Professional sport

Soccer is by far the best professional sport, even given the disparity in skill levels from the MLS to the NFL or NBA. It's the only major professional sport that doesn't stop the game action at scheduled intervals. It's the only sport that treats fans like adults and doesn't pump in cheesy, metallic messages about clapping your hands or chanting defense. It's the only sport where the experience is enhanced from start to finish by drinking because the camaraderie increases as you get more drunk with all of the singing and stuff.

The top Euro leagues are obviously incredible, but even if you're in the US and not a fan of the EPL or whatever...The skill level in other US professional sports far outstrips the MLS, but everyone should get into soccer.

ETA: I just want to say I found this sub because someone linked it on unpopularopinion and I've gotta say I'm loving the vibes over here. Not a single person made a dickish comment. Y'all are some good folk (the real 10th dentist is always in the edits)

Everyone in the UK has played it, almost everyone loves it but it's not a 'professional' sport. why?

Sport : Change

Leicester City (pronounced Les-ter), or the Foxes, are a relatively insignificant team. They are often fighting for a mid-table place in the Premier League, just as often slugging it out in lower leagues.

The way the league works is simple: 20 teams play against each other, at home and away, adding up to 38 matches in total. You get 3 points for a win, 1 for a draw, 0 for a loss, and the team with the most points at the end of the season wins. Unlike in American sports, there are no playoffs in the Premier League. This means that a team can't make it to the playoffs, then catch fire and take the trophy home. No one wins the Premier League by luck or by going on a hot streak at just the right time. They win by being consistently the best over the course of a year. It's not at all unusual for an underdog team to get off to a great start, before eventually dropping down the table as their good form inevitably wears off. It's a long and psychologically grueling season, and it's difficult to keep up the same level over a year, especially once star players get injuries. Over the course of an entire season, the top teams rise to where they belong. A team can easily finish last despite beating the eventual champions. Imagine if the Miracle on Ice players had to play in a league over an entire year - would they finish above the Soviet Union? A title-winning team needs not just to have star players, but also a sufficiently deep squad so that other top quality players can step in when the stars are injured. This is why "little" teams simply do not win the league.

In addition, the Premier League is ruthlessly capitalist. Teams that finish poorly don't get first pick of promising young players, but are instead severely punished with relegation (more on that in the next paragraph). There are no salary caps. The teams with the most money buy up the best players, and those that win trophies and enter elite competitions like the Champions League get huge cash prizes, and attract even more top players, perpetuating the cycle of inequality. Top teams also have the best trainers, the best physios, the best facilities, the best talent scouts. There is a huge disparity in resources and quality between the top teams and the bottom ones, and no real mechanisms to even things up. The same teams almost always finish in the top 4. From 1992-2015 only five teams won the Premier League. The last time a team won the league without having won it before was 38 years ago.

Finishing in the bottom 3 positions (out of 20) is not just humiliating; it's utterly disastrous. It means being relegated to a lower division, which means a subsequent loss of TV money, less fans coming to the stadium since they won't get to see any games against "big" teams and players, and an inevitable loss of that team's best players, who don't want to settle for playing in the lower divisions, and whose salaries the club probably can't afford with the reduced income. Meanwhile, the top 2 finishing teams from the lower division secure automatic promotion, while those who place 3-6 will go to a playoff to decide who will clinch that third promotion spot. The promotion and relegation system makes the stakes incredibly high, and a team that has been relegated may struggle years to go back to the top flight, if they ever make it back at all.

Ok, back to Leicester. An 18th-place finish in the 2003-04 season saw Leicester relegated to the Championship (the second division of English football). The next few years they would struggle to retain their position in the Championship. After a poor 2007-08 season, they sank even lower to League One (which, confusingly, is the third division of English football).

They would climb their way back out of League One at the first attempt. The following season, Leicester were widely touted as favourites to win promotion back to the Premier League, but the next three seasons would prove disappointing. In 2013 they finally barely snuck into 6th place, high enough to secure a place in the play-offs for a promotion spot, but lost in absolutely incredible fashion to Watford.

It was the semi-final of the play-offs, a two-legged tie. Leicester saw out the first match in a 1-0 win. Next they had to go to Watford to see out the tie. Watford fought back on their turf, and as the match was winding down the score was 2-1, meaning that on aggregate they stood tied at 2-2. Extra time, and perhaps a penalty shootout beckoned. Then, with just a few seconds left on the clock, Leicester were awarded a penalty to book their spot into the final. What happened next... I will not even describe. Do yourself a favour and watch:

Following this heartbreak, Leicester would come back stronger, finishing in first place in 2013-14, securing automatic promotion after 10 years out of the top flight.

Their first season back started promisingly, with a few initial decent results, most notably a stunning 5-3 win over Manchester United. Then misery followed, and after months of terrible results Leicester sat rock bottom with only 9 matches left to play. It looked certain that the door back into the Championship stood open after just one season with the big boys.

Incredibly, Leicester managed to win 7 of their last 9 matches to secure probably the most miraculous escape in Premier League history, finishing the season safely in 14th place.

