A few hours ago (but still today – it now being the small hours of Monday morning) I finished watching the soccer World Cup Final, and a right old bore it was, I thought. Thank goodness my kitchen contains so many other amusements. I have to admit that the complaints of Americans who say that there is not enough scoring in soccer, and a deal too much despicable play acting, now strike me as thoroughly persuasive.
The more fraught and important the occasion, the duller soccer games now seem to be. It was very noticeable how much more entertaining the group games were in this tournament than the later games, when the seriously effective sides were the only ones left, and when all those exotic Africans and Americans and whatnot, with their “brought a breath of fresh air to the tournament” unpredictability, had all gone home. The more important the games got and the higher the stakes got, the more boring they became for the increasing numbers of disappointed neutrals. It did not help that the semi-finalists in this World Cup all came from European countries within a day’s drive of each other. As the end of the tournament neared, all the players still in it knew each other’s way of playing inside out, because all of them play for the same handful of big European clubs.
The television commentators did their best to explain that the Italians showed colossal resolve and determination and great defensive skill, and that they were “worthy winners”, blah blah blah. But the commentators could not disguise the mediocrity of the occasion, which ended, inevitably, with a penalty shoot-out. During this, one French bloke made a mistake, no Italian did, and that was that.
When I was a teenager at school, I used to play squash. If you are only as good as I am at squash, then squash is a great game. With a racket slightly smaller than a tennis racket, and a small black rubber ball, which you take it in turns to smack, against a wall with a net painted on it, so to speak, squash maximises the exercise you take, while making ball boys entirely superfluous, what with the ball always bouncing back towards you for you to pick it up and resume smacking it.
But squash has one huge drawback. The better you are at it, the duller it gets. The room-stroke-court in which it is played is made the right size to suit players like me. In it I can just about reach the ball much of the time, but am also quite often unable to reach it. For a player like me, against an opponent of a similar standard, it is possible for us both to play genuinely winning shots and to have a really good game, at the end of which the loser is able to say in all sincerity: well played mate.
But at the upper reaches of the game of squash, things are different. If you are a really good squash player, you can always reach the ball, no matter where your opponent hits it. At the supreme pinnacle of the game of squash, where the two best squash players in the world are to be observed through transparent walls bashing that little black rubber ball against one of the transparent walls, the idiots who assemble to watch this absurd spectacle might as well be watching paint dry for all the excitement that it involves. Each point, to be settled, demands a mistake by one or other of the players, and each point means sitting there and waiting for one of the two squash players in the world who are least likely to make a mistake, to make a mistake. And the loser of this hideously prolonged contest, when he does finally emerge, leaves it with the feeling that it was his failures, rather than the other chap’s excellence, which defeated him. Squash did appear briefly on British television, a few years ago. Not surprisingly, it soon departed.
Might soccer be heading that way too? The invention of the penalty shoot-out, and its seemingly greater and greater frequency on soccer’s biggest occasions, suggests that it is. The penalty shoot-out is a perfectly crafted drama during the course of which mistakes, with consequences that can be observed on the scoreboard, can, at last, be confidently expected. The players, most of whom never normally take penalties, and most of whom (apart from the late substitutes) are exhausted by having just played half an hour of extra time, nevertheless take it in turns to do so. The goalies, who do so much less during regular time these days, what with the other twenty fellows being ever more likely to cancel one another’s efforts out, are still fresh and alert, despite it being so very hard to stop a penalty taker scoring. A mistake, as happened this evening, or a brilliant save by the goalie (much rarer), duly occurs, and the end is mercifully brief. How long before an entirely new version of soccer is invented, which just goes straight to the penalty shoot-out?
