Globally Loved Sports Britain Does Not Care About

After watching the British public make the quickest about-turn since the Krauts saw us advancing into the Rhineland in ’44 (sorry) whilst watching the 2008 Olympics, it struck me that Britain simply doesn’t care less about a lot of the sports you see other countries playing. We didn’t care less about the track-and-field in China until we realised that we weren’t failing for once, which brought us together as a nation in an attempt to write Christine Ohuruogu’s surname correctly on our Union Jack flags. We came round eventually to the whole idea of the World coming together to celebrate diversity and culture and sport – but only once we started winning.

There are so many other sports that could do with a bit of the same. Around the World, countries celebrate a variety of sports that nobody in Britain cares less about – most of the time, we have a reason, but in some cases it’s just snobbery that keeps us away from such activities. Snobbery, of course, being one of the things Britain is best at, alongside sarcasm, irony, humour, and making a decent fish and chips. We also have a handful of sports that we really love and accept – where would we be without Rugby, Football, Cricket, and Horse Riding – and some sports which we grudgingly accept for a few weeks until any British competitors are eliminated (tennis). Those aside though, we don’t really try much new stuff, which is probably for the best of the country: we don’t want to start playing sissy sports that give Prince Philip a heart-attack.

I have barely done any research about any of them, so most of the facts presented here are, as ever, probably incorrect, but here we will list several sports which millions of people follow fanatically. We don’t care about any of them.


American Football
The National Sport Of: America

What Is It?

American football is rugby, which has been spiced up with the addition of halftime shows and cheerleaders, and wussed up with the addition of extensive body armour for each competitor alongside rules which give the audience more scrums and less running for their money. Each team has to get the ball from one side of the field to the other without being tackled or ‘sacked’ by a member of the other team. You are allowed to kick or throw the ball to other players, and you score points each time you cross the line at the end of the other team’s end of the pitch. The game is split into four quarters, and lasts an hour overall.


Why Doesn’t Britain Care?

Nobody in Britain cares about either of these sports, because we already have variations of them for ourselves, thank you very much. In the case of American football, we already have two superior versions of the sport which we play at home anyway, those sports being rugby league and rugby union respectively. I can name for you right now, American Readers, why this sport bores us, and shall do so with immediate effect:

• American football is played in 10 yard sections, instead of being played as a free-for all race to the finish. If a player advances to the next section, the game apparently seems to restart at the beginning of that section, so you don’t get to see much movement over the course of a match.
• The players only play for fifteen minutes at a time, instead of the forty minutes halves that rugby players experience. As such, going to a game of American football appears to be more about good company and beer than it is about watching sport.
• If we want to have good company and beer whilst a sport nobody cares about goes on in the background, we’ll simply go to the pub and watch Italian football.

With rugby, nobody wears much protection at all, and when you couple this with the British weather, this makes for a much greater potential that horrific violence will soon occur. That’s why we watch the sport. Also, in America I believe that the football players are held to be the dim ones, who get into university because they are good at sport and not because they are clever. In Britain, the rugby players tend to be the posh, smart ones who go to the private schools – so we get to watch posh people get beaten up! We love that.

Another reason why Britain is never going to care for American football, despite everything it throws at us, is the fact that because it calls itself “football”, we’re not allowed on the internet to call our sport – the real sport, because we invented it first – football. Instead, on Wikipedia and around the internet, we’re forced to refer to it as ‘soccer’. Damn you! And just for that, we shall never watch your “super bowl”. It’s not petty to be annoyed about something if you’re on the side of Good, which Britain always has been.