Football is the number one sport in North America according to sportsshow.net, but football does not strike as popular in other continents as it is ranked #10 for worldwide popularity according to theculturechronicle.com. When looking at various sports around the world, there are many differences and similarities.

Football is a sport that is commonly played in schools in the US, especially in high schools and colleges. It is not played in Australia partially because of the physical aggression that is a large part of the sport, according to theculturechronicle.com. So because of the physical aggressiveness in the sport , football is not popular in that part of the world according to theculturechronicle.com.

“I watched American football for a while, and that was mostly because the family I have [in America] watched a lot of it. But they seem to have gotten away from that, so I don’t watch it as much anymore,” Clarke said.

Clarke found football to be a “complicated sport as there are many nuanced rules you have to know to understand and play the game.”

Not only are the rules more complicated in American sports but they are also different in how the teams mentally play their sport. In comparison to American ways of intimidating opponents, Australian sports teams have a different approach to get under their opponents skin, according to Clarke.

“There’s much more of a psychological game in Australian sports. People will be quite abusive verbally to each other and threaten each other in the field of play intentionally to affect your mental concentration and how well you play the game.” Clarke said.

The values American sports have versus European sports are also different in how they advertise and show support for their teams.

“From what I’ve observed, American sports tend to be more flashy [and] showboating. American sports teams tend to dedicate some of their time to learning a dance routine or some sort of elaborate celebration or comeback that they’ve pre-planned. They feel like they can afford that time to work on that rather than work on the fundamentals of their sport,” Clarke said.

One of America’s most advertised and supported sports is baseball according to theculturechronicle.com. Baseball is North America’s second most popular sport and cricket is one of Australia’s top ten sports. Both of the sports are somewhat similar with the way they are structured, but the rules to how they are played are drastically different.

“In cricket, you have to rotate through your players and all of them have to have some sort of contribution to do that aspect of the game. It makes the games a little bit more fluctuating. I’ve watched baseball games where it’s just one pitcher versus the entire other team, which seems like the other pitchers on the team are not able to really contribute that much,” Clarke said.
The bottom line is, “there’s just these little niche differences between the sports, but whether you’re playing a sport in America or Australia, all teams still work hard and support each other,” Clarke said.