Americans Hate Tingle / Sports

Athletes

Athletes

• Even within sports, different teams/individuals can have differing reputations from country to country.
  • Diego Maradona is idolized in his native Argentina and is a byword throughout the rest of the world for a supremely skilled individual. But don't tell them that to the English, where, due to the infamous "Hand of God" goal, the word "Maradona" is synonymous with "dirty cheat"; or with the Brazilians: they like his football abilities, but hate both his pretentiousness and how Argentinians idolize him to the point of deification; that, and they very much dislike how both he and his fans have the guts to consider Maradona better than Pelé.
  • When playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins, Sidney Crosby is very popular among the hometown fans, as is expected for a team's star player. When it comes to international hockey, though, every American hockey fan hates his guts because of his gold medal-winning goal for Canada against the United States at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. It was such that after those Olympics, some fans of the Detroit Red Wings, one of the Penguins' biggest rivals,^note Historically, they weren't major rivals, but after they beat each other in the Stanley Cup Finals in 2008 and 2009... created a Facebook page titled "Now ALL of America hates Crosby!"
    • He's also generally derided by fans of every other team in the league for being a weeny about physical play. Nicknames like "Cindy Crysby" and "The Holy Diver" (regarding his alleged protected status by league officials AND his tendency to embellish every bit of contact) abound. Somewhat amusingly, this was basically the exact same split in opinion between hometown marks and opposing fans that the Penguins' current owner, Mario "Mary" Lemieux, inspired when he was their star player. He also gets booed loudly every time he touches the puck in Philadelphia.
  • Similar to Crosby, there's Corey Perry, centerpiece for the Anaheim Ducks and is incredibly popular among their fans. While his line partner (and Blue Oni to his red) Ryan Getzlaf is one of the most well-respected players in the league and almost everyone agrees he's a first-ballot Hall of Famer, Perry is... not. Perry has been known to go out of his way to rile up the opposition, including antics with other players' sticks, lashing out at the other team's bench when they wouldn't help him get his stick back, getting up to no good with his water bottle, sparking line brawls and going at it with an opposing team's coach.
  • Italian footballer Paolo Rossi was the hero of the 1982 World Cup championship... and absolutely loathed in Brazil, as he scored all three goals in the game that eliminated the best Brazilian team in years (when Rossi visited São Paulo, once a taxi driver recognized him he kicked Rossi out of his car).
  • French footballer Thierry Henry falls into a similar conundrum to Maradona. While he's well respected in England and his native France, he ended up becoming hated in Ireland for handling the ball in the run up to scoring the goal that kept their team out of the 2010 World Cup.
  • Dutch footballer Arjen Robben is regarded as one of the best players of his generation and one of the best wingers in the world. In Mexico, he is hated for his dive in the Round of 16 match-up vs Mexico in the 2014 World Cup that led to the penalty that eliminated Mexico. This lead to the “No Era Penal” meme. Needless to say, many Mexicans cried karma when the Netherlands failed to qualify for the next World Cup, thus ending Robben's international football career.
  • Uruguayan footballer Luis Suárez falls even harder than Henry, as he is very much loved and respected in Uruguay and in Liverpool F.C. and admired everywhere as a gifted striker, but he will be forever marred everywhere else and in every other team in the Premier League for his unsportsmanlike behavior on the pitch, his brutal tackles and his penchant for biting rival players. His country's appeals to reduce his ban of four months from anything football after a biting incident at the World Cup were crushed by FIFA.
  • The dominant team in any given sport and country tends to attract both a rather big fandom (including of course the obligatory bandwagon fans and Fan Dumb) as well as a rather big hatedom, the latter of which will often point out real or perceived flaws, cheating and extreme Loophole Abuse. While some international fanbases copy both, in most cases only the fandom aspects are copied. The ratio of e.g. Real Madrid fans to Real Madrid haters will be much more tilted towards the fans outside of Spain than inside it. This is mostly because many people that follow sports have an attitude like "I support my team and whoever plays against Rival X" and sports fanbases are much more diverse in the country the league is in than elsewhere - good luck finding a fan of Rayo Vallecano outside of Spain, or one of the Cleveland Browns in... well, anywhere.
  • "Local boy made it big" type players tend to be more popular in the place they are from, while they may draw blank stares and a big "who?" elsewhere. Ever heard of Markus Kuhn, Sebastian Vollmer or Moritz Böhringer? No? Well every German American Football fan can tell you who they are and where they play.^note Kuhn and Vollmer play for the New England Patriots, respectively as offensive and defensive tackles. Böhringer, a wide receiver, is on the Minnesota Vikings practice squad; he got significant publicity in the States in 2016 when he became the first European skill-position player ever to be chosen in the NFL draft without having played college football (Kuhn and Vollmer both came to the States for college). Same goes for Dennis Martínez, a good but not all-time-great major league pitcher after whom Nicaragua's national stadium is named, who will draw a lot of "who?" from most Americans, except for the most dedicated baseball nerds. Bizarrely, the opposite can happen if a player is/was great on the field but did things that are considered Serious Business and/or has a bit of Stop Being Stereotypical going on. Lothar Matthäus is undoubtedly one of the greatest defenders/midfielders of his era and was among the architects of the 1990 world cup triumph for Germany, but his native Franconia mainly ridicules him for his accent and inability to speak English and they let him Never Live It Down that he went to Bayern München, which is basically seen as a devil incarnate by most fans of other teams (mostly Nuremberg in the case of Franconia). Bavaria (which Bayern München invokes in its name) being the not well liked "colonial overlords" ^{boring politics}Before there was a German state (founded in 1871) there were several smaller states. One of them was the electorate of Bavaria that came to control Franconia (and got elevated to kingdom) in the course of the Napoleonic wars by cleverly allying with Napoleon when he was on top and abandoning him when he was on his way down. Nobody in Franconia was ever asked their opinion on this and even though it happened in 1806, many are still bitter. The modern state of Bavaria has the same borders as the Kingdom of Bavaria in the early 19th century and pork barrel spending tends to focus on the areas that were Bavarian before the 1800s, at least if you ask someone from Franconia. of Franconia does not help the sports rivalry one bit.
  • Salvatore Schillaci managed to escape this. In the 1990 World Cup, he scored the goal that knocked Ireland out of the quarter finals. However, his later Adam Westing of the situation later endeared him somewhat to the Irish.
• In Sri Lanka, Muttiah Muralitharan is the greatest spin bowler in the history of Cricket. In Australia, he's a cheating chucker who stole Shane Warne's Test wicket record. The rest of the world just doesn't care. ^note  Incidentally, Warne and Muralitharan themselves were good friends until Warne's premature passing in 2022.
• In the United States, speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno is thought of as a national hero, the USA's most decorated winter Olympian ever, and one hell of a dancer. However, in South Korea the Japanese-American champion is one of, if not the, most hated athletes in the nation and nicknamed "The King of Fouls". It started after the 2002 Salt Lake City games when he won a gold medal after Korean skater Kim Dong-Sung was disqualified for blocking him, and he happily celebrated afterward. There were massive protests against the United States after he won (though US servicemen accidentally killing a couple of Korean schoolgirls probably also had something to do with that) and the United States embassy had to be closed the next day because of threats against them. They thought what Apolo did was worse than a potential war. The first verse of Yoon Min-Suk's hit song "Fucking USA" was all about Ohno (the rest was about Bush threatening North Korea), toilet paper with Ohno's picture on it sold like hotcakes, and somebody released a game where you could shoot expys of Ohno. During the 2002 FIFA World Cup, the South Korean team scored on the U.S. team and re-enacted Ohno's "bump" as a part of their celebration. South Korea erupted in laughter. America's basic reaction was one of confusion at what South Koreans were even laughing at.
  
