Favourite football team (soccer for some)

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Says you! To be honest, there's a 'we're the best in the world' camp and a 'the league is a national league, not a world league' camp, so you're inevitably going to get the points repeated in an argument like this. So don't try and take the high ground before you jump out, I don't take that **** .

Why are you? That's just not true and exactly where the Yank argument falls down. You can think yourselves the best in the world, but that doesn't make you the World CHAMPIONS. What makes you the world champions is beating everyone else in an international tournament. You can be the best in the world without being the world champions.
The winners of the NFL are the US champions, not the world champions.

Christ, why am I even having to say this? It's simple enough and I think this is where I give in trying to explain that America 'might' just be wrong on something .

 

There is no difference between 'best in the world' and 'world champions.' None. Zip. Nada. If no one else can beat you in the world, you are world champions (and for that matter solar system champions as well and whatever other stupid marketing add on you want to put there). It doesn't take facing an enimic British or Japanese or Iraqi football team to prove it. I doubt the British (or any other country besides Canada and possibly Australia for that matter) could put together a team that could even stop the Steelers from scoring on EVERY DRIVE -- the Steeler defense would score enough points to win the game (and that's just on touchbacks).

Hey, I wouldn't argue about a British cricket team being world champions -- even though there are no US teams. If there's no other team that can beat them, they are the world champions. It doesn't matter that nobody else in the world cares about cricket -- they are still the world champs.

Show me a team that plays American football better than the team that wins the superbowl. Until you can come up with someone, the winner of the superbowl is the best team in the world at their sport -- i.e., world champions.

 

Look up the word 'champion'.

'Worlds best' and 'world champions' are different. Surely you don't need me to tell you that.

*sigh*

You guys are damn argumentative even when you're wrong.

 

I support a team from Pernambuco state (Brazil) called Sport Recife. We are now leading the national second division. I have high hopes that we’ll be able to reach first division this year. Fingers crossed…

 

OK, I lied, I'm re-entering the discussion. Let's go to the dictionary as suggested by Barmy:

Note: Some of the words I looked up had as many as 15 definitions, but in each case, the first definition seemed to most accurately describe what we're talking about, so I didn't bother posting all the others that were irrelevant.

So, going straight by the definition of the words, the "world's best" as referring to a sports team would be the team that has the highest standing on the planet earth. That sounds pretty good to me. If you're the best, that's the highest standing you can acheive.

Similarly "world champion" as referring to a sports team, would be the team that has defeated all opponents in competition and holds first place on the planet earth. Also sounds good. There is no opponent left to defeat, and they are in first place. While the definitions may not be identical, they certainly sound similar enough to say they are describing the same basic idea.

 

An interesting piece of trivia to add to this stupendously off-topic debate is that the current International Champions of Australian Rules Football are New Zealand. USA came third.

 

You'd never catch me playing Aussie rules. I'm too pússy for rugby, nevermind that shít!

(those stars look horrible)

 

Celtic FC. I don't support any other teams, international, national, club or whatever because I believe that you can only truly support one team.

Bring back Martin O'Neill!!!

 

But you guys created the term "dreamteam", am i right ? After the Barcelona Olympics, where the US was represented by guys like Jordan, Bird, Malone, Johnson, Stockton and Barkley, you guys kept calling all your teams "dreamteam", not noticing that the rest of the world was catching up with your level of play very rapidly. It was also mentioned that there could be several teams formed from lesser NBA stars, and they would still whoop everybody's ass. By now we all know that was just wishful thinking.

I also have my doubts about your Miami Heat comment, simply because they would be facing very unusual types of gameplay from various global opponents, and dealing with unusual stuff is, and always will be a difficult hurdle to take. Claiming that Miami would kick everyone's butt would be the same mistake that caused team US's downfall in the first place. Same goes for baseball, if your best players have never proven the rest of us wrong, you'd better take a low profile, because you have nothing to back up your words.

You wanna claim the title of worldchamps ? Fine, then go and beat the best of the other continents, otherwise you're nothing more than national champs.

 

The term Dream Team was originally used because the U.S. had been arguing for years that we should be allowed to send a national team from the pro teams to the Olympics and other international competition instead of our university students. The term Dream Team specifically referred to the original pro team that went to the Olympics.

While it is true that all of those guys were on the dream team, you didn't even get all the starters. Back in 1992, it was early in Stockton and Barkley's career. They were role players. The starting five were: Guards: Jordon and Johnson; Forwards: Malone and Bird; Center: Ewing.

All told, I think there are a combination of factors at work here. For one, with more and more countries playing basketball, I think the quality of play from around the world has increased dramatically since 1992. The teams that most European and South American countries and fielding today are simply much bettter than the ones they had 14 years ago.

Secondly, the 1992 Team was definitely a historic one. When you look at Jordon, Bird, and Johnson as 3 of your starting 5, they weren't just good players. They weren't even just Hall of Famers. In those three players you probably have 3 of the top 10 players of all time. And that's not a cut on Malone or Ewing - they are both very good, and will probably both make the Hall of Fame - I just don't think either of them are good enough to be considered top 10 all time. So I think it's a combination of the rest of the world being better than they were a few years ago, and the U.S. Team being not as good as it was years ago.

Does this comment have a point? As soon as another country fields a pro team, OK. But until then, since no one else plays pro football, it's not going to happen. As I have said, the U.S. has tried to get American football into the Summer Olympics, but there isn't enough appeal to the rest of the world for football to become an Olympic sport. So we've tried and there are no takers. Football is different from basketball, because at least other countries played basketball. No one else besides Canada plays football, and they have different rules than we do.

 

The Olympics is a load of drugged up tosh anyway. If a gridiron World Cup was set up, that would solve this problem straight away.

Isn't there an international gridirion association who can set something like this up? If not, why not? It wants sorting out.

 

^None that I am aware of. In fact, the only American Football Assosciation that I know of that operates in more than one country is the NFL. With the major legaue NFL in the Americas, and the minor league NFL Europe which basically exists in Germany (yes, there are other teams, but most of the teams are based in German cities). The problem, as I have already stated, is that nothing is solved by having the NFL champ play the NFL Europe champ, because most people in both leagues are Americans.

Some genuinely international organization is what is definitely needed. While the NFL is in the most general term an "international association" it is also privately owned, and the owners want to make money. Their goals are to further the acceptance of the NFL - if that happens to be by international competition they will do that, but as it currently stands, there's not much money in it, so the NFL isn't too keen on pursuing it. So if the nation that likes American football the most is not pushing for the creation of such an association, what are the chances that some other country, where football is less popular, is going to start one?

 

FC Barcelona. I wear my Messi 19 jersey loud and proud when I play on Sundays

I can't believe they lost to Chelsea last night