Why the world snubs American sport by Bill Kay

There are only four rules for a successful game: 1. The basic rules should be easy to understand. 2. It should be easy to learn how to play. 3. Players should always have the feeling that they are continually improving. 4. Spectators should find enough variety in a game to keep coming back to watch it.
These principles apply to all the great games: soccer, cricket, rugby, hockey, athletics, competitive swimming, snooker, darts, golf, volleyball, rounders, American football, baseball and basketball.
But what's different about the last three? They are virtually unknown outside North America - and the reasons go very deep, as is shown by a fascinating feature in last Saturday's Financial Times (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d5e3056a-d131-11dc-953a-0000779fd2ac.html).
Once the author, Simon Kuyper, has got over the fact that he couldn't blag press tickets to see either the New York Yankees or Mets, his thesis is that the spread of games is linked to a country's success as a colonial power. OK, we're talking UK v US here, the two great colonial powers of the past 200 years, while Britain has been pre-eminent at inventing games.
But America has been unable to persuade much of the rest of the world to adopt even its synthetic rip-offs of British games - football (or girl-rugby as it has been astutely called) for rugby, baseball for rounders. Basketball is its very own, but it has the fatal flaw that, while it is cheap to organise, it does not contain enough variation to hold attention on a mass scale. Indded, you can say much the same about baseball and football, though Americans generally find there is too much variety and complexity in cricket for them to comprehend. Maybe they'll catch on now that 20-20 is taking over.
Sorry to be reduced to making cheap shots, but America's lack of success in exporting games is very cultural as well as colonial. Kuyper argues that British colonials were just better at making friends with the natives, and so it was natural to invite them to join in a game they had brought with them. He claims that American forces overseas just don't do this, and that they have been reduced to giving away soccer balls in Afghanistan.
You can theorise endlessly about why all this should be, and it's certainly worth a book because the causes should tell us plenty about the nature of American and British society. Any volunteers?