  It got so bad that, a year after he won, not only Ohno but the entire US speed skating team did not enter the nation due to death threats – and after that, he only entered the country while surrounded by armed guards. In South Korea, "Ohnolike" has entered the lexicon as meaning "dirty trick". The hatred against Ohno swelled up again during the 2010 Vancouver games after two Korean skaters took each other out and Ohno won silver, though by the end of the games it was the Australian embassy that was being shut down because of death threats because of a controversial decision to disqualify the women's relay team made by Aussie referee Jim Hewish, who just happens to be the same judge that disqualified Dong-Sung in 2002 giving Ohno his first gold.
  • Then there's Korea's close tracking of figure skater Kim Yuna and the manufactured rivalry with Asada Mao, a Japanese competitor who she beat on the way to winning the 2009 Grand Prix. When she set a new record, Korean media just had to mention that Asada's score was pretty unimpressive.
  • Anybody, regardless of sport, either Japanese or having Japanese ancestry, is bound to be HATED in South Korea, due to very strong anti-Japanese sentiment that exists to this day, thus explaining the hatred of the two above.^note Ohno has a Japanese father and white mother. The exact opposite comes true as well, due to Japan also having a very strong anti-Korean sentiment that also exists to this day.

Countries

In Japan

• Japan as a whole only likes baseball, soccer, sumo wrestling, and professional wrestling^note Which doesn't carry the same social stigma it does in the U.S., in Japan it's more thought of as a legitimate form of theater. Volleyball has something of a following (the quadrennial FIVB World Cup has been hosted only in Japan since 1977, and the sport entered the Olympic program in Tokyo-64), helped by school/corporate teams and the country winning men's and women's Olympic golds. It is not really big on the other rough-and-tumble sports like basketball, gridiron football (American/Canadian football, although the existing Japan American Football League/X-League has some degree of popularity, as shown in the aforementioned American Football paragraph above), etc. Two main reasons why: 1) the average height of the Japanese citizen is rather short (today, about 172 cm or 5 ft., 7.5 in. for men, and about 158 cm/5'2" for women^note For perspective: Yuta Tabuse, the first Japanese basketball player in the NBA (who played the first half of the 2004-05 season in the Phoenix Suns), is only 5'9"/175 cm., with Japanese only reaching those averages since roughly 1985) and 2) due to cultural reasons, Japan isn't into the stereotype of "big, muscular men and women" that is favored in the West, especially in the U.S. and Canada (although this is somewhat ironic in Japan's love of pro wrestling, since the sport actually favors muscular builds in certain types of wrestlers). While the existence of Japanese athletes who actually participate in those particular sports isn't unheard of, good luck trying to mention any rank-and-file athlete from Japan who do because they're a rarity.
  • Japan also greatly loves distance running, which is a niche sport in most of the rest of the world. They especially love the 'Ekiden' relay races, which are almost never seen outside of Japan, but inside the country will draw up to a million live spectators and be nationally televised. They have ekiden relays for all levels, including schools, universities, national championships, and even corporate sponsored professional team races.
  • Auto racing is also quite popular in Japan, mainly sports car and open wheel racing. Makes sense when Japan ranks only behind China and the United States in total car production.
  • Also reasonably popular and prestigious in Japan is gymnastics; their men's team consistently goes head-to-head with China as the most dominant team on the men's side, and the women, while not as successful as their male counterparts, make regular appearances in Olympic- and world-level team and individual finals and are often individiual medal threats. This is helped by a fairly robust domestic competition scene, including universities — Japan is the only major gymnastics power other than the United States to have serious competitive collegiate gymnastics programs.
  • Rugby union is also considerably popular in Japan as well, as it is one of the very few rough-and-tumble sports that has garnered a following in a country where such sports are usually looked down upon as being too physically hardcore for the average Japanese citizen outside of professional wrestling.
  • Speaking of which, Mixed Martial Arts is huge in Japan. More or less evolving from pro wrestling, as to make it look more realistic a few promoters had guys fight for real (but in a sort of safe controlled way) until the agreed finish, and then eventually dropped the "agreed finish" part. The first ever MMA promotion, Shooto, was an offshoot of the Universal Wrestling Federation;^note The Japanese UWF, not the Bill Watts UWF or the Herb Abrams' UWF and the Japanese beat the Americans to American pay-per-view, with a UWFi PPV airing in the U.S. a month before the first UFC.

