Why doesn't the United States have a tradition of playing British sports, such as soccer and Cricket? Why does the United States have so many sports unique to the United States?

by phloog

Especially I am interested to know why soccer has such little popularity compared to other countries

Searocksandtrees
awesome_hats

What sports are you referring to that are unique to the United States? The typically cited popular sports in the United States are ice hockey, basketball, baseball, and American football; all of these are played outside the U.S., especially in Canada.

Basketball was invented by a "Canadian" (province of Canada at the time, a still British colony) living in MA, with ice hockey as we know it today invented in Montreal (though various forms of ice and stick games were played in Europe including England as early as the mid to late 1700s). American and Canadian style football developed from rugby.

Baseball likely developed from the popular British and Irish game rounders, and is now played in many countries outside the U.S. I'm not aware of any sports that are unique to only the U.S. and all of the popular ones that I am aware of are derivatives of earlier British sports.

With relative geographic isolation from mainland Europe and a separately developing sociocultural and political system, North America was free to develop culturally and this included variations on earlier sports that evolved as they were adopted or not in various communities.

As for why soccer in particular is not as popular in the U.S. as compared to many other countries, I could only speculate, so I'll leave that up to someone else.

iambluest

The y'alls don't like playing games they might not win, so they would rather just play with themselves. I mean, World Series, with one other country? SuperBowl for a national championship?