The Not So Beautiful Game

My brother told me, “If you don’t have anything nice to say about someone, don’t say it”.  My other brother told me, “If you criticize someone, you should start off with a compliment first”.  Well, soccer is not a person, but I did write an earlier blog about how it was “The Beautiful Game”.  So now I’m going to write about what I don’t like about soccer.

As I said in my earlier blog, I like to see goals being scored.  After all, that is the object of the game, right?  You need to score more goals than the other team.  Another way to say this is that you need to allow fewer goals than the other team.  I think the latter view is how soccer must have been thought up when the rules of the game were being created.  Why else would it be so difficult to generate offense and so simple (relatively speaking) to play defense?  And make no mistake, it is the rules of the game that hinder offense and promote defense.

First, there is the offside rule.  It is very restrictive and prevents any degree of goal-sucking.  In hockey, you can at least float around the blue line waiting for a breakaway pass.  Second, there is the lack of a more severe penalty for kicking the ball out of bounds.  In hockey, it’s a 2 minute penalty for shooting the puck over the glass in the defensive zone.  Third, there is no rule that pressures you to generate offense.  In basketball, there is a shot clock and the over-and-back rule.  (Okay, so I’m comparing soccer to other sports, but hockey and basketball have the same basic objective – put the ball /puck in the opposing team’s net – so I think a comparison here is fair.)  In summary, when playing soccer you can pass the ball back and forth, never attacking, then kick the ball out of bounds at the first sign of trouble.  When the match ends in a 0-0 tie, your team will be commended for possession of the ball.

This may not be so bad if there wasn’t a penalty kick shootout at the end of a tied game.  Then, it’s a total 180.  Now offense is needed so let’s make it difficult for any kind of defense.  The goalkeeper must stay on the goal line until the player kicks the ball.  The kicker is 12 yards away from the goal line.  How can you not score?  I don’t have the stats but I would imagine the success rate for the kicker is above 75%.  The reactions of the fans, players, and coaches say it all.  When the kicker scores, they let out a sigh of relief – it’s expected.  When the goalkeeper makes a save (by sheer luck), the fans are euphoric.  Further evidence is that the goalkeeper doesn’t even know which way the ball is going.  He just picks whether he wants to jump left, jump right, or stay in the middle.  Many times he jumps one way and the ball goes the other way.  So I guess it’s the first kicker who makes a mistake that loses.  Is that how FIFA wants the most important sport in the world to have its matches decided?  (Imagine if Final Jeopardy involved a series of addition questions and the first guy to make a mistake loses.)

A simple solution would be to move the kicker further out.  Players are now stronger and can kick harder so while 12 yards would have been slightly reasonable in the 1980s, it might make more sense to move the kicker further out now.

Big Oh