Soccer - More Than Just A Game?

[Ferbian]

I read this yesterday on a Youtube comment in a video about goal celebrations, and it got me thinking.

Is soccer more than just a game? you could certainly assume so due to the love for the game you get, the cheering both the players as well as the fans does through goals, the emotions generated through this game, it's leaning towards sports entertainment in some manner.

Just as well there's the dressing up for the fans, which has been addressed before on this forum, so I will not get into that much more, but my questions to you are:

Is soccer more than just a game?

Can you say the same about other sports? is Basketball, Baseball etc. just a sport? or more than that?

To answer my own questions.

Yes I do believe that soccer is more than just a game, because of above mentioned love for the game, the emotions it generate, the annoyance when a team you're cheering for looses, even though some can be annoyed due to loss of money for example, but even just for the fact of being a fan.

And I do believe it can be transfered to pretty much any of sports that has some kind of joy for the game, some kind of cheering rather than a simple cheer, but the cheering scenes generated in soccer for example.

What are your thoughts on this?

 

[TheAnimal]

I think it is, it can have such an impact beyond what happens on the pitch. The international tournaments are done on a scale that no ever sport can touch really. How much of a positive impact has this World Cup had/going to have on South Africa?
The money going into it is also phenomenal, it is the only kind of business investment that costs more than it makes, yet people suddenly want to own football clubs.
I think the emotional investment is probably the same across a few sports, with the passion being there and the emotions it provokes.


I think it depends on, among other things, the global scale that the other sports are on etc for whether or not they can be seen as more than just a sport. Baseball for example isnt anywhere near as global as football so i think it isnt more than a sport in that sense. It doesnt unite the world and create the feelgood factor across the world when they have their world series.

 

[harrythem]

I'd deffo say football is more then just a game, it's the universal language (everywhere except America it seems). As I found out when I was a 2wentys rep (youth holiday company) it doesn't matter if you can't speak a word of the lingo or that you don't know the guests at all, football is common ground as it evokes emotion like nothing else. It's a subject that, even during the summer break, you can still spend hours a day talking about it as there's always something happening in it. What puts it above other big sports such as the NBA and NFL etc is that, as stated, it is a truly global game and doesn't suffer from people being made to move teams in drafts as that way it always leaves open for transfer speculation and seeing teams like the Real Madrid galacticos of the early 00's.

Stanley Matthews said "football isn't a matter of life and death....it's more important then that" and, you know what, he was right!


COME ON ENGLAND!!!!