Sports

Association Football

• Famously, Association Football, or soccer, as it is known as in the United States and a few other places.^Disclaimer For the sake of this entry, we'll defer to the American terminology, so we don't confuse Association Football and American Football. So noteworthy it has its own trope.
  • Far and away the most popular sport in the world, with The World Cup being the most popular international sporting event outside of the Olympic Games, soccer today remains something of a niche sport in America, at least at the professional level. Probably the only place the game is considered popular in America is as a youth or community sport—which may have something to do with the stigma, as it is therefore seen as childish and immature. Another major reason is that soccer is negatively stereotyped by Americans as a sport associated with the elite and upper-class. Which is somewhat ironic when you consider that part of soccer’s worldwide popularity is how relatively cheap it is compared to other sports like basketball, hockey, gridiron football, etc. What also irks many Americans about soccer is that it is a sport that has players having a propensity to overreact on what would be at best a light bump that they received from an opposing player, and falling down to the ground as if they received a major injury. This is seen to most Americans as being effeminate when compared to other sports, such as American football and hockey, where toughness and integrity are particularly valued. The possibility of a draw is also anathema in the competitive American culture, which prefers games with a clear winner.
    • Professional soccer has a degree of popularity in the American southwest, home to a large number of immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Mexico (whose love of the game is legendary). This is especially true in the Los Angeles area, which did not have an NFL team between 1994 and 2016, allowing MLS to fill the vacuum. Soccer also enjoys a higher-than-average popularity in the Pacific Northwest, where the rivalry between Seattle Sounders FC, Vancouver Whitecaps FC, and the Portland Timbers is one of the big sports rivalries in both MLS and in the region. Now take into account the common stereotypes of the West Coast, and you might understand why people like Ann Coulter pretend to believe soccer to be some liberal and/or European plot.
    • One of the few soccer-related things that completely resisted America's typical lack of interest in soccer was the international popularity and reverence for the Brazilian legend Pelé. He's been a household name in the United States since the 1960s and for a long time, he was the only soccer player the average American could name. When Pelé came to America in the mid-70s to play for the New York Cosmos of the ill-fated North American Soccer League, his mere presence effectively saved the league and he packed stadiums wherever he went. Ten million Americans watched his first game for the Cosmos, an impressive television audience for any sporting event in that era. His death in December 2022 received significant mainstream American media coverage.
    • The tendency of many Americans to diss on soccer in international online forums is equally infamous, and usually isn't taken well overseas, although general American opinion regarding the sport is gradually shifting. The World Cup has long attracted decent TV ratings in the States, and the 2014 Cup earned record ratings for ESPN. The fact that America's national men's team has vastly improved also is an important factor to soccer's rise in the country.
    • While World Cup and even professional soccer have become somewhat more mainstream, at this point it's probably stuck in a vicious cycle. Just as the top international baseball, basketball, and hockey players come to play in the U.S. where they can earn the most money, the best U.S. soccer players will go overseas for the same reasons (although some MLS teams have done a good job of holding on to their star players, such as the Sounders with Clint Dempsey after he returned from England). Also, the best athletes tend to already go into the more traditionally popular U.S. sports because they see the wealth and celebrity of the pros. Kids with real talent tend to specialize in specific sports at a much younger age, as well nowadays, so they don't even take the opportunity to play what would at best be #5 in popularity.
  • It's a completely different story on the other side of the gender divide. Women's soccer in the USA is comparatively very popular as it is traditionally one of the most-played sports by female athletes there,^note (Mind-blowing fact: Until the last half of the 2010s, more than half of the girls (under 18) registered as soccer players in the entire world played in the US!) and America has one of the most powerful teams in the world – winning four Women's World Cups and Olympic gold medals, and the sport seems to have finally eclipsed the men’s game in popularity by 2019.
  • Although the United States is invariably the country to get flak from Europeans for not liking soccer, the sport is even less popular in Canada (outside the aforementioned Vancouver), where hockey is king (followed by Canadian Football and, of all things, curling). Incidentally, Canadians also call it soccer. This is a mix of a lack of success from the men's team (not making it to their first World Cup until 1986, performing laughably badly, and not making it back to the WC until 2022; at least the United States has improved) and the fact that its three highest-profile professional sides play in the otherwise-American MLS (the current Canadian Premier League only began play in 2019). Another major reason is due to the country's colder climate and harsher weather; because soccer generally doesn't have much in the way of protective equipment when compared to Canadian/American football and hockey, it is practically unsuitable for most of the provinces that try to establish a major professional league. However, like the United States, women's soccer is very popular, seeing more success, and the 2015 Women's World Cup that was held here, as well as the women's Olympic gold medal in 2020 (21), have definitely improved the popularity of soccer in general in the hockey and (American/Canadian) football loving country. Some even claim that Canadian love for soccer will only grow due to the amount of immigrants and the fact it's easier/cheaper to practice than hockey. Don't ever tell that to homegrown rank-and-file Canadians, though.
  • The Philippines is also notable for its lack of enthusiasm for soccer in contrast to other nearby Asian countries. While there has been a surge of popularity in the sport with the help of the Younghusband brothers, the sport has always been seen with low regard due to its perception as an expensive game (which, as mentioned earlier, is ironic since soccer is one of the cheapest sports to invest in; it should be noted that the Philippines is an economically poor country and that the Filipino peso is of considerably lower currency value compared to the currencies of more well off countries) and perceived difficulty. Lack of major victories from its national team can also explain the lack of popularity of the sport. It does not help that whatever sport Americans like^note  (remember that the United States controlled the islands for much of the early 20th century and had a profound effect on the type of popular culture The Philippines receive) – basketball, baseball, boxing, etc. – Filipinos will end up trying to idolize it.
  • Other countries in East Asia where The Beautiful Game isn't considered the most beautiful: China (prefers table tennis & basketball), Taiwan (baseball & basketball), Malaysia (loves badminton), and Thailand (native sports).
  • Downplayed in Japan, where baseball is the most popular sport but over the years soccer has been gaining great popularity to the point of being considered the second most popular sport. For decades, soccer was extremely unpopular in Japan and its national team performed poorly, but since the mid-1980s the Japanese government saw potential in soccer and began to support its dissemination through various means, such as organizing championships and its promotion through Anime & Manga (Captain Tsubasa had a fundamental role in this). In the 1990s, a process of professionalizing soccer began in the country, initiating a rise in popularity and improvement of its national team that culminated in Japan's qualification to the 1998 World Cup. Since then, Japan has consecutively qualified for all World Cups and has become a regional power in Asia. Not to mention that their women won the World Cup in 2011, and are just as much a regional power as the men.
  • Soccer is also noticeably less popular in Ireland than in most of Europe, mostly due to competition from Gaelic Football and hurling, which nearly totally dominate domestic games. The explosion in popularity of rugby over time has done it no favours either. Though every country in Europe has a national soccer team, the sport is less popular in colder countries – Russia, the Nordic States (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland), the Alpine states (Austria, Switzerland), etc. – where winter sports get more attention.
  • Another European country where soccer isn't the most popular sport is Lithuania, where basketball is at least as much of a national obsession as (ice) hockey is in Canada.
  • Soccer is also quite unpopular in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal), where cricket is king.^note  While soccer is the most popular international sport in Myanmar, they still trail behind the traditional sports. Also, Bhutan prefers archery over soccer. Most other sports are relatively unpopular or don't have the crazy fan following of cricket, largely due to hardcore marketing activity in favour of it. In urban areas, though, soccer has plenty of fans, and in a few states there is a long-running soccer infrastructure. American sports, on the other hand, are not so popular, except basketball.
  • Oceania as a whole isn't big on soccer either (yes, they also call the sport that; it's not just an American thing, folks). New Zealand likes rugby, as does Papua New Guinea. Half of Australia prefers Australian Rules Football, the other half prefers rugby or cricket – it's a regional thing, see below.
  • Soccer is also curiously unpopular (or at least less popular than on the mainlands) in Caribbean countries. For instance, most of the former British West Indies – Barbados, Jamaica^note Which actually does have a following, with Jamaica entering the World Cup a few times, even with famous fans like Bob Marley and Usain Bolt, but it's at a mostly grass-roots level, since soccer games are cheaper and easier to set up in the poorer areas than cricket, Guyana, etc. – prefer cricket or rugby; Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela love baseball; Panama loves basketball.
  • In Nicaragua, soccer has traditionally been second to Baseball^note that is, if you only count team sports. Among individual sports, boxing easily enjoys number one status and may or may not beat out soccer or even baseball (or as the locals call it, béisbol), which is not to say that it does not enjoy huge popularity as well. Part of the reason for the lack of popularity is the Butt-Monkey status the national team has enjoyed for most of its existence, whereas the baseball team is pretty good for a country of its size and has produced quite a few successful major leaguers (the national stadium is named after one). On the Caribbean Coast (which in many ways is a country unto its own) soccer is third after Baseball and Basketball. In a similar vein as American soccer fans, most Nicaraguan soccer fans are either fans of Barça or Real Madrid and the Clásico between the two is a national event despite no Nicaraguan ever participating.

