Also, somehow small towns always find money available for soccer related stuff (like building stadiums, events, etc.) but there is no money for improving healthcare or building parks.

I hated that

Bread and circuses. Whatever it takes to suppress the instinctual nationalistic ambitions of the people by redirecting their spirits and energy into /dev/null

If you think about it, how often do you hear good news? A war here, a disaster there, a mass murder,... And it is not because of the current world situation, it is always the case, we usually don't talk about things that go right. Go ahead, go to your favorite news website and see for yourself. Chances are that the only good news you see are sports related. The only other source of good news I can think of is science and technology with their new discoveries, but even there, plenty of bad news too, like with climate change and price hikes.

Sports is the only consistent supplier of good news. Of course, sometimes, you lose, but losses are easy to forget, it is just another blip in the sea of bad news. But with all the sports that is happening, there is always something to make your day: your local team winning in a local tournament, there are even some losing matches you can be proud of.

The 'main' roads end up getting backed up and then people naturally start drifting over to a bunch of side-roads to get to the destination. This then causes further traffic issues as the locations where side-roads intersect the main roads get backed up as people on the side roads try to merge into the main ones.

A solution ends up being closing some side roads to funnel the temporary traffic into the main thoroughfare while still allowing some local traffic through the non-closed side roads at the cost of some side roads being inaccessible.

What they would do in that case is close off one the roads so traffic flows smoothly through the other one

The problem I have with it is not that my street was closed. It's that soccer always gets all the preferential treatment. Why not set that up for badminton or tennis? We have spectacular players but soccer seems to be the only important sport

In most sports, you have a world championship every year, meanwhile, a World Cup happens only every four years.

When you have screens and stuff setup by the city to follow a World Cup, the crowds are not made of die hard football fans, the majority of people there are normies that don't give a hoot about football during the 47 other months of a WC loop. Here we call them "footix". If the WC was happening every year, they would be bored and less and less of them would come out to the public events. Meanwhile, making it only every four years, they have time to forget that they didn't quite enjoyed it, they can believe things are very different from last time, and they agree to reserve part of their mental bandwidth to the event. They wouldn't do this on a yearly basis because they fundamentally don't care about football. They want to enjoy sharing a unique experience surrounded by friends, family and random peers. You can't do this every year because it removes the special character of it.

To illustrate this further: here we have the Tour de France (cycling), that happens every year, so no scarcity. Unless a stage passes near you. Which is something that happens even less often than a World Cup. In that case, people with no interest in cycling will go to the side of the road and go crazy.

I think you heavily underestimate how much normie men care about football here. Most coffee chats with my co-workers devolve into football if they last long enough, and around three out of five of my coworkers under 30 play football with friends every now and then. I'm the only man at my extended family which doesn't care about football, and I need to look amongst my most geek friends to find some men that don't either.

Cricket gets the same level of crazy support in South Asia as football does in most of the world. But the reason football gets such support in most of the world is simply because most people consider it the best sport, or the "beautiful game". It is one of the most well designed sports, having the fewest number of unnatural rules - only one in fact (offside). It can also be played with basically any number of players from 2-20 in fields of any size, so it's really popular for normal people. The skills floor is reasonably low, but the skill ceiling is very very high.

So, then it flows naturally into social actions like blocking streets.

But I think that kids nowadays are less interested in sports generally. Or at least I don't see kids playing in the streets nearly as much.

"Jumpers for goalposts" is the phrase you'd see here in the UK, to the extent that it's essentially the catchphrase for a 90s comedy character "Ron Manager" from the Fast Show.

Soccer is the only important sport so it gets all of the attention

Soccer gets all of the attention so it stays the only important sport

I mean Texas can hold a candle there. Nearly 30 high school football stadiums with 10,000+ capacity (and 20,000 in a few cases), built for amounts sometimes exceeding $50M each. Some of the stadiums are shared with track and field etc., but others are "exclusively used by the high school football teams".

30 _high school_ stadiums at 10000+ I can’t even fathom!

Just like those European football fans visiting the US for the world cup this summer, the European mind cannot fathom the American (over)abundance.

The big high school sports games here in the UK get the parents, at least of most of the kids playing.

Do non-sports events get massive following from non-parents -- school plays for example?

Still the US tax payer is an infinite gold mine I guess. Local football teams in the UK tend to pay for their own stadiums

That would be the equivalent of having the top 6 teams in England's Premier League -- which based on last season would be Arsenal, Manchester City, Manchester United, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Bournemouth*

College and High School are more like the equivalent of national teams in England, although in America is seems that the taxpayer pays for these, where in the UK they are private businesses.

* There was a coup attempt a few years ago by a bunch of european teams to leave league football behind and make more money, because in the uk "only those 6 teams win". Chelsea and Tottenham fancied themselves, Tottenham narrowly avoided relegation and finished 17th, and Chelsea were topped by such internationally famous teams as Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth

There are - but popularity is vastly different. My understanding is that minor league baseball has a notable following, basketball is smaller but there are still some passionate fans, and that football is mostly "keeping players warm".

There's also the "D1 College" as a "second division" of sorts.

We even got an isitchristmas.com-like website to track this (https://hayahora.futbol/). I admit I find it a bit amusing.

We do have an independent telecommunications authority, but it's been subservient to the Serie A (rather, the companies who own the broadcasting /streaming rights) diktat almost completely.