Being a fan - the European perspective

[*rfaulk34*]

(10-17-2015, 12:14 PM)mano de dios Wrote: (I  didn't really know where to put this thread. Feel free to move it if it fits somewhere else)

First off: I know I hardly ever posted around here and there is something like the 50-post-rule, but I didn't want to post random chatter and on the other hand I'm a frequent reader to this and the old board. Furthermore I already wanted to start this series of threads during the offseason, but never got to it. So I hope it's ok to discuss this:

Being myself from Germany I think there are a lot of differences for Europeans in their approach to loving football. How they get to know it, how they find their team, how they follow what happens. I think that my experiences are somewhat typical for Football lovers outside the US.
What I want to discuss is how the guys from this side of the pond experience this difference and what the Americans think about this.

With that said, hey ho, let's go:

Being a fan - the European perspective. Part I: Getting to know and love the game

Being a kid of the eighties my first contact with this sports came through a sundays weekly sports show which - from time to time - had a little feature about americans sports, presented by a guy with the interesting name of Ben Wett and a thick american accent. So I heard about a guy called Joe Montana who threw a strange-looking Ball through the Californian winter sun.  As everybody I was - and still am of course - into soccer, so I didn't care much, but was really intrigued by the stadiums and the crowds.
Everything changed for me with the invention of the World League (WLOF) in 1991 and the TV-coverage of it. But still it was a very small niche and that's my point here:

Growing up here was - and still is - in an environment without hardly any mainstream media coverage of the sport. You only find something if You're already interested in it. If You were or are a  12-year-old kid You don't know and learn anything about it.
So football has for me some kind of exotic mysticism. Even so I watch my Bengals and the Redzone Channel every sunday, follow online media every day, I still feel some kind of fairytale fascination towards it (well, especially this season so far, but that's something different), because it's something out of the world I live in. I am pretty sure, that kind of feeling doesn't aply for people growing up in the US.

What derives from this fascination ist that I really like to watch almost every game, even it's one between really boring teams with no Bengals-implications i.e. Titans vs. Jags or whatever. I am home at night and have access to Akron vs. Iowa? Put it on! This is different for me with soccer: I love that game, but soccer is everywhere around me. I don't watch a 2nd league matchup between boring teams.

This leads me to some kind of a  thesis - and correct me, if I am wrong:
I think people with a background like this (and I am sure I am more the rule than an exception for European football fans) appreciate the GAME more than the American fans, because we're not surrounded by it 24/7.


But maybe I am pompous and after all the game of Football is just more interesting than soccer...

Not pompous at all. I think the NFL has that effect on a lot of fans. Being a Bengals fan for 35+ years, i can't get enough of them when they're winning, and i'm still there every week when they're not (the '90s o_O). But, like you, i can watch any NFL game, no matter the teams, from beginning to end and get a lot of satisfaction from it. The only other sport for me that comes close to this is college basketball. 

Welcome to the Bengals Nation!