Given the dreariness of the actual soccer that was played, especially towards the end of it, the abiding recollection of this last World Cup, for me, has not been of the soccer itself, but of the misbehaviour of various players, like England’s own Wayne Rooney and, this evening, the French Captain, Zinedine Zidane, both of whom were red carded. This evening, Zidane was sent off for pushing his head into an Italian chest. Not a happy way for such a fine player to end his carrier. (Nothing else half as dramatic as that happened the entire night.) Even more repellent than the pushes or kickings that can now get you sent off a soccer pitch are the despicable deceptions practiced by the players to try to get each other thus ejected. Who knows what disgusting thing was said to or done to Zidane to make him behave so stupidly this evening? We cannot know, but we can guess. And what we can all see very clearly, as has already been remarked upon in the comments on earlier World Cup postings here, are all the players who deliberately fell over and rolled about in agony, clutching their faces as if napalmed, when the other fellow had just pushed them gently on the shoulder. This afternoon, I recall reading on some blog or other about the Portuguese National Diving Team being eliminated, and good riddance to the little runts. That is not the kind of atmosphere than a great sport, such as soccer most definitely is, at least in the sheer scale of its global popularity, should be radiating.
Many are now commenting on the “irony” – the point being that it is believed to be pretty much a coincidence – that Italy, who have just won the World Cup, are simultaneously mired in a match fixing scandal back home. People are wondering how the one circumstance might have affected the other. The scandal back home, it is being said, “made them all the more determined”, etc. How about: Italian soccer is mired in a cheating scandal because lots of Italian soccer players cheat, and Italy won the World Cup because, at least partly, Italian soccer players get more cheating practice back home, and are better at it than the other teams. They hone their cheating skills more than, e.g., England, and are better at concealing their tricks than, e.g., the Portuguese.
Perhaps if England had played rather better and/or done rather better, instead of being defeated in a penalty shoot-out by the little runts of Portugal, I would be writing in a different vein. I cannot say. But surely an occasion like the World Cup Final ought to be entertaining for others besides the lucky supporters of the winning team, and something more than pure torture for the unlucky losing supporters.
The contrast with Wimbledon, the men’s final of which was also played this afternoon, is extreme. Do not tell me that less is at stake for the individuals involved. The loser this afternoon, Rafael Nadal, I happened to hear them say, got about a third of a million quid, so goodness knows what the winner, Roger Federer, walked away with. (Twice that amount, I subsequently heard on the TV news.) But at the end, Nadal, so wound up and pugnacious while the game lasted, was throughly gracious to his victorious opponent.
My main memory of this tennis match is going to be of the half dozen or more utterly amazing passing shots and returns of service that Nadal played, each one of them more exciting than anything that happened in the World Cup soccer final, aside from the Zidane thing. It seemed impossible that he could even manage a return at all, yet a fraction of a second later, smack, and a bullet-like winner was rasping its way past the elongated frame of the usually omnipotent Federer. Unlike with squash, the better tennis players are, the better it is to watch them at it. So when the two best players in the world (Federer and Nadal by common consent, it seems) are both playing at their very best (which only happened intermittently this afternoon – think Borg McEnroe) it is a great spectacle.
I am sure that if Nadal or Federer played soccer their ferocious will to win would cause them to become just as sneaky and duplicitous as the other soccer players. I cannot believe that soccer is sneaky merely because it attracts people who are sneaky to start with, although no doubt that is part of the story.
Part of the story may also be that soccer is a contact sport, unlike tennis, and that this brings out the worst in players, what with the line being so very fine and so hard to draw between legitimate effort and violence. But, rugger is even more of a contact sport than soccer, yet rugger players now seem to behave themselves far better.
And maybe the very rarity of goals in soccer World Cup Finals makes them all the more the causes of ecstasy when they are scored. More goals might mean no goal ever counting for as much as a goal counts now.
Maybe, as I say, it is just that England performed so badly. And maybe I am finally becoming an adult, who no longer cares that much who wins sports tournaments.
Meanwhile, soccer is by far the most popular sport on earth, so the people in charge of it must be doing a lot of things right. Nevertheless, I cannot help thinking that those who make the rules of soccer need to sit down and do some further work.
I’ve always preferred American football to European football. There is more scoring, more strategy, and games that end in a tie aren’t settled by a contest between two players that is completely unrelated to how the game is played in regulation. I’ve also never understood why people claim soccer isn’t a “contact sport.” It is. The best players are usually very good at committing fouls that the refs don’t see and good at faking ones that never happened. In American football fouling another player is part of the game and so you have less fakery in this area. You can’t complain about being tackled – it’s the whole point of the game. Also, while American football might be violent on the field there seems to be less violence and hooliganism off of it.
