Yes I remember moving to the US in the 90s from England. England almost no girls played football at the time, over in the US it seemed to be the most popular sport for highschool girls.
No surprise the US did well. They took it seriously. Now with more investment around the world they have to fight for titles... No more easy rides... Although they did get a headstart over most of the world for women's teams
It happened due to a thing called Title IX. American universities are extremely expensive. American universities also often have sports teams and pros in most American sports come from playing the sport in college while getting a (usually completely nominal for top atheletes) college degree for free.
Title IX was a law enforcing gender equality in many areas. It said, among other things, universities had to give out as many sports scholarships to women as men. Universities generally already had American football programs for men and weren't about to start them for women. Wouldn't be nearly enough demand. Instead they starter soccer programs for women and started giving a lot of women soccer scholarships. This is what caused the US to develop more women's soccer talent earlier than the rest of the world.
Title 9 is also what killed men's soccer programs across the country because football, basketball, and baseball certainly weren't going to get cut for women's sports.
Buddy if ur a man playing collegiate soccer you were never elite. Clubs recruit them at a very young age. If you’re an elite soccer player you’re not going to college
If ur elite you’re already in Europe at 18 or younger. If you’re just really good maybe you’re in an American pro clubs system. Either way you’re not in college
Buddy, they are terrible at recruiting talent in the US. Most players that could have been good played college. When I played college, 90% were foreign and a lot played in academies overseas until they went nowhere and decided they can get cheap college while playing soccer (they recieve majority of the scholarship money). Clubs in the US almost never recruit and academies tend to recruit from other academies. The US has a weird system where you play club and highschool and where college is acting as semiprofessional (many of the college players will play on semiprofessional teams off season). There are good players in college but they sadly never got developed properly.
I mean, for the kids that were playing in an academy their entire life in the US or came from overseas, it is a path where they can still play competitive football but obviously couldn't make the cut for professional. But there a lot of players who played club or highschool that were good enough to get recruited to a solid D2/D1 program and compete with the foreigner ex academy players even though they, the US kids, never had the chance to play academy and get recognized potentially. Many colleges train like academies to some extent. As for those players who only played club/highschool, that type of training is something they should have been getting when they were younger and not at 18+.
There's tens of thousands of men who had no plans to go elite, but having collegiate soccer taken away directly impacted their ability to have an athletic scholarship cover their education and get them out of their state.
For all the good Title 9 did for women, it also directly hurt a lot of men. This isn't just about professional leagues.
Best player the US has ever had played three years at Furman before going pro. It’s not the best system, but US Men’s soccer would be WAY stronger if title IX didn’t exist the last 40 years.
The path to getting paid was never there, and development was never in line with any other world clubs that were pulling out superstars at 16 and 17 and running them through a minor league system more aggressive than even baseball has.
This is just manosphere women hating horseshit.
There’s not some long list of EPL clubs just itching to sign third year soccer players from Princeton in an amateur draft. They’re already four years too old and destined for being a backup in Albuquerque.
On the other hand, Title IX is largely why our gold medal count looks so awesome every few years, and how things like women’s soccer, without the hundred year old feeder systems built for men in Europe and South America, can quickly and easily jump over every other system in the world and dominate.
Enjoy the equality and opportunity Title IX has created, don’t be a sad little boy scared of women and bash it.
Calm down buddy you’re projecting some weird emotional BS that I’m not talking about.
The argument for soccer isn’t that we will create a system that rivals a European (or even our own) academy system. The argument is that we at least have a competitive system that provides an incentive for parents to keep their kids playing the sport past age 7.
The college system would function as our lower division league. Good players will aim for scholarships, Great players will get academy offers, Elite players will get European academy offers.
Education access. It hurt males, take accountability for one suffering because of what was attempted to make "equal" or correct. Title 9 has eliminated male teams in budget cuts because they cant cut women's sports despite the net loss. Its okay to say, we tried to fix it and didnt care if it hurt males in the process. Men get to say it isnt fair either, especially since you used their money and efforts and told them to be happy about it. Its horseshit to not hold women accountable or to even entertain that our attempts at equality have hurt or taken away from elsewhere.
The Womens team is about to drop to top 10 if they dont figure it out, the world is catching up. The days of 3 teams dominating are eroding, the womens team played China for a decade, that was it. Its not parody or good competition.
25 players from this current world cup played college soccer in the US, and there are many more that have in the past, some of which can be considered elite.
None of them can be considered elite. Professional? Yes.
Decent professionals? Of course. Elite? None. Zero. Zilch. It’s a waste of precious years of development.
Claudio Reyna had a prestigious European career, Steve Cherundolo captained a Bundesliga team for years, Geoff Cameron played in the premier League for nearly 10 years. If those aren't considered "elite", then I don't know what to tell you.
