There is so much ignorance of the game in your post. If you're going to watch and post in a forum about the game at least have some understanding of it.

Not the upper echelon of athletiscm? Do your American football or baseball players run 10 Km in a single game? Midfielders typically run this distance in a single game of football. I don't know how fit you are, but unless you're a long distance runner, I doubt you'd have the stamina to keep up with most professional footballers in most sports.

In football you have to be quick, agile, have stamina, fast reactions, be able to read the game as it happens AND contrary to what you believe, be strong. If you want to retain possesion of the ball you can be quick and agile and run past people, or you can be big and strong and hold people off when they challenge you. Larger players can effectively push an opposing player off the ball (as long as it's shoulder to shoulder), whilst smaller players can use skill and trickery to keep the ball from others and then go forward.

Most central defenders have to be strong enough to out muscle large strikers for the ball and tall enough to ensure they can beat tall strikers to headers. The average height of a central defender is easily 6" . The range of sizes of different players varies greatly. Some of the larger players:

Drogba- Striker- 6"2 1/2 Large build

Vidic- Defender- 6"2 Average build

Rooney- Striker- 5"10 Large build

Howard (US player)- Goalkeeper- 6"3 Average build

Patrick Viera- Midfield- 6"3 1/2 Average build

Peter Crouch- Striker- 6"7 Slim build

To be honest I like Soccer more then Footbal.

While I do love the strategy of Football... it's too violent for me... after all the concussion research... hard for me to watch.

As such, I love playing Football based games like Goalline Blitz, reading about NFL games or playing Tecmo Superbowl.

Just can't watch it anymore though.  Seeing the state of too many old timers really dampens it for me... and will until at the very least the NFL institutes a pension plan for players who played before the big bucks started coming in.  Or I suppose they all die out... though that would be sad.

Soccer does seem to be a lot of the same though, specific plays and plans... though you do have to improvise a lot more.

http://www.mlive.com/sports/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2010/06/why_isnt_soccer_more_popular_i.html     ------link.   This is an interesting article on why soccer is'nt more popular in America. What do you think about this?

Correction: soccer isn't popular in North America. America overall, we have some of the best selections and players on the world: Brazil and Argentina. Uruguay was also once Olympic and World champion, so you can't put your ego ahead of you and say "soccer isn't popular in America". You know, this word isn't the right metonymy.

Eh, they may catch up if it ever catches on.  I mean look at Baseball.  Those South American teams are killers now a days.

American Football is way too complicated to be an international Sport though.

I mean the kind of playbooks you'd need to memorize?  Forget about it.

People call Soccer more technical then American Football... but most people would be quite shocked how complicated Football really is when it comes to management and styles and such.

It's probably the most complicated sport in the world when it comes to strategy.

The last major Soccer innovation was what?  Total Football?  Where the players can play more then one positon?

Every play in Football is like a chess move.  Well a very VIOLENT chess move anyway.  The adjustments you can make are staggering.

Soccer is boring to most Americans.  Why?  Because we don't watch the game; we don't understand what's going on, on the field; and any sport you don't understand is essentially boring because you can't follow the story of the action.  It's a self-sustaining cycle--if we watched it, we'd come to understand more and thereby enjoy it.  It's unfortunate it's so hard to change, but there it is.

It's the same thing with my father and baseball: he's followed it all his life and he understands the nuances.  I don't.  I find baseball boring, but that's more on account of my understanding of it than the game itself.

On naming, it all seems so dumb to me.  Why should I care what people in Germany call the sport that I've known all my life as soccer?  And why should they care what I call it?  I mean, it's not like I refer to their country as Deutschland; different cultures, different languages, different traditions, etc.  So long as we can communicate (which we can), I guess we can deal with the fact that we call our different games by the same name w/o pretending like it's some sort of "arrogance" on Americans' parts to call soccer, "soccer."

Generally, when someone just says America, the mean the United States of America. If the mean the continent, they will say north America, and if they mean the whole region, they will say "The Americas"

If they mean some other country, they will usually just say the name of that country. I think that is what was meant here.