Our Own Games

I'm a fair sports fan. There's one thing I don't get, and that's the constant efforts to take sports popular in one place and extend them to others. Take the generations-long campaign to make soccer take root in the US. They're probably closer than ever to actually achieving that, but I don't think they'll ever get as far as they'd like, and I don't know why they should try. Of course I know the reason is money, and since I don't get any, I can't connect to that. I guess it boils down to eventually being content with how much money you have.

Who wants to talk about money, though? I'd rather talk about letting everybody just have their own sports. It's fine by me that most of the world prefers soccer. They can have that, and we can have our sports. Just as  some enterprising individuals try to push soccer on us, others try to push our sports on them. I've read of a variety of American games being exported. There was a baseball league in Israel. Naturally Jewish Americans were into it, but the rest not as much.

There was also, I believe, a football league in Italy. Football is a common one. There was NFL Europe, which never made a ton of headway outside of some places like Germany. There has been the recently aggressive attempt to bring the NFL itself to England. I understand that they enjoy the kicking aspect of the game, which figures, but then in soccer they kick way more often, so it seems like a downgrade for them. I wouldn't be into it if I was them.

Most recently, I've read of football being tried out in India. It doesn't strike me as being a very good fit. Indeed, the article I found spoke of games in the league's first season being entirely bereft of fans. It also says though that they have improve considerably since then, but even in the article's praise there is reason to believe that the league doesn't have great long-term prospects. That is fine with me. They can play cricket for all I care.