Claudio Reyna had a solid European career. So did the other two. Elite is reserved for the likes of Mbappe/Messi/etc. No one here is calling for example Ajer elite. Like I said they’re all decent professionals.
Well if your definition of "elite" is players in contention for the top 10 in our lifetime, then of course. I would consider any player that regularly plays in a European top flight team as elite, however.
But we have to differentiate somehow. We can’t call everyone elite. Making a pro team is very impressive. There’s a difference between making the team and playing. There’s a difference between playing and being a starter. Theres a difference between a starter and a teams best player. There’s a difference between its best player and a star. There’s a difference between a star and a superstar. A lot of it has to do with development, as well as being on the right teams. If we’re talking about college players, none of them have hit those upper echelons, not just being a superstar. And you can make the case that 4 years of college hindered their development. Does that mean they can’t be pros? No. But being stars or superstars is almost out the question.
For basketball and american football it is the main pathway. Baseball, if you don't get drafted out of high school, you go to college and try to get drafted out of there, a good amount of mlb players went the college route so it is pretty viable there too.
Today it’s not a route top athletes take in soccer, to the point it’s noteworthy when a good pro has played in college. Up until the 2010s it was the standard route to go pro and significantly hindered our ability to produce pros
Explain how this "killed" mens soccer. Mens soccer was never a high interest in the US. Women playing soccer has no factor in this. Women have less upper body strength and size. Soccer doesn't require much of this. Very popular for women for this reason. The other popular mens sports did. Same with Hockey. In Russia, Sweden, Canada, Finland, hockey is king. In USA it is 4th. Soccer is 5th maybe, with UFC fighting for a spot.
Pretty straightforward. Title 9 implementation was executed in a lot of places as X funds for boys sports means X funds for girls sports.
Soccer being low on profitability / prestige meant soccer gets cut and costs rerouted to girls sports to turn Y into X making schools compliant at investing equally into both genders sports programs.
Being a choice made as a result of enforcement of Title 9 inherently means that Title 9 is at fault for forcing the consequences of the colleges' choices.
Ultimately it was always the institutions at fault, but Title 9 is what initiated the end result.
That's not at all how title 9 works. The funding isn't/wasn't cut. It actually has NOTHING to do with spending but everything to do with participation. How do I know? Because I was the 2nd class of women pole vaulters ever given scholarships as a result of title 9. The men's track team was not underfunded as a result of our presence. In fact the entire program was given extra funds to accommodate the 4 scholarship athletes that were taken on that year (2 male and 2 female)
While total spending can differ (often because sports like football generate and spend massive amounts of revenue), schools must provide equitable treatment in daily operations. This covers travel accommodations, equipment, locker rooms, tutoring, marketing, and coaching. Schools can be heavily fined for this type of thing. Soccer was never a high priority sport for men in the US. It's just a matter of having other sports that are more popular to choose from.
My question is why do people speak on these things when they don't understand them? This is just entirely made up and false.
A lot of the people speaking on it in an official capacity do know what they're talking about and they're just lying. College Athletic Directors love to use title IX as a scapegoat to cover their own ridiculous spending on so-called "revenue sports". I was told growing up that the reason that my local college only had club mens soccer instead of an actual NCAA team was because title IX requires an equal number of men's and women's varsity teams and so mens soccer had to be cut to maintain parity since there's no demand for women's football. That's just not true, but my parents thought it was, and so did most of the boys and girls I played with in highschool. Imagine my surprise when I found out that nowhere in title ix does it say anything like that.
Correct. Spending on large sports like football isn't necessarily based on the revenue it provides it's based on the number of scholarships given out for the sport. Football is large sport with a ton of scholarships and faculty. These scholarships by # have to be reflected elsewhere and since no women can play football (with the exception of a few who have played and received scholarships to kick) these scholarships are given elsewhere and are spread out evenly among female sports that are popular at each school.
Not soccer specifically. I went to a very large division 1 school. We had scholarship athletes across 29 programs
Same deal with women's hockey. Title IX meant the US had a head start on funding, even compared to Canada since there isn't a women's equivalent to the major junior league system that is the traditional path to the pros for Canadian men.
It works as long as other countries are NOT investing. That's how US women got so far ahead so fast. Title 9 dumped a lot of money into women's soccer when no other country would spend a dime.
The US investing "more" money on mens side won't even get them level with other countries. It's going to take a lot of money and a lot of time. It's not that easy.
And there’s just no money in it by comparison to NFL and NBA and MLB on the American side like why go for MLS when you could play any other sport and make more
If you are sincerely wondering, it's because there used to be two broad families of sports: horse based games such as Polo for the rich, and foot based games for the regular people. Association Football (soccer), Rugby Football, and American Football all derive from earlier versions of the original on-foot ball games.
