Why do you think American style support for school sports has never taken off here? Would you ever like to see the same thing in the UK?

15 comments

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2. They only get such high turnout because there is quite literally nothing else to do in Scrotum, Illinois and all the thousands and thousands of other tiny towns. Here that niche is filled with other things – including actually playing football

3. The thing with US college and high school sports is that they’re very popular (mostly) in regions without major league teams. Obviously there is a crossover in regions with both popular college and major league teams but it’s the exemption rather than the rule.

   Areas like Nebraska, Rural Texas, and places like Montana there won’t be a major league team within a few hundred mile drive and their very good college teams are the only sporting attraction around.

   You’ll find that in the bigger cities the university teams won’t hardly draw any locals in, they’ll just rely on their massive student base for fans.

   There has also been a long tradition of collegiate sport at universities held sporting contests long before there was any other organised leagues. US universities are some of the oldest institutions in the country.

   This is different to the UK where every town, village and city will have multiple teams across various sports. 99% of people will be within an hours drive of a EFL football team so there is no room for amateur university teams to get popular.

4. To be fair, at least where I live, there is a lot of smaller local sports teams (of different ages) that get a decent community turnout, they’re just not school related

5. School sport is much more integral to the professional game in the US than it is here. College feeds the pros, so there’s going to be a fanbase for that in the same way there’s a fanbase for lower league football here.

   School sports here are an entirely recreational thing, the path to professionalism is being scouted and signed to the academy of a pro club.

6. Probably because they are a big ass country.

   99% of people in the UK are in accessible distance of a professional sports team, and that was the case 100+ years ago too.

   A small town in the US won’t be big enough for a professional sports team and be too far from a large population centre that will have one. So they make do with what they got.

7. My participation award for competing in the egg and spoon race is enough to tell me that sports day isn’t taken serious enough here.

8. I think it’s better this way, although I was captain of my school football team for 7 years and would have been a god had I been american!

9. There are 32 American football teams. But think of how many football teams there are in the UK. A high school sports team is like the 200 people who watch your local football team.

10. I don’t think we even have a big enough economy or population to support such sports events at scale, especially when they’re run by large universities.

11. You don’t want an athletics-centered education system. Trust me.

    Source: American

12. Local youth teams replace school teams in a lot of cases.

    Also the existence of academies for professional teams which pick up on youth talent from an early age. If you’re good enough, you play for an academy, not your school and you would go pro at 16/17/18 rather than go to university.

    The UK (and Europe/world) model is vastly superior. Talent isn’t artificially delayed because players have to wait until college for a lottery-style draft.

13. Because the structure of youth sports development is different here.

    Youth sports development is attached to existing professional teams, they develop their own youth talent and have first dibs on recruiting them for the main team.

    In the US no such system exists. The college leagues *are* youth sports development and that’s where the professional sport recruits from.

14. Generally speaking, if you’re playing sports for your school in the UK then you’re not good enough to eventually turn professional and you’ve also missed your chance.

15. We have a very large sporting culture, for example – 92 professional football teams, thousands more semi-pro and amateur; Same with rugby, cricket etc, etc…

    The US are not lucky enough to have this – There are only a few dozen professional teams per sport, so the “supply” of sport is very limited – however, the demand is large, and as such has to be filled instead by poor substitutes for professional sport, such as children’s schools and suchlike.

    I’m sure if you cut down the amount of professional sport played per capita per year in this country to 1/10th of it’s current number, there would be a result of increased demand for all sorts of stuff to take it’s place.