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Comment by JackFr | Hacker News Reader

The SEC (Southeastern Conference) arguably the leader in football, basketball, baseball and softball and apart from those sponsors 18 other sports. They do not sponsor soccer.

As long as that’s case I’ll have trouble believing we’re gonna be great.

Soccer is like the metric system of sports. Everyone else uses it. It makes sense and we should like it, but we’re culturally suspicious of it.

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The is probably the most significant reason. The top athletes are pulled into other sports which have higher cultural status and financial rewards.

"Soccer is like the metric system of sports."

No. Not at all. It doesn't make any more sense to chase a ball to kick it just with feet, than to chase it protected hands allowed or to chase it using only hands to touch it.

Different sports.

(I am from europe and did play, but think soccer is highly overrated. Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy)

I think you're looking at the comparison from the wrong angle. The parent poster meant the USA does not take up the metric system because the imperial units are seen as part of their culture while metric is a 'foreign' thing. Typically American sports like baseball, American 'football' and basketball are seen as part of American culture as well while football (which for some unexplainable reason is called 'soccer' in the USA) is seen as the foreign thing, just like metric. It is not like any of these sports is better or worse in any way, in the end they're all forms of ritualised warfare without (too much) bloodshed and they all work in this regard: the winner gets the spoils, the loser gets to leave the field with their tails drooping.

Yes, your angle is more interesting.

The name Soccer comes from an abbreviation that was popular in English schools and Universities. America started to use it to differentiate from gridiron football that became popular here, and now it's apparently weird and wrong to use the nickname the inventors of the sport created :)

> Unlike the metric system that actually has a clear logic behind it and makes handling scientific numbers more easy

The clear logic behind soccer is low barrier of entry. A vacant lot, some friends and a makeshift ball gets any child started. Even the poor can play it with minimal inputs.

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