American Football

• American Football, or gridiron football towards foreigners, is only really popular in the United States and its neighboring countries. Canada plays a local variation called Canadian football with its own league and rules (similar to, but distinct from, the US's), and Mexico has a few collegiate leagues and a sizable fandom for the Dallas Cowboys (until very recently the only team whose games were consistently available on Mexican television), but didn't launch a professional league until 2016. Outside North America, while there are pockets of popularity in Europe^note  (the NFL has hosted games at Wembley and Tottenham Hotspur's new stadium to sold-out crowds, and has long been considering an expansion team in London), it is even more niche a sport than soccer is in the U.S.; an attempt by the NFL to form a European American football league, NFL Europa, was shut down in 2007 by incoming commissioner Roger Goodell who viewed it (at the time all but one team was playing in Germany and the only non-German team played in Amsterdam)^note  in Germany itself, the NFL Europe might have had the problem that it was competing with Germany's own independent minor league, the GFL as a colossal waste of time and money and replaced it with the London games. However, in a major case of Germans Love David Hasselhoff, the sport enjoys solid, if not huge popularity in Mexico, Japan, Germany and - of all places - Austria. The Super Bowl is carried in Free TV stations even though kickoff is somewhere beyond midnight and ratings are decent. German free TV has started carrying two games every Sunday beginning with the 2015 season to decent ratings, and the NFL started playing regular-season games in Germany in 2022. However, the attitude people have to American Football is very often influenced by the attitude those people have towards the USA in general.
  • Professional football has a respectable fandom in Canada both with its native Canadian Football League and Canadian NFL fans. However, Canadians don't generally share Americans' nearly religious obsession with Collegiate American Football (though see below on that), much less varsity high school football. While American pop culture is rife with stories and characters featuring both high school and college football, they don't really exist in a Canadian culture that's much more likely to focus on hockey. The only place in Canada where high school and college level football are really popular is Quebec, believe it or not.
• While Collegiate American Football is hugely popular in America if you just look at overall TV ratings it doesn't have as much of a following in the Northeast, where people seem to prefer to just watch the professional teams. This is probably because most of the college football teams in the Northeast aren't very good and very few of them are in one of the Power Five Conferences (or even Group of Five Conferences) that get the majority of the TV coverage.^note Which is a result of most of the region's major universities, particularly the Ivy League, deciding to deemphasis college football around the 1950s due to concerns over maintaining academic standards. As an example, while there's literally dozens of 60,000+-seat stadiums throughout the southern and midwestern U.S. that exist just for college football (and seven that hold over 100,000), the Northeast has very few that hold even 50,000. Pennsylvania, which is considered a part of the Northeast by the US Census Bureau, has two college-only stadiums that seat at least 50K, but those don't really count for various reasons. Franklin Field in Philadelphia (about 53K) is home to the Penn Quakers, but the Ivy League now plays in the second level of college football, Division I FCS, and on top of that the Ivies don't participate in the FCS playoffs per conference policy. Not to mention that Penn rarely comes close to filling its stadium in modern times. The Penn State Nittany Lions, whose home of Beaver Stadium^note Not named after the animal, but rather a former Penn State president and state governor. does hold over 100K, are smack-dab in the middle of the state, with a heavily Midwest-flavored culture. Two other Pennsylvania college teams, the Temple Owls (also in Philly) and Pitt Panthers (with the latter city's culture also being more Midwest-flavored), play in the stadiums of their cities' NFL teams. Outside of that state, the only college stadiums in the Northeast that seat even 50K are the Yale Bowl (about 61K), another Ivy League stadium that's rarely even half-full, and SHI Stadium at Rutgers University in New Jersey (52K-plus). Syracuse's JMA Wireless Dome (historically the Carrier Dome) is just short of the 50K mark.

Australian Rules Football

• Curiously, Australian Rules Football is not popular everywhere in Australia. While it is huge in South Australia, Western Australia, Tasmania, and practically the state religion in Victoria – where the game began and where the national league is headquartered – it has traditionally been unpopular in New South Wales and Queensland, where Rugby League is dominant. With the combined state populations of the two camps, this means Australia is effectively split 50-50 between the two sports. Since The '80s there has been a sustained attempt to make Aussie Rules a more nationwide sport, with the Victorian Football League becoming the Australian Football League, and the league expanding into Queensland and NSW (the South Melbourne Swans moved to Sydney, the Brisbane Bears were created, then merged with the Melbourne-based Fitzroy Lions to become the Brisbane Lions, and in the last decade the Greater Western Sydney Giants and Gold Coast Suns joined the league).^note Teams were also added in footy-loving SA and WA Some of the gap has been made up, but Queensland and NSW are still viewed as rugby territory. On the flip side, the National Rugby League added the Melbourne Storm in 1998, who have become a league power, but still only manage a niche following in their home market.

