Americans referring to football as ‘soccer’ is just the tip of the iceberg for Brits struggling to understand sports from across the pond. So, here is the ultimate guide to help you come to terms with Uncle Sam’s most cherished­­­­ sports...

 

Two similar nations with a dissimilar approach to sport

A common language, mutual appreciation for the TV show The Office, and, of course, our foreign policy: these are just three of the many things welding Britain and the US together. Our ‘special relationship’ – a term used to denote the strong cultural and diplomatic ties between the two global powers – is routinely referenced in the media and celebrated by our politicians. America, once a distant colony on the edge of the British Empire, is now our heavyweight transatlantic ally. But for all the affinity there is one area where the two states differ markedly: sport.

Explaining American Games to Brits

The American sporting world is a difficult terrain to navigate for us Brits. Seasons are heavily concentrated with fixtures (each team in Major League Baseball plays 162 regular-season games), franchises never experience promotion or relegation and draft days take the place of transfer windows. On match-day, fans can be found ‘tailgating’ – essentially, arriving hours before the scheduled kick-off, drinking alcohol and barbequing meat in the stadium car park – but terrace culture is limited.

Despite the increasing popularity of football/soccer, other core British sports are sparsely played in America. A recent study asked adults in the US to name their favourite sport; 37% of the 2,200 respondents named American Football, 16% Baseball, 12% Basketball and 5% Ice Hockey (Statista, 2019). It may come as no surprise that cricket or rugby did not get a mention.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the sporting activities integral to our distant neighbours’ cultural identity, demystifying the unique laws, practices and phrases that make-up their favourite pastimes.  

1. American Football

One aspect of American football that British fans struggle with is the near-constant TV adverts. A report analysing a 2014 National Football League (NFL) broadcast found that only 8.3% of the coverage could be considered gameplay. The stop-start nature of the sport makes it a prime target for adverts – which took up 24.5% of the aforementioned broadcast. Given that a typical match lasts 3 hours, that’s roughly 45 minutes.

An American football game is played between two teams of eleven players. Through a combination of running or passing plays, players attempt to move the ball forwards into their opponent’s end zone, and ultimately score a ‘touchdown’. Each team has an offensive and defensive set of players, who rotate depending on which team has possession of the football. A calculated gameplan is of paramount importance. An NFL playbook might contain well over a hundred different plays designed to make incremental or lengthy gains on the football field.

The NFL contains 32 franchises split across two conferences: National Football Conference (NFC) and American Football Conference (AFC). Each team plays 16 regular-season games; the 12 with the best win-loss records advance to the play-offs. Eventually, only two franchises remain in the competition. The season then concludes on Super Bowl Sunday – with the victor becoming the year’s overall champion. A cultural phenomenon in its own right, Super Bowl 2020 drew in a US audience of 102 million alone. This flagship occasion often represents the second most-watched sports event of the year (Nielsen, 2020).

A fascination with American football dates back to North American colleges in the late 19th century, where it evolved as a hybrid alternative to two classic British games: rugby and football. Higher education institutions like Harvard, Yale and Princeton formed an Intercollegiate Football Association and began competing. To this day, college football has an enormous fanbase, especially in the Southeast, where regionalism is strong, standards are high and rivalries are intense.

2. Baseball

Threaded into the cultural fabric of the US, baseball has long been considered the nation’s favourite pastime. It’s a cliché that every kid remembers his first ‘ballgame’. The sport’s official anthem, ‘Take Me Down to the Ballgame’, is regularly the 2nd most performed song year-on-year in the States, behind only ‘Happy Birthday’. The MLB, America’s professional baseball organisation, boasts the highest total annual attendance amongst sports leagues worldwide (Statista, 2020).

American history and baseball have long been intertwined. Babe Ruth, the revered player who led the New York Yankees – yes, the team with a hat that became a global fashion sensation – to four World Series Championships in the inter-war years, was arguably the nation’s first true sporting icon, predating Muhammad Ali and Micheal Jordan; Jackie Robinson, an African-American who broke the MLB colour barrier in 1947, lobbied for greater racial integration and helped set the stage for the Civil Rights Movement; following 9/11, incumbent President George W. Bush threw the first pitch in the third game of the World Series, signalling America’s return to normality.

A typical baseball game features nine (mini) innings in which each team takes a turn batting and fielding. Each team is allowed three ‘outs’ per innings. A run is scored either by the batter hitting the ball out of the park or running around all four bases in the correct order. The overall goal is to outscore one another. In a similar model to the NFL, the 30 teams in MLB are split into two leagues – National League (NL) and American League (AL) – that are then divided into three further sub-divisions. Franchises compete to qualify for the postseason and reach the best-of-seven games World Series – an annual rite in North America’s sporting calendar.

MLB teams are increasingly looking towards Latin American countries to unearth hidden gems and boost their rosters. In 2018, 31% of all players were Latino, up from around 15% in 2000. Many originate from baseball-crazy nations like the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Cuba. Some, like Jose Altuve of the Houston Astros and Colorado Rookies’ third baseman, Nolan Arenando, have gone on to become US sports stars.

3. Basketball

The Last Dance, ESPN’s ten-part docu-series charting the rise of Micheal Jordan and his six-time NBA title-winning team, the Chicago Bulls, catapulted basketball into the public domain last year. Invented in 1891 by a teacher looking to entertain his disruptive class during the bitter winter months, the game is now a staple part of American culture.

