在美国，为什么足球运动不是更受欢迎?（四）

Chris Knight
This can’t be a serious question, surely!
How can a 60 minute NFL game take 3.5 hours? The games stop for TV commercials, for goodness sake! That’s ridiculous. Pathetic actually.
As for the scoring, first off, you’re comparing the wrong sports - compare American Football to Rugby, not soccer. However, even then, you’re talking numbers. 7 points for a TD, compared to 1 for a goal. Swap that around, 1 point for TD, 7 for a goal. A 21–14 scoreline becomes 3–2. It seems Americans with this complaint are literally blinded by numbers. It’s like they don’t have the attention span unless the numbers are bigger than somebody else’s. Again, pathetic.
Now, I actually love the NFL, although given I’m a 49ers fan you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise! However, trying to argue that soccer is boring in any way when American football is, to over 6,000,000,000 people, the most tedious and boring game ever created, is laughable.
Questions like this are why the world laughs at America.

这肯定不是一个严肃的问题！
一场60分钟的美国国家橄榄球联盟（NFL）比赛怎么能花3.5小时？看在上帝的份上，停止比赛播放电视广告！这太荒谬了，其实很可悲。
至于得分，首先，你在比较错误的体育项目——应该把美式橄榄球和英式橄榄球（ Rugby）进行比较，而不是与足球运动进行比较。然而，即便如此，你也在谈论数字。触地得分7分，而进球得1分。交换一下，触地得分1分，进球得7分。21–14的分数线变为3–2。似乎有这种抱怨的美国人真的被数字迷住了。就好像他们除非数字比别人大，否则就无法保持注意力。再说一遍，可悲。
现在，我实际上很喜欢NFL，尽管考虑到我是旧金山49人队(美国橄榄球队)的球迷，你可能会认为我对此有其他看法！然而，当有超过60亿人认为美式足球是迄今为止最乏味和无聊的比赛时，试图争论足球在任何方面都是无聊的，这简直是可笑的。
正是这样的问题让世界嘲笑美国。

Steven Haddock
Here’s the thing.
As a participant sport, it’s immensely popular. In 2015, there were an estimated 24 million people who played the sport at some level.
It is also growing as a spectator sport. Right now, it’s more popular than both baseball and hockey.
But the level of play of the sport isn’t getting much better than it was in the 1970s when the NASL was formed. Right now, the U.S. women’s teams are the best in the world, but the men’s teams are floating in the middle of the pack. When you realize the United States has the third largest population in the world, it underperforms in soccer in relation to how many players there are.
The consensus opinion seems to be:

事实上是这样的。
作为一项参与型运动，足球非常受欢迎。据估计，2015年有约2,400万人在某个层次上参与了这项运动。
足球作为一项观赏性运动也在不断发展。目前，它比棒球和冰球都更受欢迎。
但这项运动的水平并没有比20世纪70年代美国足球联盟成立时的足球水平更好。目前，美国女子足球队是世界上最强大的，但男子足球队在世界排名中仍处于中游。当你意识到美国是世界上第三人口大国时，你会发现相对于球员数量，美国在足球方面的表现不尽如人意。
普遍观点似乎是：
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United States professional soccer sucks. Former U.S. national team coach Jurgen Klinnsman benched his best player because he played in the MLS. Now, part of MLS’s mission is to provide more opportunities for Canadian and American players to get high level experience. The problem is that their national team coaches know that, if they’re that good, it’s not hard for them to play in Europe and get better competition. A lot of American and Canadian players want to play in the MLS because (1) it’s easier and (2) they get to be stars, but the downside is they don’t play against very good competition.
United States college soccer sucks. Heck, even MLS coaches don’t look at college programs, and European coaches ignore U.S. college altogether. NCAA football, basketball and even hockey play at a very high level now, but if you’re playing NCAA soccer you’re not learning much and your competition is weak. If you want to be serious about soccer, you sign up with a European academy when you’re too young to sign a contract and you hope to wind up with a high school diploma because the NCAA won’t consider you an amateur (Canadian junior hockey has the same issue - it’s a better road to the NHL but the NCAA sees you as “professional”).