Strategy? Just seems like a bunch of pro-forma moves to me, about as exciting as watching rock-paper-scissors, just with weirdly dressed guys in strange hats. I don’t hate American football and I occasionally watch it for the sheer bizarreness (at least to me… I guess you just have to grow up with it). I prefer soccer because there is more personal skill involved and the low scores makes it like watching tightrope walking in the wind.
It would be extremely easy to increase scoring in soccer and to make it more fun to watch at higher levels of play. All you have to do is to make the goal larger. How about a meter wider and about half a meter taller?
By the way, there must be something wrong with the offense/defense game balance in soccer given that scores in soccer tend to be lower than scores in hockey, even though the goal must be ten times the size of the hockey goal.
Please, can we all stop with the American sports don’t require skill thing?
Even our football. Take a look at a play in slow motion some time.
And don’t start with that it’s harder because we don’t use our hands. That’s just perverse. Americans are obsessed with using the best tools for the job. That claim is gonna fall on deaf ears.
I am always struck by how many miscues the players make. Even Beckham and Zidane routinely biff corners and almost every pass over 20 feet seems like a miscue. To an American, this is intolerable. I mean, you’ve had how many years and the best players can’t kick a corner where they want it 9 out of ten times?
Frankly, it’s also a sport without honor.
Z^2’s headbutt was brilliant and nothing to be ashamed of. It was praiseworthy enough for its flawless technique, but the true genius lay in his timing and planning. Look at how long he waited and how he surveyed the field; notice how long it took for the red card to be delivered. None of the officials saw it, and he was only “caught” because an assistant on the sidelines did some cheating of his own, saw it on the video screen, and then claimed he’d seen it live.
I don’t hate soccer or anything (football and baseball can meet any team sports yawn factor IMHO) but penalty shootouts are without a doubt the lamest method of determining a winner in any sport period.
I say send the goalkeepers off after regulation play (and I like the idea about making the goals larger too).
“soccer is by far the most popular sport on earth” and is watched by 6% of Americans. Another case of “American exceptionism”?
“”soccer is by far the most popular sport on earth” and is watched by 6% of Americans. Another case of “American exceptionism”?”
And watched by an even smaller percentage of Australians, I’d guess. It’s not just Americans who are immune to the so-called “charms’ of soccer, a game devoid of skill or honour, where cheats are rewarded time and again.
I think the “squash” thesis might be right. I did try to enjoy this tournament, if only to disclipline my rampant intellectual snobbery. But even before England exited, it really was impossible. The play was dull, and stayed that way for hour on end. And the cynicism of the players. . . .
Perhaps this multi-week demonstration of football’s flaws will be looked back on as the time when intellectual snobs threw off the pretence that there’s something to enjoy here. . .
“Frankly, it’s also a sport without honor.”
Eh? Are you implying that there are professional sports with honor out there somewhere? I suppose some are have politeness still (albeit either enforced, or a veneer), but I don’t associate professional sports and sportsmanship anymore.
In the UK football still has a tradition that if a ball is deliberately kicked out of play to stop the game because someone is injured, then whichever team throws it back in will pass the ball to the side that was in posession when the game stopped. But that hardly makes up for the other aspects of the professional game.
That’s because those disappointed neutrals don’t realise that the World Cup isn’t the supreme expression of The Beautiful Game. For a genuine fan the World Cup is nothing more than a summer filler between the end of one season and the start of another. The highest quality football is played at the top end of the national leagues in England, Spain, Italy and Germany and in the Champions League. Frankly, I couldn’t give a damn how England performed or who won the tournament. My club had 16 players at the World Cup and my only wish was to see them back fit for pre-season training.
There are certain litmus tests at a time like this. One being the humbug surrounding Zidane’s headbutt. Come on, who couldn’t laugh at that? It doesn’t matter what Matterazzi did or didn’t say. An Italian defender is the closest thing to a paid assassin and anyone who lands one on them goes up in my estimation. I only regret that Zidane didn’t give the podium holding the World Cup a kicking on his way off. Zidane – top man.
