Fuck sake. This is a load of romanticised bullshit. I couldn't be fucked responding to this so I will just refer you to a post similar in opinion to mine. People need to get a handle on reality. These aforementioned games are as similar to football as rugby or ALF but writers still want to grasp at a connection to sell their books. It's a similar tactic to ALF and what they attempt to do with indigenous games when they have no correlation whatsoever. It's like the natives got together and said 'hey there is this massive game about to hit out shores, let's ensure that we played a similar version of it first even though we have no ideas of what it actually is.'
Come on. Get a grip.
https://www.quora.com/Why-is-football-soccer-the-most-popular-sport-in-the-worldGood question!
None of the answers given so far really get to the root issue of why soccer is the world’s most popular sport. It’s upsetting, because the history behind that is quite interesting.No, the real reason soccer is the world’s most popular sport is perhaps a reason many of its fans don’t find so appealing:
European cultural imperialism.
The main reasons on answers on this question appear to be things like the “simplicity” of the game. But that isn’t an adequate metric for the game’s popularity. Far more complex games become popular in various places (Gaelic, Canadian, American, Australian, and rugby football are all far more complex than soccer, and enjoy dominant popularity in specific regions of the world). Simplicity does not have adequate correlation with the popularity of a sport because, as we can see in several cases, a sport may become dominantly popular within a market without that simplicity. And simplicity itself is an arbitrary measure, anyway, one that cannot be adequately quantified.
Instead, it is important to look at the conditions through which soccer actually spread throughout the world, and what socioeconomic and cultural factors led to that.
First, where did soccer come from? Soccer, or properly association football, was one of the many folk football codes in 19th-century England (alongside rugby football and other local folk games). Some versions of these folk games branched off into other games; for instance, they spawned proto-versions of
Gaelic football in Ireland,
Australian rules football in Australia,
Swedish football in Sweden,
Canadian football in Canada, and
American football in the United States, among other minor games. All of these sports were in primitive form at the time, so it was easy for people in each of these areas to experiment with rules and change things around, as none of the early folk games were well-codified. That’s what led to so many different “takes” on “football”, a term that encompassed a huge variety of games that branched out from one another. (And no, “football” at the time did not refer solely to a game played with the ball and foot. It was a family of related folk games with various similarities, whose history stretches well into the past before “association football” rules were ever conceived and written down.)
By 1863, the Football Association had codified its version of the sport, thus earning it the name association football. Other European countries adopted the sport as well, and through that, the game spread to South America. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, several countries played the game at a competitive level.
This spread was pretty viral. Some countries had local recreational games they played, and those got washed away rapidly as the cultural imperialism of larger European powers dominated over the local customs. The key period where soccer began to spread globally was 1880–1930, and most of that spread was due to existing European colonial ties, or post-independence cultural influence by European merchants and sailors.
By this point in time, the sport of soccer was well-codified and structured globally; FIFA and IFAB had been well-established. By this point, it was no longer possible for locals to really experiment with their own rules for these games. So when soccer reached a certain part of the world, rather than locals inventing their own rules and branching it off into a new sport (as happened in Australia, Canada, et al), the version of the sport people got was the original version: association football. The experimentation stage of football games was gone.As a result, some local sports vanished. For instance, Swedish football no longer exists today; when association football became codified and popular, and entered Sweden, it superseded the local football code. This didn’t happen everywhere, however. The local football codes in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United States were each well-organized and run by the time soccer got there, so soccer was unable to supplant those codes (as a result, we have, as I stated earlier, modern forms of Australian football, Canadian football, Gaelic football, and American football, respectively—each of which branched further and further away from the folk football games they sprang from).
In other countries, there was no local sport that was overwhelmingly popular before soccer; this applies to a lot of non-European countries. These were large populations with no culturally important recreational pastimes in the modern understanding of sports. So when soccer came, it had access to a huge, untapped market with people eager to play a game. So it caught on like wildfire.After 1930 or so, the spread of soccer to more countries (especially throughout Africa and the Middle East) could best be ascribed to the fact that everyone worldwide was playing it by this point. So it was natural for people in these areas, who again had no culturally important sports to begin with, to adopt the same sport that enjoyed worldwide popularity by this point.
That’s why soccer is the most popular sport in the world. As I always say, it’s important to ignore generalized stereotypes when trying to explain realities, and instead look at the history and development of those realities and explain the social processes behind their occurrence. I hope my answer helped.