things don't happen in a vacuum. Chiefly, the football culture in the UK is inextricably tied to the entrenched class system, in the worst ways, unfortunately - and I haven't seen the Premier League's televised pundits ever advise their fans to maybe, perhaps, actually be good ambassadors for the sport to the rest of us.
(Okay, Michael Owen is an exception - my perception is the rest are like Eric Cantona: officially reprimanded, but we can tell people are lapping up his then abhorrent personal conduct. The same way people support Trump, I suppose).
FIFA aren't running a tight-ship from the top. The tiers under them aren't coming close, and the conceptual levels below are only worse.
I have issues agreeing with you, I am more willing to think that certain issues are more about the system segregating classes, not educating or giving chances, than violence exists because of football, then of course football is more accessible as you can play it with a paper ball, and has bigger numbers? I would say that violence would still come out as it's there and (used to come?) comes out with football, what should we do? Only follow sports that require better social status and more expensive tools?
Or like yeah there are some example of players that were violent and crazy, as you can find in any place with a number of humans doing it, I'd say HSBC was laudering cartels money and funding terrorist, all bankers are criminals?
> Association football, itself, in isolation, is a fine game. There's nothing inherently bad about it.
Actually one can argue that the rules in football haven't kept up with the evolution of humans. When they defined the size of a goal, the average adult male was a full 10 cm shorter than they are today. People are running faster and jumping higher.
The sport would be a lot more exciting if you increased the physical dimensions of goals and pitches, so you would have 10 goals in an average game instead of 0 to
3.
Average goals per game has been 2.6 - 2.7 since 1962. Highest was 1954 with 5.38.
10 goals has never been an average, to reach that, the goals should be twice the size at least.
I don't thing the size of the goal or people getting taller / faster is the reason we don't see many scoring. A big problem for me is the amount of downtime and the amount of foulplaying. Schwalbes are a real skill. Players fall to the ground way too quickly.
I'm not a huge football fan, but I'd argue part of the excitement of the sport comes from the fact that it is low soring - individual goals matter a lot, rather than just being a minor tick towards the overall score. Higher scoring games could dull those moments significantly.
> The sport would be a lot more exciting if you [suggested changes]
Do note soccer is currently tremendously exciting for millions of fans worldwide. I understand you mean well, and everyone is free to suggest changes (some of them good), but the sport right now is very exciting for huge numbers of people.
Informally it's a tremendously easy and fun game to pick up. Any kid with a foot ball and some room can play with their friends. It's even how some players start.
I don't think excitement is the biggest issue with football. The biggest issues are probably corruption in the business organizations around it, violence due to hooligans, etc.
When sports are so high scoring and close with so many goals they just boil down to the last 5 mins of the game being the only part that actually matters.
Having grown up in America right when soccer was inching towards popularity, and having then lived in Europe for many years, I've always been puzzled by the violence associated with the game.
I can easily see it being a class-related thing in the UK, but the wealthy and cultured are very much into football in, say, Italy and Germany.
I'm very glad that kind of sports-violence culture isn't a worldwide thing, and it makes me sad that the same sport can be innocent enough to be associated with suburban "soccer moms" in one place, while celebrating the wrong team can get you killed in another place.
> However, the sport itself has nothing todo with the bigger picture here.
I have a book that convincingly makes the case that physical exercise, sports, is a favorite tool of the fascist. To my knowledge, it's never translated from Dutch, but I think there must be research on this in English as well.
However, the sport itself has nothing todo with the bigger picture here. It just so happens that it's the biggest sport in the world, hence worth so much money to $REGIME who will do anything they can to capitalise.