Sure, and there’s strategy in Basketball and in tag. But it still amounts to very little in the long run as the outcome in European football/soccer just doesn’t change much regardless of whose team captain or coach is the better strategist. Most of it breaks down to deciding who sticks to which opponent and how much passing of the ball is going to be done. At the professional level, the former is largely irrelevant as they’re all really good at the same skills (except the goalie), and the latter is pretty much decided by whatever the true optimum is with very little room to wiggle. Even if you can change those values over the course of the game, there’s not going to be a big difference in the result.
In baseball, you can change the batting order, change where people hit, choose whether to have them try and steal bases, etc. There’s a fairly wide variety in terms of skills among the players. Some are better runners, some better hitters, etc. so matching up plays to the talents of your players is something where you can actually spend a bit of thought. Even still, I wouldn’t say that there’s a great amount of difference in end result.
In American football, every play is a miniature battle between the two teams where they do their best to guess what the other side is going to do, set up a plan for how to deal with it, and at the whistle quickly move into position and play it out hoping that what they planned was actually what they needed to do. They are their own chess pieces. People tackling each other or running or whatever is not the game, it’s the strategy of the plays that is the game. If you change out the guy doing the strategy with someone of a different level, it will massively change the outcome.
When it comes to strategic planning, American football is the king of the sports (of those I understand well enough to opine). It’s also one of the more violent, and also comes to a conclusion based on the outcome of the plays rather than resorting to a tie breaker.
What sport you like is essentially determined by which one(s) you watched with your dad when you were a wee tot and which, subsequently, you know enough about to be able to spot the intricacies of the play and which gives you a warm bubbly feeling of nostalgia. What sport you would lean towards if you were given a blank slate would, of course, depend on your preferences but I suspect that more people would end up watching American football than European.
You do realise that there are only 300 million people in the land that American Football is played and supported in, don’t you?
I’d bet there are probably 300 million Asian proper football fans, without even starting on those from Europe, Africa and the South American countries.
Person 1: Since Europe conquered much of the known planet and forced Christianity on those regions, Christianity is what most people believe. If people decided things for rational reasons, atheism would probably be the winner.
Person 2: Atheists are a minority in the US, let alone the world. Most people are Christian.
Person 1: Um…did I say otherwise?
Indeed. I love it when someone who clearly has no idea about a sport tries to make out he’s an expert. Good to see that he managed to get in that American Football is really violent as well, because that is clearly what makes a sport. How violent it is.
For the record, I think most europeans know and accept that American Football is complex with a lot of book-based, chess-style strategy. However, that really isn’t the only way strategy works. In soccer there is a lot more on-the-fly work where you have to know exactly what people will be doing and where. Believe it or not, that comes from strategy. It is just a bit more fluid. It is quite possibly less strategical than American Football, but that does not make it strategy-less, like he seems to think.
I also wonder if he’s ever even heard of a “set piece” in soccer. maybe he should spend some time with Championship Manager or Football Manager and try fiddling with different strategies.
(For the record, I find “soccer” to be quite an ugly word and I’ve never really used it, but I have here so as to try and avoid confusion).
That’s tactics, not strategy, nor did I say it was devoid of strategy. I said that soccer is based principally on teamwork (tactics) whereas American football is based principally on strategy but still involves a lot of teamwork. Of the two, you get more variety in the latter.
There’s plenty a variety of color in an Ansel Adams’ photograph, and there’s plenty of reason to enjoy his paintings. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t photographs with more than mere plenty.
Even if you agree with that (which I don’t) there is no getting round the fact that the concept of the set piece is in no way different to how plays are organised in American Football.
A lot more than what? American football is chock full of on-the-fly work where you have to know exactly what people will be doing and where. People seem to be under the mistaken impression that the coach sends in a play that rigidly determines exactly what every player will do for the entire play. This is not the case. There are many decisions players must make during the play within the framework of whatever play is being run. Quite possibly there are as many or more of these on-the-fly decisions in American football than are in soccer. (And I agree with the Rat that this is tactics, not strategy.)
Set pieces are absolutely plays. How many different set pieces do teams prepare? In the NFL, every team has between several hundred and a thousand plays in their playbook, and they activate (practice) a subset of several hundred of those for any given game. Do soccer teams have so many set pieces that they only activate a subset of them for any given game, or are they able to run their entire arsenal in every game because there are only a few dozen set pieces to remember?
