As the husband of a French woman, and a frequent visitor to Europe, I have had many conversations with lifelong fans of football (soccer). I have been met with a uniform wall of resistance to the idea that the game needs any changes. Yet it seems obvious to me and to many American friends that there is a fundamental flaw in the game: it is too hard to score. This is not some simpleminded American desire for offensive fireworks. This is a matter of statistics. A typical scoring action in soccer takes less than a minute. This includes offensive development that leads to a corner kick, for example. This means on average that a team has about 50 chances to score. But, in the World Cup at least, on average a team scores once. An offensive powerhouse might score twice. When it is this difficult to score, the merit of the winning team becomes increasingly less important and chance becomes more important. A single mistake or bad call can seal the fate of the game.
If purity of the game is a concern, consider that while the game has not changed, the players have changed dramatically. People are taller, faster, and more fit. World records in track regularly fall as even the level of elite athletes improves each decade. This has had a disproportionate benefit to defense in soccer. A survey of the average goals per game in the World Cup shows that scoring has fallen from 4.41 goals per game prior to 1960 to 2.63 goals per game since. This is a 40 per cent drop in scoring. If the game was perfect fifty years ago, it no longer is. Let the game evolve with the athletes. Make the goal larger. Or relax the offsides rule. When only 2.3 goals are scored per game, as in the 2006 World Cup, the average score is a tie, and that’s no way to decide a championship.