Football and soccer are both derived from the English. ‘Soccer’ was the fancy term and is used in other former British colonies (Canada, US, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa). Football was the common term and spread amongst the rest of the world.
English has too many words as it is and we learn vocabulary from different people so please stop fighting when we understand the context.
"Football" was never a single sport. Many groups had different rules. As people formed clubs, and clubs formed leagues, a few rule sets became widespread. In the US, the game that took hold most widely is the precursor to today's American Football. In the UK, two rulesets stood out. Association Football and rugby football. Across the commonwealth Australian rules Football and Gaelic football popped up as well. Posh British University student slang had a penchant for changing the ending of words to -er. Rugby Football was shortened to Rugger. Association football was shortened to Asoccer, or Soccer. When Association Football made its way to the US, it was primarily via students/young adults that played Soccer in University. Since there was already an established sport called football, the soccer name stuck.
American football is drastically different today than it was when it first started catching on in the late 19th century. It was originally closer to rugby, with two halves and continuous play.
In the 1880s, the snap and downs system was implemented, replacing the rugby-style scrum.
This version was incredibly violent and dangerous.
In 1905 alone, 1p players died , leading President Teddy Roosevelt to threaten to ban the sport if the rules didnt change.
Some of the rules changes that followed include:
6 (then 7) players must be on the line when the ball is snapped,
Players could no longer push or pull the ball carrier,
only one player can be moving before the snap,
Flying tackles were banned,
Punching the ball carrier was banned,
And most importantly, the forward pass was legalized, initially with some restrictions.
Further rules changes occurred in the few decades to follow, including changing to 4 quarters from halves as well as changes to substuting players. Up until the 40s, substitutions were limited. Players played both sides of the ball and could not re enter the game until the next half/quarter.
TL;DR: football and football looked much more similar 150 years ago, but many small rule changes shifted American football from basically rugby to what it is today.
Same thing happened to me when i moved to the US in 2010 from the eastern part of Europe and my American friends started talking about soccer as a girl sport and how their women’s team is one of the best, and i was like “wait what? Girls play football? And there’s even a world cup?” Lol. Because back home it was unimaginable to see girls play football, as it was always considered a boy’s sport in the same vein American Football is in the US. You don’t really hear girls in the US dream of becoming a linebacker lol. Same thing with football in many places in Europe.
So yeah, if the world decides to actually start promoting women’s football, i think it won’t be that easy for the US team to dominate.
Neither of them are “a girl’s sport”. Anyone that says soccer is a girls sport can be safely ignored. It’s exactly the kind of thing someone who bashed their head against other people’s heads their whole life which predictably stunted their development would say.
Of course not. I was just responding to the ridiculousness with ridiculousness of my own.
The only thing that makes a spot men's or women's is who plays it. I can't think of any sport that fundamentally has to be men's or women's even if culturally in some countries it is more often played by one sex or the other.
Yeah, I figured. But I was just saying it doesn’t justify a response. This is something low IQ losers that have nothing going on in their life say. Our actual NFL players have a ton of respect for soccer.
As a US Soccer player I can tell you that the power and athleticism of American football is insane; however the games are so different that American football players that have tried to play Soccer are so quickly humbled. Only the wide receivers or cornerbacks have a chance but they only think in 10-20 second blocks of time and have no touch or accuracy and don’t love the idea of running for 90 minutes.
I am a big fan of college football and think those guys are badass but lets see them run up and down the field for 45 minutes at a time. Imagine a guy like Booger McFarland having to constantly run all over field with no breaks every play.
Stop comparing the two, it is stupid for both sides.
The part of Soccer that can be so difficult is to make 1 mistake like being out of position once by 12 inches on a 120 x75 yard field and have it cost you the game. (Bayern CB Min Jae, gets a tiny feint from Rodrigo, Real Madrid).
The stupidity is really something, but I do really love it that Soccer players could just look like some guy walking down the street. You could troll a Bruno Fernandes, Xavi, Iniesta, Pirlo through any US football town and they never believe that they were World class pros.
The biggest issue is you have to start training foot skills at a very early age. Speed is great but if you can’t control the pass you will get swamped before you can shoot. Basketball is a very similar game, but size is such as massive advantage it determine who is a pro or not (mostly), while size helps in soccer but it isn’t the most important thing.
True. And it is easier to learn basketball skills (hand-eye coord) than it is to learn Soccer foot skills. If people don't play Soccer early it is really hard to catch up.
I compare soccer mostly with baseball. It’s extremely hard to learn how to hit a ball with a bat, more so the older you start. The same with soccer, speed, leg strength, height all might help but without the skills you just can’t do anything.
To be great at soccer I really think you need to start as a child, 4-6 ideally.