美国的职业足球糟透了。前美国国家队教练尤尔根·克林斯曼（ Jurgen Klinnsman ）把他最好的球员放在替补席上，就因为他在美国职业足球大联盟（MLS）踢球。现在，MLS的使命之一是为加拿大和美国球员提供更多获得高水平经验的机会。问题在于，他们的国家队教练知道，如果球员足够优秀，在欧洲踢球并获得更好的竞争力并不难。许多美国和加拿大球员想在MLS踢球，因为（1）这更容易，（2）他们可以成为明星，但缺点是他们不会面对很强的对手。
美国大学足球烂透了。甚至MLS的教练都不看大学的足球项目，而欧洲的教练则完全忽视美国的大学足球。目前，全国大学体育协会的橄榄球、篮球甚至冰球水平都很高，但如果你在全国大学体育协会踢足球，你学不到什么，而且你的竞争对手也很弱。如果你想认真对待足球，在你还小到不能签合同的时候，你就和欧洲的足球学院签约，你希望最后能拿到高中文凭，因为全国大学体育协会不会把你当作业余球员(加拿大少年曲棍球也有同样的问题——这是通往 全国曲棍球联合会（NHL）的一条更好的道路，但全国大学体育协会认为你是“职业球员”)。

Soccer is still seen as a recreational sport in the US and Canada. Football, baseball, basketball and hockey are seen as ultra-competitive at pretty much every level. Soccer, on the other hand, is a sport you can play for exercise and fun, and it’s great at both. A lot of those 24 million players are adults - it’s one of the very few sports in the United States where it’s easy to continue to play competitively once you leave college. Soccer leagues are a lot easier to arrange than the others, and even formerly competitive players like to play for fun.
Meanwhile, football and basketball are entrenched at the professional and college level in both the United State and Canada. They’re both played at a highly competitive level right down to the high school level, and sometimes earlier than that.
And given that a standard soccer field usually won’t fit inside the boundaries of an American football field, that means you would have to build a lot of purpose built soccer facilities to make it work, particularly at U.S. colleges. Given that soccer is currently one of those sports that colleges run at a loss, that’s not going to encourage its growth.

足球在美国和加拿大仍然被视为一种娱乐运动。橄榄球、棒球、篮球和冰球在几乎每个层次都被视为极具竞争力。另一方面，足球是一种你可以出于锻炼和娱乐而参与的运动，而且在这两方面表现出色。这2400万球员中有很多是成年人——在美国，这是为数不多的一种在你离开大学后仍然轻松进行竞技的运动。与其他运动相比，足球联赛更容易组织，即使是曾经具有竞争力的球员也喜欢为了娱乐而踢球。
与此同时，橄榄球和篮球在美国和加拿大的专业和大学中都根深蒂固。在高中阶段，有时甚至更早，他们的竞技水平都很高。
鉴于一个标准的足球场通常无法容纳在美式橄榄球场地的范围内，这意味着你需要建造许多专用的足球设施才能使其发挥作用，尤其是在美国的大学。考虑到目前足球是大学运营亏损的项目之一，这并不会促使足球运动取得发展。

Thomas L. Johnson
I'm sitting here on a Saturday morning watching Chelsea take on Tottenham, so I probably have sacrificed any claim to be a true American.
Americans don't really get sports that are televised without commercial breaks every five or six minutes. It wears them out. Baseball, a sport that lacks a time clock and where the typical score is 3-2 or 1-0, is perfect for regular bathroom breaks and trips to the microwave for another batch of Redenbacher. Football, where you can put in a commercial break before a kick-off, after a kick-off and four plays later is more like it. Plenty of collisions and a lot of happy chatter from commentators and "color men' in the 45 seconds where players stand in circles discussing their next move.
When the World Cup takes place next summer, the US team will be populated by a bunch of athletes who speak English as a second language and practice their occupation in other countries

一个周六的早晨，我坐在这里观看切尔西队对托特纳姆热刺队的比赛，所以我可能已经牺牲了作为一个真正的美国人的资格。
美国人真的不太喜欢在每五六分钟就有商业广告的电视体育节目，这让他们感到疲惫。棒球是一项没有计时器的运动，通常比分是3比2或1比0，所以你可以定期去洗手间，或者去微波炉里再拿一份Orville Redenbacher 微波炉爆米花。而橄榄球，你可以在开球前、开球后和四场比赛后插播广告，在45秒的比赛中，球员们围成一圈讨论下一步棋的时候，评论员和“有色人种”之间有很多碰撞和愉快的闲聊。
当明年夏天世界杯举行时，美国队将由一群以英语为第二语言的运动员组成，他们将在其他国家践行他们的职业。
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The reason I get so talky when someone asks a question like this is that I have absolutely nobody with whom to share my love of the "beautiful game." If I go to a Bundesliga game or a French Ligue game, I almost always go alone while my American travel companions look for a sports bar playing American Football highlights. It gets really lonely to be a fan of football. And my suspicion is that, outside of Portland or St. Louis, it will continue that way.
So if you love the game in the USA like I have, you have adopted an anti-social mindset. You are going to have to live like any other person does under the grips of OCD, I better end this. The game is entering its tenth minute and something big could happen sometime in the next half hour. Then again, maybe not. 0-0.