With teams of five playing on a relatively small, rectangular court and a shot clock in operation, basketball is naturally a fast-paced and high-scoring sport. NBA fixtures consist of four twelve-minute quarters, but due to breaks, time-outs and clock stoppages, games often last longer than two hours. The underlying objective is to throw the ball through the opposing team’s hoop: a feat that is rewarded with 1, 2 or 3 points depending on where the player is standing when the shot is taken.

Dating back in its inaugural form to 1946, the NBA has been at the forefront of professional basketball for three-quarters of a century and is the third-highest grossing league on the continent. Forbes estimates that every franchise is worth at least $1 billion. The thirty teams are divided into an Eastern and Western Conference. They play a hectic regular-season schedule of 82 matches – roughly 3.5 fixtures a week. The eight with the best records in each division progress to the playoffs. A best-of-seven elimination tournament that sees the winner claim the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy and secure their place in basketball history.

As with the other major North American sports leagues, the NBA utilises a draft system designed to allocate talented college players and non-American international stars to franchises. It functions like a transfer window and is intended to create parity by awarding selection based on how well a team has performed in the previous season; those with the worst records are entitled to earlier picks. The idea is that the weakest franchises sign the brightest talents and keep the league competitive.

4. Ice Hockey

Ice Hockey’s ostensibly violent nature makes it a mystifying recreation for British fans, who are accustomed to seeing lengthy bans handed out for aggressive behaviour in the Premier League. Although fighting is still a traditional – and completely legal – aspect of the sport, ‘enforcers’ or ‘goons’ (players expected to retaliate to violence with further violence) are slowly fading out of the game. During the 18/19 National Hockey League (NHL) regular season, only 15.3% of matches witnessed a fight, down from 41.4% in the 08/09 edition (ESPN, 2019).

Played on an ice rink between two teams each with six players, including a goalie, competitors wear ice skates and use specialised sticks to shoot a puck – a kind of black rubber disc – into their opponents’ goal. NHL games take place over three 20-minute periods. If the scores are tied, a 5-minute sudden-death period follows. On rare occasions, a shootout is needed to decide the winner.

Ice Hockey was brought to the US by Canadian immigrants at the back end of the 1800s. Given the cold climate, it holds a special place in the hearts of the northernmost states. Minnesota is unofficially regarded as the centre of the hockey universe. Yet, the sport is continuing to expand: the 18/19 season witnessed an increase of 190% in player participation (USA Hockey, 2019), with positive growth patterns in the Sun Belt states of the South.

The NHL – a hybrid league counting both American and Canadian franchises – is universally accepted as the sport’s top competition. The season concludes with the Stanley Cup Final, in which the winners of the Eastern and Western Conferences battle for the oldest existing sports trophy in North America: the Stanley Cup. Canadian franchises have typically dominated proceedings; the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs have claimed 24 and 13 titles respectively since the championship’s inception in 1893.

Other notable US sports for Brits to get their heads around

For the sake of convenience, we might think of softball as a modified version of baseball. Although the two recreations share many similar characteristics, softball is played with a larger (and softer) ball that travels at slower speeds, and the pitcher (bowler) throws the ball underhand, not overhand. By most accounts, the game was inadvertently discovered in Chicago in the late 1880s. It was the brainchild of George Hancock, who witnessed a balled-up boxing glove be batted away with a stick and soon chalked up the rules for what would become softball. In the US, it is an established summertime game that is widely accessible and well-liked amongst women.

Home to Henry Ford’s Model T, Harley Davidson, Route 66, Chevrolet and hot rod culture, America’s preoccupation with motorsports is well-documented. NASCAR, stock racing’s sanctioning body and official race organiser, is to the Southern states what rugby league is to Northern England; the Indy500 – a 500-mile endurance race – constitutes one-third of the Triple Crown of Motorsport and is referred to as the ‘Greatest Spectacle in Racing’ (the occasion drew 5.745 million viewers in 2019 according to NBC, an 11% increase from the previous year); ever since American firm, Liberty Media, acquired Formula 1 in 2015, it has grown rapidly in their domestic market.

Professional wrestling is synonymous with popular culture in the States. Although the contests are scripted, fans are gripped by the compelling storylines, idiosyncratic characters (think Hulk Hogan and The Rock) and athleticism. In fact, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the world’s largest professional wrestling promotion, was ruled an essential service in the state of Florida last May. Permitting the company to continue filming weekly installments during the pandemic. That said, WWE is facing an uphill battle to remain relevant in the 2020’s. Nielsen, an information, data and measurement firm, reported a dip in TV ratings for the show over the last few years.

Takeaway

Whether you’re an Americanophile, work in UK sport, or are just keen to get to grips with the differences between baseball and softball, our guide is on-hand to help you out. So, next time your colleague mentions Super Bowl Sunday, or a televised football match is followed by highlights of an NBA game from the Eastern Conference, you’ll be in the know.

Spurred on by the success of the four NFL regular-season games that Wembley Stadium hosts annually and the two MLB fixtures played at London Stadium in 2019, the popularity of American Sports in the UK is continuing to rise. By the end of this decade, the two nations’ sporting cultures could be as closely aligned as ever before.

On a side note, want to learn how to ‘ambush’ the Olympic Games. You’ll learn how to cash-in on the media hype surrounding blockbuster sports events.

Written by Jordan Brunel