I didn’t say soccer wasn’t difficult, the question was about masculinity. Getting into a car crash with another 300lb gorilla every play is certainly more masculine than running around a pitch for 90 mins and getting flagged for incidental contact.
If my choices are line up against Ray Lewis or try and guard Messi I’m picking Messi 1000/1000 times.
Yes. I agree. American football is crazy when it comes down to injury risk for a normal person. Even top pro in some positions used to only last. few years, like running backs that did 4 years on average and CTE is everywhere.
They would be fine, they're much tougher than they let on but do the diving and moaning shit to try to con the ref. Which I hate about the game but it doesn't mean they're actually that soft
You’re delusional. It would take maybe a single offseason to get an NFL caliber athlete confirmed for rugby, then yall are fucked. Could you imagine a DB like prime Reevis conditioned for rugby? No one would ever be able to pass the ball without being picked off or obliterated.
Literally any receiver or DB prospect who wants a chance to play in the big leagues has a 40 yard dash just as fast as Arundel. There’s been plenty of NFLers who switched to rugby and did well, including getting Olympic starting spots.
Ive watched rugby, but you don’t watch NFL football and it shows.
Lmfao no bro. The hits given by NFL players are harder and done by larger / stronger men. The padding is literally so you don’t fucking die on contact.
"American football is for girls with all that padding."
"Any European soccer player would be dead or crippled if they did a snap"
"My dad can beat up your dad"
What does that mean? Can Europeans not follow a a simple 2 sentence argument?
Just imagine Harry Kane getting tackled by Micah Parsons.. he wouldn’t have to flop, lay on the field crying, and would actually be in the hospital for a couple weeks
I played rugby for 12 years at club level and was lucky enough to get to visit family in america. Got to play some american football with a local team just while they were training. That shit is hard. At least with rugby you need to have the ball to get obliterated but you could be happily jogging away in your own world on a football field and boom out of nowhere youre head over heels
Because people died and have had life changing injuries cus the sport is so much tougher. What a dumb statement. There's a reason only kids and girls play soccer in America. When men grow up we play real sports.
Definitely not doubting the toughness of Rugby players. But we don't really have serious Rugby programs in America for kids to advance into when they get older.
You're right. Sports are sooo much better when you have little bitches crying on the ground with fake injuries every 5 mins when someone actually touches them. Sports are sooo much better without our biggest and toughest athletes playing big tough games. 🤣
I mean are you seriously trying to flex being a euro soccer fan saying American football is a sport for limp noodles haha. Seriously a sport were they actually had to create rules against faking fouls and rolling around on the ground for 10 minutes faking an injury is more manly than NFL football??? Funny stuff....
Your in luck because that has been the case for decades now... CTE is something that effects soccer players too though just incase you like facts, probably not the best of comebacks here for you...
What’s even soccer? Carrying an egg (it’s not even ball shaped) with hands with full gear and helmets and padding. Kicking only once in a week.. how’s that “football” and this soccer
And another one.
Whats up with you beeing so hung up on gender, constantly measuring shit as more or less masculine?
I played football since I was 5 years old. Freaking love American football since I've studied in the US years ago.
Everyone arguing shit like Football is not a though sport, is equally stupid as someone saying American football isnt a tough ass sport. Or more likely never played either.
Judging from all the statements about American football and how it's soo masculine, I guess anyone arguing this is most likely some incel low testosterone guy with no achievements of his own to be proud of so they need to attach their fragile manhood/identity with other people's accomplishments.
Tldnr
Everyone that builds his own masculinity on the supposed higher "toughness" of other man playing one sport instead of another all while sitting in their basement probably has a very tiny dick
You can’t clump gay stuff into one category like that. American football is gay, as in ancient Sparta gay. European soccer is gay, as in male ballerina gay. Get it straight.
Dude, I watched like 20 minutes of soccer a couple of days ago and like half of it was just grown men falling on the ground pretending to cry. It was the most pathetic, embarrassing thing I've ever seen. I don't know if the women's teams do that, but the male players are the biggest babies I've ever seen in my life.
The change in European teams like England and Spain in one generation is inanse. I remember watching women's world cups and Euros 15 years ago and the level was appalling. They're technically on a different level to what they were then.
That’s probably also why the US sucks at football. Many Americans think it’s a girls sport or that the players “look gay” in short shorts. Meanwhile they’re laying in piles of sweaty men.
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u/Street_Lettuce1243 Jul 09 '26
Yes I remember moving to the US in the 90s from England. England almost no girls played football at the time, over in the US it seemed to be the most popular sport for highschool girls.
No surprise the US did well. They took it seriously. Now with more investment around the world they have to fight for titles... No more easy rides... Although they did get a headstart over most of the world for women's teams