Baseball

• Baseball is popular in its North American homeland, as well as in nearby countries heavily influenced by the United States – Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, parts of Central America, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, a few islands in the Pacific – and almost nowhere else, although there are also professional leagues in Australia, Italy and the Netherlands (who have had great results in international play because of the fact that players from the leftover Dutch Caribbean holdings are eligible to play for them). Europeans in particular find it as incomprehensible as Americans find cricket, despite both sports sharing a common ancestor. There's even a British variant of baseball but is only popular in Wales and England, and even then it is regional and tends to be overshadowed by association football.

Basketball

• Basketball is one of the biggest team sports on the planet (arguably behind only Association Football and Cricket). Especially in European countries, which have several pro leagues and provide the strongest competition to the US and China in Olympic competition. The major exception to this is the UK, where the sport is seen as a kid's game. Attempts to grow the sport in the country (some spearheaded by the NBA itself) have been met with apathy at best.
• Christian Laettner was a phenomenal basketball player for Duke, and played for the NBA and other international basketball teams. In college basketball, he was voted the most hated player in NCAA. His dislike is well apparent in Lexington, Kentucky where resentment towards him because of a game-winning shot against the Kentucky Wildcats in the 1992 NCAA Basketball Tournament remains to this day.^ContextEven more to the point for Big Blue Nation, Laettner stepped on the chest of Kentucky's Aminu Timberlake after the latter had fallen to the floor during that game. Video clearly showed that it was no accident. While Laettner received a technical foul, most UK fans who are old enough to remember the game believe to this day that he should have been ejected.
• Good luck trying to find Robert Horry fans in Sacramento, because he was public enemy number one in that city after the 2002 NBA Western Conference Finals. He scored a clutch game-ending shot for the Los Angeles Lakers which contributed to the Sacramento Kings' collapse against their division rivals. Because of his late-game heroics, he was booed loudly whenever he touched the ball or taking free throws when he visited Sacramento, regardless of which team he played for until his retirement in 2008.

Bowling

• Tenpin bowling has been making inroads outside the United States, though it's still the most popular there. Other variants are popular only in narrow areas: Five-pin in Canada, candlepin in New England and eastern Canada, duckpin in the eastern US (and the variant with rubber bands around the pins in Quebec), and ninepin in Texas's Hill Country (brought over by German immigrants in the 19th century). Note that 9-pin bowling, the standard form in Europe, was banned in most of the USA (Texas was the exception) prior to the Civil War due to Moral Guardians associating it with debauchery and organized crime, and 10-pin was created to get around the ban.

Cue Sports

• Which cue sports are most popular varies geographically.
  • In Britain and many other former British colonies, snooker, which developed in British-ruled India, is the most popular of cue sports, and is a really big deal in terms of money in the sport, while 8-Ball pool is a casual barroom game played on small tables. Conversely, in the U.S., 8-Ball, 9-Ball and straight pool are the most popular (and the last isn't as popular as it once was), and 10-Ball is becoming increasingly popular among professionals, while snooker is practically unknown. (And the British and American versions of 8-Ball are actually different rulesets, too, with the U.K. version also known as blackball.) Carom billiards (the pocketless variety) is more popular in France and other French-speaking countries, while English pocket billiards, which is essentially a hybrid created by playing carom on a snooker table, has its fans in the UK and some other English-speaking countries.
  • In Germany carom used to be the most popular "elite" type of cue sports for a long time, while eight ball pool enjoyed a popularity as an amateur sport (albeit with Bad Guys Play Pool stereotypes associated with it). However, the rather successful Eurosport telecasts of most major snooker tournaments have lead to a small "boom" of snooker, and it is now much easier to find a snooker table and people who know who Ronnie O'Sullivan is. 8 Ball Pool is still more commonly found because the smaller tables are cheaper, but snooker has the benefit of not being associated in public consciousness with dingy smoky bars in the bad part of town. Carrom meanwhile is almost entirely unheard of.

Curling

• Curling is big in Canada (where even the smallest town usually has a curling rink), but not so much in the rest of the world, which wonders what the heck those people are doing with brooms on the ice. Curling is known in Scotland (being that's where the sport was invented) and isn't viewed as peculiar and unusual as it is elsewhere in the world, but its popularity is not nearly as big as it is in Canada. That being said, it does score big ratings during the Olympics, probably because it's the only native Scottish Winter Olympic sport... and for the longest time was the only distinctively Scottish Olympic sport in general (shot put, hammer throw, and rugby sevens, although originating in Scotland, aren't distinctively Scottish, and golf spent 112 years outside the Olympic program). In the Northern U.S., where winter sports like hockey, cross country skiing and tobogganing are considered traditions, curling is seen at best as a winter activity akin to horseshoes and bocce ball. Oddly enough, curling is also developing a following in Washington, DC.

Handball

• Handball is the number one or at the very least close number two sport in large parts of Central Europe, the Balkans, the Nordic countries (including Iceland and Greenland) and some Eastern European countries. It also has a following in South Korea and Brazil, who have even won the World Championship. In most of the rest of the world handball is known as "the who with the what now?" Some Americans may even think of an entirely different (and still obscure) sport when hearing the name.

