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.
Well put. It’s unfortunate, however, that the others who read this don’t put their own comments. (HINT*HINT)
First off, this sounds like someone who refers to as soccer as communist kickball is trying to suggest rule changes. Soccer only comes to these extremes at very high levels, more soccer is played at amateur levels as in any sport, so just because the elite few don\’t preserve the purity of the game doesn\’t mean you have to destroy it for the rest. What you are suggesting is that soccer is based on chance because they don\’t score enough. The other alternative is far worse, if it was extremely easy to score then soccer would turn into an offensive minded, heavily american game where change really would matter. Japanese baseball is one of the most conservative sports in the world, they always play it safe, almost never do they gamble and the player follows the coaches orders. Americans consider themselves brash people who play big or go home. In the long run, as any logical person knows, they end up going home more than they win big. In the end run its a gamble, and everyone knows gambles are up to chance. So the very mention that soccer is up to chance is purely hypocritical with the current state of the American Sports spectrum.
To use a metaphor from another sport, I have no horse in this race. If you like seeing championships decided by shootouts, or think that rules which encourage someone to use a blatant handball foul to deflect what would be a winning goal are a good thing, then enjoy your game. As for logic, the alternative to “don’t score enough” is not “extremely easy to score.” There are many alternatives, and one in which a 2-0 lead is not insurmountable would be an improvement in my opinion.