当有人问我这样的问题时，我之所以会滔滔不绝，是因为我完全没有人可以分享我对“美丽的游戏”的热爱。如果我去看德甲或法甲的比赛，我几乎总是一个人去，而我的美国旅伴则在寻找一个播放美式橄榄球集锦的运动酒吧。成为足球迷真的很孤独。我怀疑，在波特兰和圣路易斯之外，这种情况还会继续下去。
所以如果你在美国像我一样喜欢这项运动，那么你已经接受了一种反社会的心态。你将不得不像其他人一样在强迫症的控制下生活，我最好结束这一切。比赛已经进行到第十分钟了，在接下来的半小时内可能会发生重大事件。话又说回来，也许没有变化，比赛结果是0： 0。

John Cate
Soccer is enormously popular in the United States, just not as a professional sport—yet.
As of 2015, 24.4 million Americans played soccer on a regular basis, which is more than the entire population of 140 countries. It is the third most-played sport in the country, after basketball and American football, and the fastest-growing, in part because of the country’s increasing Latino population. It is also, as I have written before, a very accessible sport, since it can be played with a few very simple items. You can’t play American football or baseball without costly equipment.
It has never been a major pro sport here, but there has been a professional soccer league of some sort for more than 40 years, and Major League Soccer has been around for more than two decades and has steadily grown. I have covered sports in the USA as a journalist for more than 25 years, and we barely paid attention to soccer when I started. Today, it gets as much resources devoted to it as football, baseball or basketball.

在美国，足球非常受欢迎，只是还不被视为一项职业运动。
截至2015年，有2,440万美国人定期参与足球运动，这超过了140个国家的整个人口总数。足球是美国第三大流行运动，仅次于篮球和橄榄球，并且发展长速度最快，部分原因是该国日益增长的拉丁裔人口。正如我之前所写，它也是一项非常易于接触的运动，因为它可以用一些非常简单的物品进行。而美式橄榄球或棒球则需要昂贵的装备才能进行。
足球在这里从来都不是一项主要的职业运动，但40多年来，这里一直有某种形式的职业足球联赛，而美国职业足球大联盟（MLS）已经存在了二十多年，并稳步发展。作为一名记者，我在美国报道体育已经超过25年了，当我开始的时候，我们几乎没有关注过足球。如今，它获得的资源与足球、棒球或篮球一样多。

Jason McDonald
For a long time, soccer was caught in a reinforcing cycle — people don’t follow soccer because we’re not very good at it; we’re not very good at it because we don’t follow soccer, and therefore, our young athletes choose other sports. At best, American soccer would get the rest of the world’s retreads once they were too old to play in the big European leagues. (And that’s still true — MLS is still a feeder league for Europe that a few aging stars stop through to collect one last paycheck before they retire.)

很长一段时间以来，足球一直陷入了一个恶性循环——人们不关注足球，因为我们在这方面表现不够好；我们在这方面表现不够好，因为我们不关注足球，因此，我们的年轻运动员选择其他运动。在最好的情况下，美国足球会在世界上其他国家的老球员因年龄过大而无法在欧洲的大型联赛中踢球时获得他们的青睐。（而且这仍然是事实——美国职业足球大联盟仍然是欧洲的一个支线联盟，一些年老的球星在退役前会停下来领取最后一份薪水。）
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If there’s a SINGLE reason for that, I feel like it’s that until recently, they couldn’t figure out how to properly package it for TV. Or more accurately, when ad-driven models for TV reigned supreme, a sport where you couldn’t stop the action for ads was hard to get on the air. If you’re a kid growing up, you want to play the sports that are “cool” enough to make it on TV, and that tended to be baseball, football, and basketball, with hockey as a niche sport that was a little more popular in cold-weather markets. Soccer? No ads = no TV presence.

如果有一个单一的原因，我觉得那就是直到最近，他们还不知道如何正确地在电视上播放它。更准确地说，在以广告为驱动的电视模式占主导地位的时候，一种不能为广告而中断比赛的体育运动很难在电视上推广的。如果你是一个正在成长的孩子，你会想要玩一些“酷”到可以上电视的运动，那就是棒球、足球和篮球，而曲棍球是一项小众运动，在寒冷的市场更受欢迎。足球吗?无法播放广告等同于无法在电视上播出。

Now, the model for sports on TV are changing. Subscxtion and streaming models mean there’s other ways to get money than just charging companies for 30-second ads. Technology improvements have made it so that you can pump the company’s logo into the corner of the screen while the game is going on (or I’ve seen cases where flip the logic and play the commercials with the game still running in a picture-in-picture window. Heck — now we have the bandwidth to pump the European games into the states — you can create a soccer channel on cable and charge directly for subscxtions and people will buy it. All of a sudden, it’s viable to start showing soccer on TV, elevating it amongst the “real” sports. I think that, as much as anything, is starting to help soccer turn the corner as a “big” sport in this country. The next step feels like it would be some sustained international success — get a US team a deep World Cup run a couple cycles in a row — or actually creating a homegrown star player. We’ve had some American players go to Europe and crack a starting lineup, but an American Messi or Neymar that fans can rally around might REALLY get things to take off.