Ice Hockey

• Traditionally, Ice Hockey is only popular in Canada, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the northern U.S., with those eight countries producing the most NHL players, and winning the most hockey medals in the winter Olympics. The obvious reason is because it's traditionally a winter sport. Attempts to spread it outside of those regions have not had much success. The National Hockey League, for instance, added or relocated a number of teams to the Southern United States, with mixed results. As a rule of thumb, any region in the Southern U.S. with a large enough population of Canadian and Yankee snowbirds tends to have a hockey team that at least does well enough. For example, while teams in Tampa Bay, Nashville, and Dallas are well-supported, the teams in Arizona, Carolina, and the Miami area have lagged behind (though new owners are improving those teams' fortunes, especially Carolina's near-complete turnaround). The biggest contrast is between Las Vegas, which despite being in the middle of a desert has sold out every single game in its history, and Atlanta, a city that lost teams that wound up moving to Canada – twice – and doesn't currently have an NHL team, despite being one of the top ten largest markets in the country. (Although there were extenuating circumstances with corrupt ownership the second time.)
  • Additionally, the physicality of ice hockey can be shocking to spectators used to low-contact sports. Fighting is technically against the rules, but the definition of a fight is somewhat loose^note you can't trip someone, hit them with your stick, or punch them, but pushing and grappling are permitted within limits and body-checking is part of the game (at least for men, the main difference between men's and women's hockey is that body-checking isn't allowed in the women's game), and many players break the rules anyway and accept the penalty. Moreover, in North American professional leagues (the NHL and its feeders), the penalty itself is also weaker than in most other sports. In any other sport (and, to be fair, European professional and North American college hockey), players involved in a punch-up would be ejected from the game, but in North American pro hockey, players fighting just get five minutes in the penalty box (the famous "five for fighting").^note Yes, that's where the singer Vladimir Ondrasik gets his stage name. Many hockey fans, meanwhile, enjoy a certain amount of on-ice violence and see it as part of the culture, with less-aggressive players like the Sedin twins sometimes being derided as less masculine. These fans are sometimes puzzled by how, during a soccer game, a player will fall down and scream because an opponent lightly touched them.
  • The St. Louis Blues. Missouri is right on the dividing line between the the region of the U.S. where hockey is popular, and where it isn't. In the northern half of Missouri, the team is popular and among the top ten in attendance nearly every year, while in the southern half of the state, they get less coverage than high school basketball and their popularity is limited to only a handful of towns. Meanwhile, in Canada hockey is a year-round major news source, eclipsing not just all other sports combined but also politics, religion, and the arts.
  • While we're on the topic of hockey, it's infamously unpopular with Black Americans, even in the North, compared to say, basketball, football, and baseball, something which a number of black stand-up comics have noted. ^note Indeed, seemingly-odd disparities between Northern U.S. cities in their degree of "avidity" for hockey (i.e. how hockey-crazy they are) can often be explained away by simply removing the share of the population that is Black: for instance, an analysis of Google searches suggests that about 27% of people in Greater Pittsburgh are hockey fans, while only 15% of people in Metro Detroit are, which seems intuitively weird (Detroit is literally on the border with Canada, Michigan is often only-half-jokingly called "basically Canada", and Detroit is often nicknamed "Hockeytown"), but when you consider that the Pittsburgh area is 89.8% White and only 7.9% Black, while Metro Detroit is 70.2% White and 22.8% Black, the numbers get much closer. This is also true with NHL players, of whom few are black, and most of those come from Canada's much smaller Black minority (about 3% of Canadians are Black, while about 12% of Americans are... also keep in mind that the US has nine times Canada's population, meaning that Canadians of all backgrounds are outnumbered by African Americans). While the two facts are almost certainly related, it's unclear whether the game has fewer black fans because it has fewer black players, or the other way around. Which is amusingly ironic in the case of American football, since the sport itself also happens to be a winter sport (the season starts in the autumn and ends in mid-winter) and yet there's a large amount of black players in the league. However, it must be noted that a disproportionate percentage of top black American football players grow up in states with generally mild winters (mostly the South, including Texas, and California).
    • Some have accused the NHL of either deliberately playing up the Unfortunate Implications of its demographics compared to the NBA (which is well known as being popular among African Americans) or being unable or unwilling to cater to a more diverse fanbase.
    • While football is a fall/winter sport, nothing about it is specifically related to any season the way ice hockey is. In warm months and regions it can only be played in a rink which costs money. (Street hockey and roller hockey, using a ball instead of a puck, are popular warm-weather pastimes in hockey-mad countries, but even when it's played on inline skates, the experience isn't the same as the physics of skating and handling a puck on ice.) Football only requires a ball and an open area. Basketball, which was specifically invented to give athletes something to do during the winter, only requires a ball and a hoop. Schoolyards and parks have those and are open to the public free of charge. Football and basketball are played near the start of the school year and are played on school grounds making them social events for even the non-players. Most schools can't accommodate a hockey rink and those that do have a team must rent rink space elsewhere.

Men's lacrosse

• Men's lacrosse is only really popular in the United States and Canada, which is fitting as it was created by Native Americans, and even then it is very regional, being mostly popular in the northeastern US and eastern Canada (although since the 2010s it has become the fastest-growing high school sport, especially the indoor box version of the game in the hockey-mad Upper Midwestern US, as box lacrosse was invented specifically to fit inside an ice hockey rink). In the UK, it's thought of as a girls' school sport, albeit a brutal one – see the St. Trinians cartoons/films. Lacrosse is also almost solely a girls' sport in Japan, where it's currently experiencing a surge in popularity. Even in the United States, lacrosse is mostly associated with rich East Coast prep school kids, and isn't played much by poorer people.

