Originally posted by MikeLan:
I rarely watch soccer and now I know why. Looks like professional wrestling only these guys are a bunch of pussies. The fake injuries, the flopping, the facial pain contortions complete with writhing on the field only to get up and sprint down the field seconds later. Better yet, be carried off the field on a strecher then return seconds later. It's a freaking joke.
Just for fun, I did some math, using the WSJ article I linked in my other post.
The average NFL game includes 11 minutes of action. For generosity purposes, let's round that up to fifteen. That means that the most "action" time for any one player, assuming that player plays offense, defense and special teams, in an entire season (including playoffs) is 5 hours, or 300 minutes.
Now, let's say that this iron man player is good enough to have a 10 year career. That would be 3000 minutes of game action.
Moving to soccer. Given that there are set pieces and other stoppages, we can be generous here, too. Let's say, taking all of that out, there are 60 minutes of "action" in a soccer match. There are almost certainly more than that, but we'll take a worst case scenario. That means that it takes only five matches for a soccer player to equal the amount of action time in his or her sport that an NFL player gets in an entire season!
Over the course of a 38 match season (which is the standard for a 20 team league), this player would amass a total of 2,280 minutes of action time. In one year, then, the soccer player gets 76% of the action time that an NFL player gets in a ten year career! Or, to put it differently, the amount of action in ONE standard soccer season (excluding all non league matches, which can add a dozen or more matches to a player's season) equals 7.6 seasons worth of NFL seasons that stretch all the way to the Super Bowl.
(If our representative NFL player isn't an iron man that plays every single snap of every single game, the difference gets more stark. At that point, it is more accurate to say that an average soccer player will see more minutes of actual action in one season than an above average NFL player will see in an entire career).
But yes, they're pussies.
This post was edited on 6/25 5:17 PM by pastorjoeboggs