Sports that CAN be compared vs ones that CAN'T

[xiphias]

American football and soccer are not even remotely the same sport. One can reasonably compare rugby, American football, Irish football, and Australian football. One can compare duckpin and candlepin bowling. Bocce and curling have similarities.

But then there are a group of sports which all have the characteristics of "two teams in continuous play attempt to move a ball into a goal area, with a particular player tasked as goalkeeper." These include soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, and hockey. Those are games that CAN be reasonably compared.

And thus, I would like to mathematically demonstrate that hockey > soccer.

A soccer pitch can be 100-130 yards long, and 50-100 yards wide, but somewhere around 120 yards by 80 yards is considered best. That gives an area of 9600 square yards.

A hockey rink is 200 feet by 85 feet, which is 17000 square feet, or 1889 square yards. So a soccer pitch is five times the area of a hockey rink.

A NFL hockey player skates at about 28 mph; a FIFA soccer player runs at about 7 mph, so hockey players move about four times the speed of soccer players.

So hockey players only need to move 1/5 of the distance of soccer players, and do so 4 times as fast.

This means that we can mathematically demonstrate that hockey is 20 times as fast and exciting as soccer.

Comments

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

Real hockey is played on grass.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

But at a play area of 100x60 yards, or 6000 square yards, it's only 1.6 times as good as soccer.

[nitoda]

I knew mathematics would come in useful one day! ;-) It's nice to have confirmation of my opinion that soccer is dead slow and deadly boring compared to hockey. Hockey, which we call ice hockey over here to distinguish it from the more ubiquitous field hockey, is the ONLY sport I have ever been fannish about.

[yehoshua.livejournal.com]

ITYM "NHL"