An Englishman’s Guide to American “Football” (Which Isn’t Football at All, Really)

Right, listen up, ein Britishers! We need to have a chat about this peculiar American pastime they call “football.” Now, before you start assuming it’s just our beloved game with a few quirky rule changes (like baseball is to cricket—an inferior imitation), let me stop you right there. This so-called “football” has about as much in common with football as a Labour politician has with common sense.

Firstly, Where’s the Fucking Foot?

Here’s the first and most glaring issue: they barely use their fucking feet. Okay, there’s a bit of kicking here and there—once every 45 minutes when someone remembers they actually have a foot—but for the most part, it’s a game of throwing, carrying, and smashing into each other like a bunch of blootered pensioners outside a Wetherspoons on a Saturday afternoon.

In fact, if we’re being historically accurate, American football is far more like rugby than it is football. It started out as a chaotic mash-up of rugby and association football in the late 19th century, when American universities decided that simply playing one of the perfectly good existing sports from England wasn’t confusing enough. No, like all American mash-ups they had to invent their own Frankensteinian version—one where they could wear a suit of fucking armour, stop every seven seconds for a committee meeting, and somehow still call it “football.”

A Brief History of American “Football” (or How the Colonies Butchered Rugby)

Back in the 1860s and 1870s, American universities were playing various versions of football, some resembling association football (our actual football) and others closer to rugby. Eventually, a chap named Walter Camp—an American, of course—decided that rugby wasn’t quite organised enough, so he took it upon himself to ruin it with a bunch of additional rules, such as the line of scrimmage, downs, and most outrageously, the forward pass.

The forward pass is where this game really goes off the rails. In rugby, you pass backwards like a civilised person. In American football, they decided, “Nah, let’s chuck it 40 yards forward and hope for the best.” The result? A sport where hulking meathead jock brutes throw missiles at each other while wearing enough padding to survive a car crash.

The “Rules” (Used Loosely)

If you’re a Brit watching American football for the first time, here’s what you need to know:

1. The game stops. Constantly. Seriously, it takes them three hours to play what should be an hour of sport. Why? Because after every few seconds of action, there’s a huddle, a replay, a referee conference, and approximately 57 television commercials.
2. Each team has about 600 players. In proper football, you have 11 players who do everything. In rugby, you have 15. In American football? They need separate players for offence, defence, kicking, special teams, hydration duty, social media management, and possibly a bloke just to hold the quarterback’s hair back while he adjusts his helmet.
3. The ball is an egg. This is just a minor gripe, but if you’re going to call something “football,” you might at least use a fucking ball, not a misshapen leather kidney.
4. The scoring makes no sense. A touchdown is six points. A kick after is one point, but if you decide to run it in instead, it’s two points. Field goals are three points, and safeties are two points. It should be plainly obvious at this point that they’re just making it up as they go.
5. It’s violent, but not really. Yes, they smash into each other like a stampede at Primark’s Boxing Day sale, but they also wear helmets, shoulder pads, and padding that would make a medieval knight jealous. Rugby players, on the other hand are not fucking namby-pamby pussies, tackle just as hard but with nothing but their own skin, cauliflower ears and sheer determination to absorb the impact.

Just Call It “Handegg” and Be Done with It

So there you have it, the Daily Squib guide to a game called American “football” which isn’t really football—it’s a bizarre, stop-start, hyper-commercialised fucked up version of rugby on steroids with added bureaucracy and unnecessarily complicated rules. But let’s be fair to the Yanks—it is entertaining in its own over-the-top way, and the Super Bowl is quite the spectacle (mainly because of the half-time show and the woke NFL adverts, but still).

Next time you’re forced to watch this odd spectacle with American mates, just remember: it’s not football, it’s rugby with timeouts, an advertising budget, and a slightly inflated sense of self-importance.

Now, who’s up for a proper game of footie?

Next week – Why the Game of Tennis is Strangely Tennis On Both Sides of the Atlantic …