Because in soccer you don’t stop between plays every time. It is common to see several turnovers (to use the American Football term) without stopping.
Surely this is obvious?
Let’s go back to what I wrote:
"For the record, I think most europeans know and accept that American Football is complex with a lot of book-based, chess-style strategy. However, that really isn’t the only way strategy works. In soccer there is a lot more on-the-fly work where you have to know exactly what people will be doing and where. Believe it or not, that comes from strategy. It is just a bit more fluid. It is quite possibly less strategical than American Football, but that does not make it strategy-less, like he seems to think. "
At no point did I even come close to claiming that the average soccer teams needs to learn the same amount of set pieces as an American Football team does plays. I was just countering the accusation that soccer is more-or-less strategy-less.
I agree that strategy and tactics are different things, I merely disagree that what Sage Rat wrote regarding strategy in soccer. I think he is showing his utter ignorance of the sport.
Turnovers continue play in soccer, yes, but soccer probably has more stoppages per game than American football. Granted it’s 90 minutes to 60 minutes, but the point still stands. How many times does the ball go out of bounds, or a goalie pick up the ball, or the refs award a free kick?
Surely this is obvious?
You’re backpedalling now. Sage Rat didn’t say there was no strategy in soccer. His point – that soccer fans appear wholly unable to grasp – is that the strategy doesn’t have as much impact on the outcome of games.
If, for example, the average game involved 20 cornerkicks and top coaches spent countless hours coming up with innovative and surprising plays to run, then you’d start to approach the minor league of strategy as compared to American football.
Here’s an example: NFL coaches will often run “dummy” plays in a given formation; pedestrian runs or short, high percentage / low reward passing plays. They’ll do this several times in a game, and just when the opposing coaches have been lulled into thinking that formation is nothing to worry about, they’ll run the explosive game-changer play out of that formation they’ve been working on for weeks. The “dummy setup” for a formation can often stretch across multiple games, or even half a season. As you can imagine, the longer you “dummy it up” the bigger the surprise when you unleash the precision deep ball.
Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs – who led the Redskins to three Superbowl victories – reportedly used to do the “dummy up” routine for a formation for years in order to have a game-changing play in his pocket that he could pull out in a critical spot.
Where is this kind of strategy in soccer? That’s the point. It’s not that soccer has no strategy. It’s that it has very little strategy compared to American football, or even baseball. But that wasn’t even Sage Rat’s point. His point was that the strategy in soccer doesn’t have much of an impact on the games. Go in with journeymen players and a great strategy against Brazil and see how well you do. By contrast, master strategist Bill Belichick can lose his Hall of Fame starting QB early in the first game of the season and still lead his team to an 11-5 record, largely because he is just plain better at strategy than anyone else.
There are 125 plays in the average NFL game, not including kickoffs. There are 65 stoppages in the average English Premier League match (can’t find relevant stats for the World Cup, but expect them to be similar) including kick offs.
FWIW, I think the strongest rebuttal to the “soccer has very little strategy” claims are the fact that managers can be brought into clubs idling at the bottom of the league, and, with exactly the same cadre of players, completely turn the club around. Clearly, if there were no strategy in football, then a specific choice of manager would likely make very little difference to the outcome of the games, as the individual skills of players would be all that mattered. This is clearly not the case. Certain managers have strong records turning clubs around, whilst others do not.
That’s a fair rebuttal to that point. It’s conceivable that maybe players hated the previous coach and so rallied around the new guy by playing their hearts out instead of half-assing it, but more likely the new guy brought in a new system that exploited their abilities much better.
But here’s a question: How long would it take for a high level soccer coach to explain every intricacy of his strategy? An hour? A day? A week? And how much of it changes from game to game?
Yeah, this is exactly the kind of contentless reply I’ve learned to expect from soccer fans.
Since his strategy is going to be defined to some extent by his players’ skillsets, months. Sven-Goran Eriksson took over as manager of the Ivory Coast in March, and was considered to be working on an extremely short time frame (ie., 3 months) before the World Cup.
Most national sides won’t change managers less than a year before a major tournament.