Honestly think an issue keeping soccer from ever really catching on in America is we have no idea what a 3 vs 3 match would look like (we have a good sense of how to shrink a 5-man basketball team down for half-court 2 on 2) and we don't live in villages or even pre-automotive towns really so we never have 21 of our mates looking for something to do

it works exactly like every other sport with a net?? if there are three ppl around one can play goalie and the others defend or attack depending on whether they currently have the ball or not, etc. with more people you scale up until at like half strength you decide to use two goals and so on. I'm by no means a soccer fan but this doesn't seem like a hard concept to grasp?

This is also weird because the fact that it's so easy to play is basically the reason it's caught on all over the world, even in the poorest communities. All you need is something to kick, preferably a ball, and something to use as goalposts, where traditionally kids will use two bags or jumpers.

America isn't unique in not having kids roam around in gangs twenty-two players strong, and everywhere else seems to manage. You can easily do three people as described, two vs two, then up to things like five a side which are actual competitive formats.

Football can easy be scaled down in this way, and probably much more than baseball, ice hockey, American football which Americans seem to cope with. Hell, even basketball needs a hoop, whereas I've played so much football without a goal, and just a couple of friends (or at school you could go the other way and have twenty per side and simply enlarge the pitch).

Football sucks. That’s why the only two nations that really matter, India and China, don’t care compared to all the tiny bitch countries that nobody cares about. Hell, even the third most country in the world, the USA, doesn’t care that much about soccer.

Laissez-Faire Lockdowns

Normal tort law alone would probably have pushed big business at least halfway toward the so-called lockdowns Americans lived through over the past year:

The galaxy-brain case against government lockdowns would be that laissez-faire lockdowns would accomplish almost all of the very wise job of locking down, especially when one takes into account the fact that many elderly Americans became much more cautious voluntarily.

The galaxy-brain case for government lockdowns would be that they’re mostly just emulating laissez-faire lockdowns, rounding up some. 

But notice that this creates a problem for anti-lockdown activists: If the Invisible Hand would have replicated most of the lockdown, it also would likely have replicated most of the harms–including loneliness, deaths from delayed doctor’s appointments, job market problems–that the government lockdowns have created.

We can’t look at the harm from lockdowns and attribute them to government, because it’s reasonable to think that spontaneous order would have created many, perhaps most, of the same harms.

“ We can’t look at the harm from lockdowns and attribute them to government, because it’s reasonable to think that spontaneous order would have created many, perhaps most, of the same harms.”

You can compare to some degree stats that were locked down vs states that weren’t, or states while they were in lockdown to when they weren’t. Sure there’s tons of of confounding factors but that’s true of basically anything that’s actually experienced in the real world, if you want to do it this way then sure but you also can’t really say almost anything about how economic or even government policy affects the real world on any issue