Racing

• NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) is easily one of the most popular forms of auto racing (CART used to be one of the top until the CART/IRL split) in the United States, and if you consider it a sport its popularity is up there with the NFL. While it has fans from other countries in North America, it has a niche fanbase in the rest of the world at best, because even in the US it's often considered a "redneck" sport (detractors often using terms like "Non-Athletic Sport Centered Around Rednecks"). In the Prohibition era, people would occasionally set up races between each other to see who had the better car set-up for transporting moonshine, which eventually evolved into NASCAR. It was invented by people considered to be "hillbillies" or "rednecks", and the majority of its drivers also tend to qualify under such names.
• Conversely, Formula One is often coined as the "Pinnacle of Motorsport" and is up there with the FIFA World Cup in popularity in most of the world. In the U.S., however, it has little love, hence the United States Grand Prix has been an on-and-off deal. One of the turn-offs in F1 to most American racing fans is the difficulty in passing, which is something that happens a lot in NASCAR and CART/IRL (then again, passing is easy on oval tracks, which F1 cars never race on). This is deemed by most American racing fans to make Formula One races much less exciting.
  • It doesn't help that because of time zones, most races are on only in the early morning in the U.S.
  • It also really doesn't help that there's very little American representation in F1. There's only one American driver in F1 for the 2024 season (Logan Sargent, with Williams), there weren't any from 2016 to 2022, and there's only one American team in Haas, who are one of Ferrari's development teams. No American driver has won a F1 race since Mario Andretti won the Dutch GP in 1978, which was also the last time an American won the World Driver's Championship.
  • Another difference is that Formula One has fewer limits on the equipment, and in many ways is considered a showcase of technology, resulting in a larger gap between the top teams and bottom teams, whereas the major U.S. auto racing series have more limits on the cars and the engines in an attempt to make the driver a bigger factor.
  • This has started to change in the 2020s as new F1 owners Liberty Media have poured a ton of money into trying to get Americans interested again, and to some extent it's worked. There were three grands prix in the US in 2023, and all 3 did great numbers at the gate and respectable (though not great) TV ratings. However, the time zone issue is always going to be a problem for races not held in the western hemisphere, not really helping the ratings is that most of the races that are held in the western hemisphere are during the fall (the GP of Miami in May and the Canadian GP in June being the exceptions), where they run right into both the NFL regular season and the NASCAR playoffs.^note The Las Vegas GP having a 1:00 am EST start time (10:00 pm local time) for some bizarre reason didn't help either. This may have been to avoid competing with Sunday Night Football, but still, 1 am on a Sunday night is ratings suicide Getting Americans to watch F1 on TV can be tricky, but they seem more than willing to see it in person.
• Likewise, another sport that is governed by the FIA, namely rallying, is followed by a great portion of the world except the United States. One might think that a car careening at full speed through rural areas, Tokyo-Drifting through half the trek would attract attention to speed junkies everywhere, especially since there is no discernible alternative in the U.S. at all. Hell, even Ford has a great team that competes every year!^note By Ford we meant M-Sport, run by Malcolm Wilson as a privateer team independent of Ford, though the company does supply M-Sport with cars and resources. One possible explanation is that street racing displaced rallying in the culture, which is functionally very similar to rallying, but with the added bonus of it being a Forbidden Fruit by it being illegal and the cops going to great measures to stop the racers and organizers. Or off-roading, which makes sense when trucks are far more popular in the U.S. than the sort of econoboxes that rally cars are based on. Another possible reason is that the idea of what is effectively a time trial doesn't seem to be as readily appealing as a head-to-head race where drivers compete against each other directly as opposed to beating each other's stage times. Perhaps the reason why rallying did garner attention in the States was that of the likes of Ken Block and his Gymkhana videos done on rally cars, though his World Rally Championship record was seen by rally enthusiasts as spotty at best.
  • Rallycross, the Americanized version of rally (4-6 cars doing laps around a temporary rally circuit, usually built in a football stadium or in the infield of a NASCAR track), has had mild success in the U.S. but not much elsewhere. Oddly it seems to mainly draw fans from the X-Games and Ridiculousness crowd rather than fans from other racing series. Block is part of the "Ridiculousness-verse", so to speak, which helps.
• Touring car racing is really only popular in Germany, Great Britain, and Australia, with a mild fanbase in other European countries. Americans wouldn't even know it exists if not for Top Gear (UK), though a case could be made that NASCAR is basically touring car racing on oval tracks. It's starting to gain a little more popularity in China as the Chinese build more racetracks.
• Sports car/endurance racing is pretty much ignored outside of Europe and Japan, with only a tiny niche following in North America (and even that's mostly limited to the west coast and Florida.)
• In general, auto racing on oval tracks is only popular in the United States and the countries that border it. Auto racing fans from outside North America are likely to view oval racing as "hundreds of laps of turning left" and find it to be incredibly boring—oval racing has the misfortune of being something that's very difficult to do without being apparent to spectators. On other continents, oval races are curiosities at best. One exception is in eastern Europe, where motorcycle racing on small oval tracks has a pretty big following, in terms of tickets sold it's the most popular sport in Poland.
  • Even in North America, Canada has a noted dislike for any form of oval racing other than short-track. The largest oval track in Canada is the just-under 1 mile Sanair Super Speedway in Quebec, which has never hosted a race in NASCAR's current Canada Series.^note The largest oval track the NASCAR Canada Series has ever visited is the 1-mile New Hampshire Motor Speedway, but that's obviously not in Canada—and the Canadian series hasn't been there since COVID-19, Canadians are likely to view superspeedways like Daytona and Talladega as being unfortunate by-products of the American obsession with everything being big.
• In America itself, there are several different types of racing that are only popular within a certain region of the country. Modified racing is hugely popular in the Northeast, but viewers from other parts of the country view it as a strange form of racing with cars that more closely resemble dune buggies than actual automobiles. Late model racing is extremely popular in the South, but in the Midwest the most popular form of dirt oval racing is sprint cars. Regional fans will argue until blue in the face which is the superior form of racing—meanwhile, auto racing fans from outside those areas view all dirt racing as the realm of ignorant hillbillies. Meanwhile, racing fans from Flyover Country view California and the Pacific Coast's preferred styles of sports car racing and drag racing as something only participated in by effete, limp-wristed urbanites and a dumbed-down version of racing where nothing but speed matters, respectively.

Rugby and Cricket

• Rugby and Cricket are very popular throughout many former British territories (especially South Asia), but are far less popular in the United States and Canada, where the latter sport is considered a curiosity at best. Unlike cricket, many Americans at least know what rugby is, even if they've never played it or seen it played (perception = "football without the pads or timeouts").^note One minor exception (outside of immigrants from the Subcontinent): The Philadelphia elite has been fond of cricket since colonial times, and the sport never fully went away. The oldest country club in Philadelphia is called the Philadelphia Cricket Club, and it still has cricket facilities and fields a team. Admittedly, it went without a cricket team from 1924 to 1998, but since then it has presided over the Philadelphia-centered minor revival of U.S. cricket. (The PCC is otherwise a fairly typical American country club with a lot of focus on golf and tennis, although the members tend to have ludicrously impeccable pedigrees.) It has a fair degree of popularity on college campuses and in some high schools as an intramural sport. There was also a brief vogue for varsity rugby at some California universities in the years before World War I. Cricket is also not very popular in Ireland despite having one of the oldest national teams in the world (founded 1855, and had not gained Test status until 2018), mostly because it was seen as a sport for upper class Anglophiles and fell out of favour in an increasingly nationalist Ireland in the late 19th century (in fact, until the 1970s, the Gaelic Athletic Association banned anyone who played cricket from playing the more popular sports of Gaelic Football and Hurling). When the Irish team beat cricket giant Pakistan in the 2007 World Cup, the general public reaction in Ireland was one of surprise that the country even had a cricket team.
  • Rugby Union is far and away the more dominant form of the game. Rugby League is limited to northern England, southern France, northern Spain, Australia and Papua New Guinea (with a moderate following in New Zealand). The people in the United States who play rugby play Union, even though League is a lot closer to American football in form than Union is.^ExplanationIn League, teams have six "tackles" to score, roughly similar to "downs" in football, and on the sixth tackle teams can kick the ball to the other team or attempt to score a "field goal", much like a football fourth down
  • The forward pass, a particular offensive play mechanic that is familiar to fans of gridiron football, is disallowed in rugby, befuddling many Americans and Canadians who are used to seeing it as a legal mechanic in gridiron football. In rugby, it is considered illegal and results in a penalty to the offending team.
• The drop goal, one of the ways teams can score points in Rugby Union, is unpopular in New Zealand. Fans see it as a boring cop-out, and their national team doesn't use it very often. In fact, their lack of good drop goal kickers was a factor in their elimination from two World Cups, both of which they entered as favourites. Their extra-time loss in the 1995 final came after a missed drop goal attempt from Andrew Mehrtens, and in the last 10 minutes of their 2007 quarterfinal, they were camped in French territory but unable to score.