Scandal struck the club during the summer. A sex tape of three Foxes players having an orgy in a Bangkok hotel room with some Thai women leaked out. The players shouted racist abuse including "slit eye." One of the players happened to be the son of Foxes manager Nigel Pearson. Leicester's Thai owner was not amused, and Pearson and the three players were subsequently let go. The inspirational manager who had dragged Leicester out of the Championship and led them to that miraculous escape would not be there to guide the ship the following season.

No one was particularly impressed with Pearson's replacement, Claudio Ranieri. He had not managed any Premier League team since Chelsea in 2004 – back in 2004 he was shown the door by new billionaire investor Roman Abramovich, who felt Ranieri wasn’t a sufficiently glamorous manager and brought in Jose Mourinho. Ranieri had since had mixed success with various Italian teams, and his most recent job was manager of Greece – a job that ended in disgrace after just a few months, following a humiliating defeat by the Faroe Islands (yes, that place with a population of 50 thousand which is not even a country). In retrospect, there was a precedent for what Ranieri was about to do with Leicester - in two seasons at Monaco he led the club out of the French Ligue 2 (less confusingly, the second division in France) and the next season finished in second place with 80 points, the highest points tally ever achieved by a team in the French league without winning. Still, he had been unbelievably unimpressive at Greece.

Things did not look good for Leicester. Ranieri was the odds-on favourite to be the first to lose his job. Their squad was made up mostly of unknown players and a few scraps from the table of bigger clubs, including Robert Huth and Danny Simpson, discarded from Chelsea and Manchester United, respectively, for not being good enough (Huth, in fairness, had since made a name for himself as a rock-solid defender at Stoke, but he seemed by now to be past his prime). Their most expensive signing of the summer was N’Golo Kante, brought in from French team Caen - not exactly a blockbuster signing. With this context, it's easy to understand why, going into the 2015-16 season, Leicester were favourites for relegation.

Leicester came flying out in their first match with a 4-2 win over Sunderland, and went undefeated their first 6 matches, the only Premier League team to do so. After a 2-5 spanking at home by contenders Arsenal, their hot streak appeared to be over, and the universe seemed to be back in order.

Undeterred, the Foxes would continue flying. They played extremely energetic, rapid, and deadly counter-attacking football. They were well organized at the back, with all the players knowing their jobs, doing them well, winning the ball and getting it quickly into one of their devastating counter-attacks, sprinting across the pitch like a pack of wild, well, foxes. And three previously unknown quantities – N’Golo Kante, Riyad Mahrez, and Jamie Vardy, started pulling off astonishing performances. As they continued winning week after week, the pundits picked up on a fascinating statistic: 28-year-old goalscorer Jamie Vardy was about to become a record-breaker. But first, more about Vardy. If you thought this was an impressive rags-to-riches story up until now, you haven’t heard anything yet.

Jamie Vardy dreamt of being a professional footballer, but at the age of 16 he was released from the youth academy of Sheffield Wednesday, a team now playing in the Championship. He wasn’t cut out for it. Nevertheless Vardy kept playing semi-professionally for minnows Stocksbridge Park Steels, a team in the seventh tier of English football. He would spend 7 years there, working 12-hour shifts at a factory to support himself and playing on the weekends for £30 a match. At one point, after being charged with assault (according to Vardy, he was sticking up for a deaf friend that was being picked on), he had a 6pm curfew enforced and had to wear an ankle bracelet. Sometimes he had to be subbed off an hour into a match so he could jump into his dad's car to avoid breaking his curfew.

After some impressive displays, he was signed by Halifax Town, a team then in the sixth tier. He finished as the league’s top goalscorer and helped his team win promotion before signing for Fleetwood Town, now in the fifth tier. Again he finished top scorer, and again he helped his team win promotion. His impressive performances got him a call from Leicester. Finally, in 2012, at the age of 25, when most players would expect to have a few years of experience behind them, Vardy could call himself a pro.

Vardy’s first season was poor, prompting criticism from sceptical fans: what the hell was Leicester thinking, signing a player from three divisions below? However in the 2013-14 season he started showing what he could do, and his 16 goals helped Leicester to get back into the Premier League. Early on in the next season, he turned in a man-of-the-match performance against Manchester United, scoring one goal and setting up the other four in that 5-3 win. Along with the rest of his team, he would fail to make much of a mark for the rest of the season, but came to life at the crucial moment, playing a key role in Leicester’s miraculous escape.

Like Leicester, Vardy got off to a blistering start to the 2015-16 season, scoring in the first match of the season. Failing to net in the next two games, he then scored again in the fourth match. And in the fifth. And in the sixth. Twice in the seventh. He scored again in the eighth. Twice in the ninth. And in the tenth. By the twelfth match of the season, Jamie Vardy, who five years earlier worked in a factory, was the top goalscorer of the most competitive league in the world, and he had now scored nine games in a row.