So, roll on August, the start of the Premiership, when the fans will have their game back and the ignorant will thankfully sod off for another four years.
boring? Brian, I thought it was a great final, marred at the end though by Zidane’s moment of madness (what on earth must have been said to him to make this usually decent man behave like that?). Just because lots of goals were not scored does not mean it was dull. Sorry, but I cannot agree with you on this one, Brian.
I must admit, the whole ‘American Football’ vs. ‘soccer’ debate fascinates me.
To me, American Football has always seemed like a strange sport, given the very precise physical and tactical requirements of the game. Football players are uniformly very physically large and their game consists of following very strict tactical instructions without error. Soccer players, on the other hand, range in physical size and some of the best players are able to adapt to a range of different tactics as the situation demands. Of course this causes more errors, because the players are required to consider far more variables, with far less direction from coaches.
To me, the pinnacle of American Football has always seemed to be ‘efficiency’, whereas soccer places greater emphasis on individual vision. To non-Americans, the plethora of statistics generated during the course of a football game seems bewildering, just as the lack of them in a soccer match seems to leave Americans nonplussed.
I’d speculate that the reason soccer is far more popular on a world scale is that it is a far simpler game with fewer regulations, requiring at the most basic level:
* people (who are to be found almost everywhere these days)
* some kind of markers for goalposts
* a ball
No padding, no helmets, no need for a coach to tell you exactly what to do and when. Perhaps most importantly, no ‘wrong’ physical size or shape provided that you’re fit enough to run up and down a bit.
I hate the way people view sports as binary alternatives. I watch both American football and “world” football and love both (and I’m an American). I appreciate these sports for what they are and I don’t try to create artificial criteria to compare them.
As to which sport is better, that is a completely subjective debate, and those who bash “soccer” in the U.S. are as bad as the people that they probably complain about the most – those who bash NASCAR.
As for the “honor” bit, that sort of talk sounds like the concerns of 19th and 20th century “amateur” sport blue bloods.
Actually, on further reflection it is probably the case that my language was a bit strong, but I think my overall point still holds – that what one likes in a sport is subjective in the sense that Montaigne would describe.
Rob,
I thought your comments were very well put. Though (as an American) I don’t find U.S. football strange. I, like most Americans who aren’t first or second generation immigrants, had to grow to like and then love “soccer” (I found it a strange and boring sport at one time), and I may be better for it.
Brian Micklethwait,
You seem to intimate that FIFA is the reason for the success of football; if that is the case I think that line of reasoning is mistaken.
What soccer needs is HOTTIE CHEERLEADERS!!!
I’ve seen a radical, but interesting suggestion that could either make diving even more prevalent or reduce the number of fouls.
Instead of a yellow or red card, players who commit a foul have to leave the field and stay off for a certain period of time. Say 5 min for a normal foul, 10 min for a serious one, and 20 min for a red card style offense. This follows ice hockey’s penaltykilling/power play style, which would open up the field and allow for more adventurous attacking play, and hopefully more goals without making the goal too big for keepers to defend.
No red cards or yellow cards as we know it and the attendent ejections, but allow more substitutions to compensate for the fact that players are more likely to run themselves ragged chasing the game when a man down. Say, the normal 3 subs up to the 60th min, then an additional sub can be brought on every subsequent ten minutes, which also extends to extra time play.
It probably won’t play like soccer as we know it, but I reckon it should make the game more exciting.
TWG
I hadn’t watched football (soccer) since leaving the UK in 91 until this World Cup. The reason I stopped watching was, in addition to leaving a country where it was the number one sport, the ‘simulation’ of all the players when they experienced a fleeting touch in an area of the pitch where there was a benefit to falling as if shot. Sadly, this seems to worsened over the last 15 years. Now, players fall all over the pitch, just to get opposition players sent off or booked.
The scoring system is also a problem for me – it’s just not fair! One team can be far better than the other over the course of 90 or 120 minutes, and yet still lose because of a single error or moment of brilliance from the other side. The penalty shootout is the logical extension of this.
However, the attraction of football lies in the fact that it isn’t fair (which, I guess, is also it’s major problem). I found the tournament to be enthralling – but this faded as it progressed towards its rather sad denoument.