现在，电视转播体育节目的模式正在发生变化。订阅和流媒体模式意味着除了向公司收取30秒广告费用外，还有其他赚钱方式。技术的进步使得在比赛进行时你也可以将公司的标志投影到屏幕的角落（或者我看到过一些颠倒逻辑的情况，播放广告时，比赛仍在画中画窗口中进行。）见鬼——现在我们有足够的带宽把欧洲的比赛传输到美国——你可以在有线电视上创建一个足球频道，直接收取订阅费，人们就会购买。突然之间，在电视上播放足球是可行的，将其提升到“真正的”运动之中。我认为，这和其他任何事情一样，正开始帮助足球在这个国家成为一项“大型”运动。下一步似乎会取得一些持续的国际成功——让一支美国队连续几轮打入世界杯——或者真正培养出一名本土明星球员。我们已经有一些美国球员去了欧洲，进入了首发阵容，但如果有一个美国的梅西或内马尔，球迷们可以团结在一起，可能真的会让足球运动起飞。

Adrian Corfield
As many answers here have stated, soccer is very popular to play, but is not popular as a pro sport.
I think the reason it is not popular as a pro sport is TV.
American TV is riddled with ads. American TV will only promote heavily sports that fit their model of showing content that is interrupted frequently for ads.
Thus all the most popular US sports are those where players do things for a few minutes then take a break.
Soccer in this respect is very bad for TV, as playing is near continuous for 45 minutes. How to you insert ads ?

正如这里的许多答案所说，踢足球很受欢迎，但作为一项职业运动并不受欢迎。
我认为它作为一项职业运动不受欢迎的原因是电视。
美国电视充斥着广告。美国电视只会大力宣传那些符合其播放模式的体育节目，而这些节目经常被广告打断。
因此，所有最受欢迎的美国运动都是那些运动员打几分钟比赛然后休息一下的运动。
足球在这方面对电视来说非常糟糕，因为比赛几乎连续45分钟。如何插入广告?

American football, they play then take a rest, a play takes a few seconds, rest a few minutes. It is perfect for TV. For a minute, then can show some action, then replay that action, then show the reaction of someone to that action then analyse that play, for all of 2 or 3 minutes, then show 4 minutes of ads.
Baseball, same thing as football.
Boxing, a bit tougher, as a round lasts a whole several minutes, but still OK, you get more ads and less replays and less looking at someone looking at the game.
Golf, perfect! A few seconds to watch someone walk up to a ball and twiddle his ass, swing a stick, a ball fly through the air, then you see people watching the ball, then you see people watching people watch the ball, then they have a lengthy walk to to ball, where all ads are shown.

美式橄榄球，他们打完就休息，一次进攻只需要几秒钟，休息几分钟,非常适合电视模式。持续一分钟，然后可以展示一些动作，然后回放那个动作，然后展示某人对那个动作的反应，然后分析那个比赛，持续2或3分钟，然后播放4分钟的广告。
棒球，与橄榄球一样。
拳击，稍微难一些，因为一个回合持续好几分，但仍然可以接受，你会看到更多的广告，较少的重播，以及较少的看别人看比赛的画面。
高尔夫球运动，完美！观看某人走到球旁边，扭动屁股，挥动球棒，看球飞过空中，然后你会看到人们注视着球，然后你会看到人们观看别人注视着球，然后他们要走很长一段路才能走向球，期间会播放所有广告。

Hockey is a bit harder, as it is a fast paced game, but since the area is small, I guess there are frequent breaks to show ads..
Basketball is good, as points are marked swiftly with small breaks in action between. Less scope to see people watch other people, but the TV can skip the boring parts where the other team retrieves the ball and starts towards the other basket.
Tennis is good, an exchange lasts a minute or so, the downside is the break between two exchanges is a bit short for all those ads. Luckily between two games, there is more free time!
Car racing is tougher, they just need to interrupt the race for several minutes, then when back on the air, recap the situation since last break. Luckily most of the time nothing much changes.

冰球稍微难一些，因为比赛速度很快，但由于场地较小，我猜经常有休息时间来播放广告。
篮球很适合电视模式，因为得分迅速，行动之间有短暂的休息。在这里，人们互相观察的空间减少了，但电视可以跳过无聊的部分，即另一支球队取回球并开始向另一个篮筐进攻。
网球很适合电视模式，交流持续一分钟左右，缺点是两次交流之间的休息时间有点短，无法播放那么多的广告。幸运的是，在两场比赛之间，有更多的空闲时间！
赛车更难适合电视模式，他们完全需要中断比赛几分钟，然后在重新播出时，总结自上次休息以来的情况。幸运的是，大多数时候没有太多变化。

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