With the Super Bowl coming up, people are excited over football. It seems to be the only thing sports fans are talking about at the moment, however, it is not the only sport that people should be excited about. In the summer, the FIFA World Cup will begin and there are multiple reasons why more people should be excited about soccer.
First of all, it is a much larger competition than the Super Bowl and has a lot of history to it. The World Cup is a competition that started in 1930 and occurs every four years, while the first Super Bowl happened in 1967 and is an annual event. There are two hundred and eleven nations who can qualify for the World Cup, but only thirty-two teams actually make it. In order to qualify for the World Cup, the countries play matches against other countries in their region and depending on how many countries are in the region, only a handful can qualify. These matches take place across the time frame of 4 years, with athletes leaving their teams for a couple weeks to play with their national team.
When the teams qualify, they then proceed to the World Cup, where a nation hosts all the games in their country. This summer, Russia will host the event. The countries who are qualified for the World Cup are Russia, Uruguay, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Portugal, Spain, Iran, Morocco, France, Peru, Denmark, Australia, Argentina, Croatia, Iceland, Nigeria, Brazil, Switzerland, Costa Rica, Serbia, Germany, Mexico, Sweden, South Korea, Belgium, England, Tunisia, Panama, Poland, Colombia, Senegal and Japan.
Besides the history behind it, the World Cup also has much more fans than the Super Bowl. In 2014, one hundred and twelve million people watched the Superbowl, while also in the same year, one billion people watched the final of the World Cup. The fans also are more united with who they support. The Super Bowl is only one match between two teams, forcing fans of other teams to resonate with one of the teams. In the World Cup, the fans follow their nation after four years of preparation for the event.
The Super Bowl also focuses a lot on advertisements than the actual game. They show a lot of commercials which draws people in, but if they are drawn into the event just because of the advertisements, they are most likely going to only care for the commercials. Overall, it comes down to rather you like the sport or not. Not everybody likes soccer, but everybody should not assume that everybody in the United States likes football because not everybody does. The World Cup is just as special to some people as the Super Bowl is special to others. There is not a reason why people can only like only one sport. I personally like both sports, however people should expose themselves to both instead of assuming one sport is better than the other.
