Soccer Players have an impact on the NFL

By: Bob | February 2nd, 2007

In some corners of the globe this Sunday is a big day. People will gather to feast on high caloric snacks, watch insanely expensive commercials involving beer and breasts, and occasionally offer one another high fives after obese men in pads pummel each other. It is Super Bowl time where the round football takes backstage to the pointy one for 17 hours or however long it actually takes to finish an American football game.

This Super Bowl will be a special one as David Beckham will grant his first television interview in the U.S. since signing with the LA Galaxy. You won’t understand a word he says anyway so that would be the ideal time for you to head to the potty to further decimate the water table.

Even though the two sports share the same name, you wouldn’t think that there is much crossover between football and American football, but there has been. The Guardian does their best to show that European soccer players have ended up playing in the NFL almost exclusively as place kickers.

Beyond that, however, it was European soccer players who helped to change the kicking game in American football. Back in the day kickers used to kick straight on using their toe. If you have ever tried kicking a ball – either round or pointed – with your toe you know that this is difficult to control. Enter soccer players and the side style kick, which is infinitely more accurate and exclusively used in today’s NFL.

The first to use this kicking method was a Hungarian named Pete Gogolak – a guy my father inexplicably has always loved. While Gogolak put the side kick on the map, it was a Norwegian ski jumper named Jan Stenerud who made it commonplace.

“Once I had some success,” Stenerud says. “teams went looking for kickers like myself and Pete [Gogolak]. They went on kicking caravans to Europe. I was a decent soccer player, but I knew that there had to be other players out there who could kick farther than me. After my first year, [Chiefs coach] Hank Stram went to Europe and came back with three kickers to challenge me in camp.” Two of those kickers, England’s Bobby Howfield and Germany’s Horst Muhlmann, went on to successful NFL careers. But they couldn’t take Stenerud’s job.

“All these guys came over and tried it with our team and with others,” Stenerud says proudly. “But there was still no one who could kick it farther than me.”

“I think it’s safe to say that we changed the game,” Stenerud says of himself and his fellow “sidewinders.” “Now that all the NFL kickers use this style, and with the growth of soccer in this country, teams don’t have to look to other countries to find kickers.”

Keep that in mind while you are stuffing your face and watching the beer commercials on Sunday. Now if only we could convince 300-pound offensive linemen to give soccer a shot!