Tournaments

Draws/Ties

• Americans famously dislike draws/ties. Some of it is the inherent dissatisfaction in a game that ends with nobody winning or losing—Michigan State football coach Duffy Daugherty famously compared a tie to kissing your own sister. Also, American sports traditionally use winning percentage rather than a points system to determine standings, so there's no real reward for a drawn game. That's why there is overtime in the NFL regular season when the score is tied after regulation (though a game that's still tied at the end of overtime is officially marked as a tie). The same goes for the NHL (which prior to 2006 did have ties if the draw remained, but then added a shootout) and the NBA. Many commentators say this may be a factor in the trope of Soccer-Hating Americans.

FIFA Club World Cup

• For all their tradition and reputation as the hotspot for world soccer, Europe doesn't look too highly on the FIFA Club World Cup, seeing the UEFA Champions League as the world's top club competition instead. It's not difficult to see why: while the CWC congregates the champions of each continent, it's a short tournament in which teams of wildly varying strengths are brought together, with only the South American representative consistently offering a challenge (while there's been upsets before, they never affected the European clubs, who always made it to the final, and whenever they played a non-South American team, they won). Plus, it's usually held in December and hosted far from Europe (traditionally in Japan or the Middle East. The closest to Europe that the tournament has ever been held is Morocco) which, for the European teams, means one week or two of playing the league with the reserve team (or a week or two's worth of postponed games), which is sometimes crucial as it is during this time that league placement is usually defined. On the other hand, the UCL is a season-long tournament, played in a home-and-away system except for the final (which is held at the very end of the regular season), meaning teams don't have to worry much about traveling or having their key players absent for important league/cup matches, plus, many participants are on par in skill levels and, with the Round of 16 (at which point only the best clubs that season remain) and quarter-final playoffs and semi-finals being defined by drawing of lots, a determined team's chances of having an easy path to the final are very low.

Mechanics

• Certain mechanics of a sport which are, if not beloved, at least accepted elsewhere can be a Berserk Button for both fans and haters of a sport in certain countries. You will hardly find any person in the US who knows the first thing about soccer who doesn't complain about flopping, for instance. American Football is often hated for its use of more protective gear than Rugby and its frequent and (comparatively) long intermissions in play. So much so, that the German Football League ^note  the premier competition of American Football in Germany, which is actually named that has cut down on the intermissions as much as possible to make the sport more palatable to German viewers. Also the GFL knows no regular season overtime and a draw or two per season is normal, mostly because Germans are not as draw-averse as Americans tend to be.

MLB's World Baseball Classic

• MLB's World Baseball Classic (a baseball version of The World Cup) has generally been met with apathy by the United States. Several of the top American players decline to participate since it clashes with spring training, resulting in the US team performing rather poorly until they won the the 2017 edition^note  Even then, many of the players on the roster weren't household names. Meanwhile, only the most passionate fans attend the event or watch it on TV while the rest of the country tunes into March Madness and the NBA and NHL's playoff pushes. The Caribbean and Asian countries on the other hand treat the event as just as important as the World Cup. Their teams have no problem getting their top stars to play and the fans show up to their games in droves while those watching back home set ratings records. For small but nonetheless fierce Baseball nations like Nicaragua even the qualification stage is Serious Business as it is pretty much the only sport where they can even hope to compete on the world stage.
  • Part of the issue is that Americans can see all of the top players from these other countries in MLB games during the regular season where the teams are not being filled out with less talented players who struggle to make MLB rosters. Also many of them view the WBC as both a marketing gimmick and somewhat fraudulent in the sense that many of the teams from nations that don't traditionally play the sport (Italy, the Netherlands, Israel, etc.) get filled out with American players who have ancestry in those nations (or in Israel's case, any player who is Jewish), but no direct ties whatsoever. Therefore, many fans see the participation of those teams as a desperate ploy by MLB to "grow" the sport in these countries.
  • Another part of this might be the fact that Americans don't really care about international competitions outside of the Olympics and the World Cup (when the Soccer-Hating Americans trope is put on pause for about 3 weeks.) Similar tournaments in other sports like the FIBA Basketball World Cup and the Ice Hockey World Championships draw abysmal TV ratings and barely get mentioned on ESPN, while elsewhere tournaments like these are considered more important than the professional leagues.

Playoffs

• Champions determined by league standings (like the first round of The World Cup or the way most European soccer leagues determine their champion), instead of playoffs, sometimes called the "single table" system, are a non-existent concept in American professional sports. The only major exceptions were the NFL, who used a single table format until 1933, and Major League Baseball, who determined the pairings for the World Series by matching the teams atop the single table standings in the American League and National League (who were said to have won the league's "pennant") until 1969, when each league split into geographical divisions. By contrast, the single table system is a crucial part of sport competition in Europe and most of the other continents that base their sport structures on "tier-style" formats where teams get promoted or relegated to higher/lower ranked tiers based on their win-loss records. This is viewed as helping to promote competition for even the lesser ranked teams and lessening the probability of contraction. In America (and Canada), the thought is that single table is only feasible in a league that's small enough to allow an equal number of games between all teams. Since pro leagues tend to be much bigger, uneven scheduling is tolerated in the regular season, with the thought that playoffs eventually even out the field, and teams get a chance to prove their merit with the threat of elimination. The playoff system is so ingrained in North American sports that even Major League Soccer has playoffs, making it a huge outlier among soccer leagues.^note Another part of the reason why North America adopted playoff systems is geography. Most European countries are comparable in size to individual U.S. states. Even France, the largest country in Western Europe, is smaller than Texas. By contrast, American leagues had to send teams halfway across a continent before the jet age, and today routinely send teams on transcontinental flights. Even NASCAR uses a playoff system, something unheard of anywhere else in auto racing.
• Australians are equally disdainful of single table systems without playoffs. Even in the era when the top competitions in Australian rules football and rugby league were restricted to one city (respectively Melbourne^note The Victorian Football League, predecessor to today's Australian Football League, did have a team in Geelong (which still plays in the AFL), but it was the league's only non-Melbourne team until 1982. and Sydney), those leagues used playoffs (there known as "finals", short for "finals series") to determine their champions (locally known as "premiers" in both sports). Even the term used for the team with the best regular-season record comes off as a Stealth Insult: "minor premier". When the jet age allowed those leagues to expand throughout the country (and, in the case of league, to New Zealand), the finals systems were retained. All other major Australian sports, including soccer, have adopted playoffs. New Zealand also uses playoffs/finals series domestically due to Aussie influence.

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