Study says 72 percent of Europeans think the Seattle Seagulls are a real NFL team
Somewhere, somehow, the Seahawks were lost in translation
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1 min read
It appears hockey isn't the only sport where fans haven't quite settled on what Seattle's team name should be.
A whopping 72 percent of Europeans think that there's an American football team named the Seattle Seagulls, and they think that team plays in the NFL.
That's according to a survey on Kroon Casino, which asked 1,000 people from both America and Europe about the countries' differing renditions of football. (Here's your reminder that football, in Europe, is what we American folk call "soccer.")
"Men on both sides of the pond were identically confident in their knowledge of their respective sports, as 78 percent said they had above average knowledge of American football/soccer," the survey reported.
But there were plenty of misconceptions among those asked about football in America.
For one, almost three-quarters of them thought "Seagulls" was an NFL team. That was in stark contrast to America, where only 14 percent of the survey respondents fell for the fake name. The Seahawks, of course, are Seattle's real NFL team, and the closest thing to "Seagulls" in professional sports probably lies in the American Hockey League, in which the relatively new San Diego Gulls play.
The basics -- or, in Europe's case, not-so-basics -- of American football were also fair game for misconceptions.
Just over one in 10 Europeans said they thought American footballs are at least 22 inches long ("bigger than the length of a typical house cat," the survey reports). Twenty-one percent of them thought NFL teams put at least 15 players on the field at a time. Half of them figured NFL rosters contained no more than 25 players. And 10 percent of them thought NFL games include at least twice as much as the allotted 60 minutes of game time -- something that probably just as many Americans would assume.
Lots of misinformed people out there, right?
Well, guess what? We're not in the clear, either. Because Americans were just as wrong about plenty of things pertaining to soccer -- more than half of the 1,000 polled didn't know there are 11 players on the field for each team, 45 percent of Americans didn't know how long a soccer game lasts, and 39 percent believed that soccer players always wear jockstraps.
It's time for everyone to study up.
