Football is foreign to American values: Column What if there's a game more attuned to our individualism and entrepreneurial spirit.

Dan Carney | USA TODAY Opinion

Football is America’s game. We know this because the NFL says so, and because it attracts huge audiences. But mostly we know it because there’s a holiday dedicated to giving thanks for it.

Yes, football has taken over Thanksgiving like candy has taken over the night before All Saints' Day. It will be on pretty much non-stop. Its ratings will be phenomenal.

However, America’s game doesn't actually represent American values very well. In fact, a case can be made that the most American sport is actually — drum roll please — soccer. This is, no doubt, sacrilege to the traditional sports fans who see soccer as both alien and elitist, kind of like an invasion of undocumented sociology professors.

But it’s hard not to conclude that many of the attributes that make America great — individualism, enterprise and resistance to rules and authority — are better exemplified by soccer.

Football is an infuriatingly micromanaged and overregulated game. On the field, each formation, each play, is dictated by coaches on the sideline. Off the field, the NFL has grown to be enormously powerful, arbitrary and inconsistent.

The NFL’s rule book is a thicket of complexity. Its rules on passing are so multifaceted, they’ve spawned a kind of Socratic dialogue over what should be a straightforward question: What constitutes a catch? Every few weeks some new catch, or a non-catch as it were, rekindles the debate.

And every year, the NFL decides that it just can’t leave well enough alone. This year, it changed its rules on extra point kicks for no other reason than it thought they should be harder

Soccer, in contrast, is a simple game with unchanging rules. Fluid and improvisational, it rewards individual initiative. Unlike in football, all of its players come in contact with the ball and are required to make snap decisions on what do with it.

Soccer is also a game for capitalists. Unlike the NFL — in fact unlike all major American leagues — most soccer leagues make no effort to level the playing field between rich and poor teams. They impose no limits on what the rich can spend on players. They have little in the way of revenue sharing. And at the end of each season, they kick out the bottom three teams.

But perhaps the most American thing about soccer is its national team. There is no Team USA in football. And there’s only one in the other traditional sports for a few weeks every four years.

The men’s national soccer team plays 10 to 25 games annually (as do the women), giving fans ample opportunities to strut their patriotic stuff. Some do so in creative ways, like turning out for matches in Godforsaken Central American venues, where they sing, shout and dodge projectiles heaved at them by the locals from over the chain-link fence and the riot police.

Soccer, to be sure, does have one big problem. It is ruled by the temple of graft known as FIFA. But even in that there is something inherently American — an enterprise flourishing at the ground level in defiance of its much-despised governing elites.

Football is way too popular to be knocked from its perch any time soon. But as you revel in it on Thanksgiving, you might want to ask yourself this: Is it really America’s game?

Dan Carney is a USA TODAY editorial writer. Follow him @dancarney301