The Premier League record for goals scored in most consecutive matches, 10, had been set in 2002 by Manchester United legend Ruud van Nistelrooy, one of the greatest attacking players since the new millennium. Could Vardy match the great van Nistelrooy?

Could he ever:

Having equaled the record, there was one more challenge left: could he BEAT it? Well, what better opposition to go for it than against Manchester United themselves?

By the way, did I mention that Vardy did all of this with a broken wrist?

At the end of 2015, Leicester made history: they were the only team to ever go from being bottom of the league on Christmas Day one season to top of the league on Christmas Day the next season. Meanwhile, Ranieri got his revenge over Abramovich and Mourinho: Leicester City's victory over Chelsea on December 14 was the final straw in an incomprehensibly dreadful season for defending champions Chelsea. Jose Mourinho, the glamorous manager brought in all those years ago to replace the unfashionable Ranieri, was fired from his second stint at the club that catapulted him to true stardom.

Thanks for playing, Leicester, everyone said. But it’s time for the fairytale to end. Surely these plucky underdogs would start to feel the pressure, would fall apart at some point?

Last weekend was the true test. Leicester faced title favourites Manchester City. Manchester City, until very recently, were a club mired in mediocrity, having undergone a long decline after some golden years in the late 60s. In 2008, the club was purchased by the Abu Dhabi United Group, a private equity company owned by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family. Overnight, this once middling team was one of the richest in the world. A slew of huge money signings brought a wealth of talented players, finally translating into first place success in the league in 2012 and 2014. Manchester City are for many a symbol of everything that is wrong with the hyper-capitalist world of football: all you need is a billionaire investor with a blank check, and the success will come.

Just to put the gap in resources into context between these two teams: Leicester’s starting line-up cost a grand total of £22.5 million to put together. Last summer, Manchester City brought in Raheem Sterling for a reported £49 million.

That’s right: ONE of Manchester City’s players cost more than TWICE AS MUCH money as Leicester’s ENTIRE first team put together.

Surely, surely, order would be restored?

Well, Leicester hadn’t read the script.

It was vintage Leicester: good organisation combined with terrifyingly fast counter-attacks. They went to the richest team in the country, and they didn’t just beat them. They carved them apart, repeatedly, in front of their fans, on their own turf. And they did it in a thrilling, entertaining way that was an advertisement to everyone about why this sport is so great. Player-of-the-season Riyad Mahrez was at his scintillating best, bamboozling the Manchester City defence with a brilliant goal. N'Golo Kante was huge in midfield, charging down the ball and starting counter-attacks. Robert Huth, the Chelsea reject, was a beast at the back and bagged himself two goals.

Leicester now sit five points clear on first place. They are well over the halfway mark. No one is talking any longer about when they will fall away. They are odds-on favourites to take the whole thing. If they do, it will be an unbelievable accomplishment. This weekend, they travel to London to take on contenders Arsenal, one of only two teams who have beaten them (the other being Liverpool) early in the season. Whatever happens, it will be thrilling.

EDIT: LEICESTER ARE CHAMPIONS. UNBELIEVABLE. Since more people are being linked to this post I've added a couple more explanations on how the league system basically works, for those that know very little, and corrected a couple factual inaccuracies (yes, Manchester City fans, you are absolutely right, Leicester and Man City did not have a similar amount of titles before 2008, sorry about that).

Also bet365 has 100/1 odds on Leicester winning the Champions League next season. It's not quite 5000/1 but it might be worth putting a quid on it.

My inbox has not been silent at pretty much any point during the last few months. The replies I've most enjoyed getting have been the "I don't usually watch this sport but this season I'm watching every game." Welcome to the greatest sport in the world.

I'm still getting over this. If you had told anyone a year ago that Wes Morgan would be one of the top defenders of the season, or Kasper Schmeichel one of the top goalkeepers, you would have been ridiculed. If you had started raving over Riyad Mahrez (now officially Player of the Season), you would have gotten a one-word response: "who?"

I'm an American currently living in the UK. Back home, when you randomly overhear people talking about pro sports, they're sometimes talking about (American) football, sometimes basketball, sometimes baseball (or hockey if you're further north). In the UK, though, it's almost always soccer/football.

How is the situation in your country?

There is no parity. The top players control the league by just crying until they get their way. It’s just an endless cycle of super teams being created by superstars joining forces and then ring chasers come to suck on their teets. I can respect teams that drafted their way to championship like the Warriors pre-Durant but like I said even that gets ruined.

Not to mention how boring the whole sport has become since you can’t even play actual defense anymore. Cricket is more exciting than the NBA.

Thank god MLB is about to start.

For me I think it would be Baseball players, they know how to use the bat, they run so good cardio and throwing stuff to people.

For reference, the Big 4 is the NFL, NBA, MLB, & NHL. Soccer includes MLS and international leagues (EPL, La Liga, etc.)

I’ve always wondered how much it really affects players when going over to other states to play? If you get there a day before you should be fine after a sleep right?

I’m aware I’m probably oversimplifying it but what do teams talk about when talking about the difficulties in going interstate?