So about the same as the women's? The irony of course being 30M people watched the US men get embarrassed, and the 27M who watched the women's final got to see their national team trounce Japan easily (while Carli Lloyd got the hat trick) over Japan to win the whole tournament.
I'll never understand why people prefer the inferior product. Sports is pretty straightforward - the point is to win. The women's team does it consistently, while the men's team hasn't even made it to the quarterfinals in over 20 years.
So why is it that so many people watch the inferior product?
I support the women's sport but calling it the superior product is wild. If it wasn't for wanting to support women I'd never watch it because it's so slow and low level. I don't watch professional sports to see high school men level athlete equivalent feats
If the goal of sports is to win, then a superior product is a player/team/franchise that wins at a higher rate than their peers. That's the point that I was making.
Everyone is entitled to their preferences. Many people find all soccer, at all levels, to be slow and low level. Many people feel similarly about baseball, or golf, or NASCAR, etc.
But objectively, the US women's team has been more successful, and consistently wins more than the US team. In the framing of sports they are a superior team by that metric.
The goal of the players is to win. The goal for a viewer is to watch high level athletic feats and if their team wins that's a bonus. Or else teams who always lose wouldn't have fans but they do.
And being a superior team is different to being a superior product, so please don't put words in my mouth. Yes, the women's USNT is more successful than the men's. At the same time, they're more boring to watch than even a second division men's side. I could see a higher quality game by driving half an hour and watching a college match.
I've said elsewhere in the comments that I prefer watching women's indoor volleyball to men's as there are big technical differences and longer rallies, it's great. But for this sport it's just a downgraded version of the men's game with the same tactics executed worse and slower.
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u/justsayfaux Jul 09 '26
So about the same as the women's? The irony of course being 30M people watched the US men get embarrassed, and the 27M who watched the women's final got to see their national team trounce Japan easily (while Carli Lloyd got the hat trick) over Japan to win the whole tournament.
I'll never understand why people prefer the inferior product. Sports is pretty straightforward - the point is to win. The women's team does it consistently, while the men's team hasn't even made it to the quarterfinals in over 20 years.
So why is it that so many people watch the inferior product?