As an aside – what could Materazzi have possibly said to Zidane that could justify his actions – namely probably costing his country the World Cup? Racist insults were mentioned in the commentary – but how is being called a black c*** worse than being called an old or slow c***? Looking at his history, I think we’ll all have to accept that Zidane has feet of clay.
I know next to nothing about soccer and care no more, but to a disinterested observer it seems obvious that whatever is wrong with The Tedious Tribal Game, the tournament format is guaranteed to make it duller. A knockout in the latter stages means elimination, so teams are bound to play with extreme caution. Further, the qualifying stages and round-robin groups filter out poorer teams and flatten the distribution of ability feeding into that latter stage. Result: there is little to choose between the last set of teams and the thing comes down to random errors.
Chess has grappled with this problem and came up with a pretty good solution more than a century ago: the Swiss-system , which keeps everyone involved up to the end (good for TV audiences) and allows early mistakes to be rectified by dashing play in the latter stages. And because it copes with draws, there’s no need for that insufferable penalties stuff.
Maybe instead of fighting it, we should embrace the violence. How much more satisfying it is to see Zidane actually attack his opponent “head on” than to watch them all pretend to be hurt all the time. On the pitch the teams could beat each other up for money, whilst in the stands, the supporters could beat each other up and pay for it.
On and off the ball.
Well J you are mostly right on the honour question, but I might mention Golf.
It is the only sport I know where a player can lose a major Championship for signing his card incorrectly, even though every shot he played is on videotape and the score can thus be verified, that he is indeed the winner.
But instead of screaming the house down with a touch of the “You cannot be Seeerious!!!!” and reaching for their lawyers, They grimly but calmly accept that rules are rules and that it was their own fault.
Not as gentlemanly as it was but still head and shoulders above the rest.
RAB
Snooker, also, has honour, where players will call their own foul shots, even in the final of the World Championship.
Yep fair enough.
Silly me equates a sport with a certain amount of physical activity.
Now before anyone starts- Golf may not require you to perspire much, but you do walk about 7 miles per round and are on your feet four about 4 hours whilst periodicaly trying to hit the shit out of a little white ball.
As for stategy well! Only Cricket has more.
My answer to the question “which is better, Association or American football?” is always: rugby. (Union rules, of course.) It combines the multidimesionality of American football (running, passing, kicking, tackling, various set-piece formations) with soccer’s improvisation and continuous action. It’s a kind of golden mean sport, balancing virtues of two very different games while also avoiding their extreme vices (particularly the overregimentation and reliance on mutant specialists in American football.)
The game should have a higher profile in North America. I wish the Canadian Football League would stop being a poor cousin to the NFL (with even weirder offensive strategy), go back to its roots, and become a professional rugby union.
“All you have to do is to make the goal larger. How about a meter wider and about half a meter taller?”
When I read something like that, I (naturally) consider the implications of such a move in baseball. I sometimes wonder what some people think they’re looking at, if they ever look at a baseball diamond at all. It really is almost a miracle of human-scaled precision. If that baseline (the line between the bases) was a hundred feet (ten feet more than regulation), almost nobody would ever get to first base on an infield play. If it were ten feet shorter, the infield double-play would completely disappear. No serious fan of baseball would ever even consider such dimension engineering in the game.
Of course, it’s true that untold numbers of merely cursory viewers have been content with what’s happened to the strike-zone in the past forty years or so. Travesty that it is, however, it doesn’t rise to anywhere near the level of a suggestion to widen the goal in soccer.
“Please, can we all stop with the American sports don’t require skill thing?”
Try to imagine: a sphere, and a cylinder. Some assembly required.
The single most difficult moment in sports happens thousands of times every day in the summertime, on baseball fields.
Another proposal to make Association Football a bit more exciting. Eliminate offsides rules, that will open up play certainly.
As a matter of fact, they have repeatedly modified baseball’s rules in response to perceived imbalances between offense and defense. The maximum height of the pitcher’s mound was lowered and the designated hitter rule was introduced in favor of the offense. The composition and rebound characteristics of the ball have changed several times. The spitball was outlawed.
More recently, ice hockey’s goals were enlarged slightly.
There have been several smaller common-sense changes that FIFA has rejected already, such as putting at least one more referee on the field.
In view of the enormous effect of a bad call, a limited video replay might also be a good idea. Drama queens should be penalized themselves. If a replay showed that there was more theater than sport in an incident, give the thespian a yellow card and give an extra video replay to the wronged party.
Perhaps this small change: if play is stopped for you to receive medical attention you leave the field and can’t return for 5 minutes. If you are truly hurt and need attention it wouldn’t be all that different than it is currently. If you are diving, you put your team at a disadvantage. Rolling on the ground in apparent agony would, by definition, require medical treatment.
Yeah, I can’t really comment on the worthiness of soccer and its low scoring. Its not my bag is all I know. The problem though isn’t the low scoring, its that games are resolved on penalty kicks, often the result of silly acting by a flopping opponent. That to me is a scandal. The games should be decided on the field. If its really THAT hard to score, then yes, widen the net. Hell doing it by a half a meter on each side would do the trick. Then, you play until someone scores (at least for championship or single elimination games).
The only American equivalent in our major sports would be deciding basketball games on foul shots or a quarterback deciding a American football game by throwing the ball through a tire. Sometimes it seems like basketball games are decided by foul shots but it is part of the game and its not like foul shots account for even 20% of a game’s scoring.
The penalty kick thing is just insane.
I will say to Rob that he misses the inprovinisation that goes on in American football. Its not all execution. Most plays have an opened end option. A QB who always tries the first receiver option as its drawn up on paper will be as predictable as a sunrise and be out of the league in a year. American sportswriters often describe football in military terms and its actually quite apt because coaches are like generals and the guys on the field are like grunts executing a plan but being required to think on there feet and improvise to reach the ultimate goal.
I do think Rob nails it though about why soccer is the biggest sport. It costs virtually nothing to play or learn.
Comparing the de/merits of various ball-games is an apples & oranges exercise & thus useless. Get a life.
…………in any event, there are far better ways to spend a Saturday afternoon. Idiots.
I’m an American who was never thrilled with soccer, but I opened the comments here specifically to mention my suggestion for improving the game, only to see that michael farris has already made that suggestion. Since the decision by shoot-out is so dependent on the goalie, and even more different than most of the game, play the extra period before the shoot-out with no goalies on the field.
The reason Zidane attacks Materazzi is because the Italian pinches and twists Zidane’s left nipple 15 seconds before the head butt.
I am hugely surprised that everyone has missed this.
Poor Bristish fellows still so sore.
Get over it. It wasnt the Portuguese or Italian “diving” that made you loose (no penalty or decisive free kick came out of it) . You werent good enough.
You want to improve the game? Make “diving” mandatory…i mean like in basketball everytime a British defender touches (any contact is enough) in an attacker lets say Cristiano Ronaldo it’s fault or a penalty…
Of course other options would be: stop offside rule and instead 11vs11 make 10vs 10 or 9vs9 that means more space for attackers.
“The reason Zidane attacks Materazzi is because the Italian pinches and twists Zidane’s left nipple 15 seconds before the head butt.”
Maybe he headbutted him because he stopped ….
I sort of appall myself thinking that the headbutt was kind of awesome. I also think it’s _very_ obvious that he was caught only due to a cheating official who didn’t see it in real time.
You guys who don’t get football are going to love cricket. A five day game where often nothing much happens and it can end in a draw.
However as a football (soccer) player I’d say it is probably the best team game I’ve played. Squash however is easily the best individual sport I’ve played and I try and play two or three times a week. It will never be a great spectator sport though but it doesn’t need to be.
I really love watching football (soccer) and the things some Americans hate about it are exactly what makes it great.
For my money though Rugby League is the best spectator sport – particularly the NRL.
If your comment on squash is accurate, then why do have 2-3 players dominating the sport for 5-6 years in a row? I play a lot of squash, tennis & soccer…all equally more interesting to play & watch at higher levels of the game.
The analagy to squash is outdated. Late 80’s to Early 90’s squash was dominated by long rallies along the side wall, but squash has evolved and, at the highest level, is now a consistently attacking game, full of angles and virtuoso shot-making.