No, because I’m not equating goals directly to touchdowns. You’ve missed the point, which is that IMO a team dominating to the extent of a 2-0 lead in football would be dominating to about a 25-point lead in, um, football. It’s a level of superiority thing, not a 1 goal = 1 touchdown thing. I repeat: the score is merely a manifestation of the game. It does not define it.
Or, what bordelond said.
I think the phrase you’re looking for is “Soccer: Love it or Leave It!” You’d might fit in better than you think in the good old U.S.A.
Right, so does anyone have data on this? How often is a 2-0 lead overcome in world-class meaningful matches?
I’ve often seen eight defenders in the defensive third or so, even without a corner or free kick. I did say ‘in and around’.
And I don’t know how you can seriously assert that adding more players to the box favors the attacking team. Does anybody really need to argue this?
yawn
Not quite the same statistic, but so far this season in the Premier League, in results where teams have conceded 2 or more goals, the results read 6W-16D-56L.
I can’t find at first glance the statistic you want, and to be honest I really can’t be bothered looking much harder (especially since it wasn’t me who complained 2-0s were too unassailable in the first place). It doesn’t alter my point, which is that the question of how hard a 2-0 lead should be to recover is an entirely arbitrary argument of perception, which will affect not one whit the underlying team talents. A team good enough to win 2-0 in Classic Football will end up winning 5-1 in SuperHappyFunSoccer, and that’ll be just as difficult a lead to overcome. That is my point. The NFL reference was merely an illustration.
That’s because the best American forward is 17.
Your claim here, as others have noted, rests on the spurious notion that a goal is somehow directly equivalent to a touchdown. It’s not.
As i noted in an earlier post, the average number of goals scored in a Premier League game this year is a hair under 3, meaning that a typical score in a Premier League game is something on the order of 3-0 or 2-1, give or take a bit.
If a touchdown were the equivalent to a goal, that would make the average total points per game in the NFL about 21, with a typical score being something like 21-0 or 14-7 or 13-9, etc.
But there have been 116 games in the NFL this year, and a total of 4881 points scored, for an average of almost exactly 42 points per game, or twice what we would expect if a touchdown were equal to a goal. A typical score in an NFL game is something on the order of 28-14, or 24-16, or 35-7, depending on how close the game is.
So, in fact, Dead Badger’s assertion that a two-goal soccer lead is equivalent to a 25-point NFL lead is, at least based on this season’s figures. pretty damn close.
Well, sort of. This ignores the fact that in American football there’s only one team on offense at a time. If you’re down by 25 in the last quarter, you’re boned. If you’re down by 2 in a soccer game with 20 minutes left you’ve got a much better chance. It also ignores the fact that you can go down by 2 goals which are flukes and be the dominate team so a comeback would be more likely in that case.
Wow, this NFL season is going great for me, considering it’s the first one I’ve really paid attention to. First I found out I was a Patriots fan (it’s allowed! I was born there!), now it turns out I’m a pundit, too. Awesome.
My yards rushing have been poor, though. 
Well yeah, it’s never going to be entirely comparable, but they’re completely different games. But as I said before, that was purely an illustration - I’m not claiming the situations are exactly comparable. The point is that a difficult lead to overcome is obtained by having been better than the other team, and that it doesn’t matter what scoring system you use, a team that is x amount superior is going to be about as difficult to beat. Rather than nitpicking the precise ratio of goals to TDs, I’d really appreciate it if people addressed this point.
Note, by the way, that my previous post took no account of time.
Soccer is a 90-minute game in which the clock only stops for injuries and other disruptions. The typical amount of time added on is only a few minutes per half.
American football is a 60-minute game in which the clock stops for a whole variety of reasons, everything from team timeouts to the two-minute warning to kickoffs to incomplete passes to running out of bounds.
If you compare the amount of time that the ball is actually live and in play (and i have no way of doing that, short of actually watching and timing a whole bunch of games), and worked out the number of minutes per score in each game, i’d be willing to bet that the discrepancy i noted above between the value of a soccer goal and a football touchdown would be even greater.
And, on preview, i saw Snarky_Kong’s post:
Very good point about the difficulty of coming back in the NFL. When you don’t have the ball, getting it back in American football is much harder, and i’ll bet that there are far fewer changes of possession in a typical NFL match than in a typical soccer match. So i’ll concede you point there.
I’m not sure, however, that your point about going down by flukey goals can’t be extended to the NFL. I can easily envision a team going down by a few touchdowns that don’t really reflect the run of play. For example, all it takes is one interception or a fumble, or a run-back of a punt, and a fairly dominant team can quickly find themselves behind.
Now, those scores might not be completely flukey, because they require a certain amount of skill to execute (but so, quite often, do “flukey” goals in soccer), but i recall NFL games where a team has been down early and then made a long, powerful comeback that demonstrated their overall superiority. Might not be common, but it does happen.
But overall, i think you’re right that coming back from a 4-touchdown deficit in NFL is much harder than coming back from a 2-goal deficit in soccer, due to the nature of the game. This page confirms that, showing that a 28-point deficit has been overcome only twice in the history of the NFL (once in the regular season, once in the playoffs), and that deficits of 24 points or more have only been overcome a dozen times or so. By contrasts, coming back from a 2-0 deficit is much more common in soccer.
So, the question then becomes, given the very different nature of the sports, whether it is useful (or even possible) to compare scoring systems at all? Does working out how many touchdowns equals how many goals even help us come to any worthwhile conclusions? Maybe not.
No indeed. This was pretty much entirely my point. There is assuredly some deficit in NFL that is as unlikely to be overcome as a 2-0 score in football, and the numbers are merely the label for that.
To get back on topic: just as it’s pretty much meaningless to compare scoring systems across sports, it’s pretty much meaningless to say that “football would be improved” by doubling the average score.
Improvements to games come from an understanding of the mechanics, an appreciation of the skills involved and a careful consideration of what the changes entail. Saying there should be twice as many goals without considering how to actually achieve it is as meaningless as claiming that doubling our currency would make everyone twice as rich.
And the crazy thing now is that we seem to be concluding that actually, this 2-0 deficit which was cited as being too difficult to overcome in football is actually not that insurmountable, and that by contrast leads are pretty defensible in NFL. Indeed, by the standards cited above, aren’t we uncovering a hellish flaw in NFL? This oppressive scourge of teams gaining leads and defending them must be stamped out of NFL, I say!
Of course, I say no such thing. I don’t presume to. Nor, if I had a proper understanding of NFL, would I expect to even think it. So why these arbitrary examples of what’s “wrong” with football?
I would hope not, as a 2 goal lead is the second-smallest possible margin.
As to your parody of a counter-argument, the difference in the NFL is that there is a much higher likelihood of lead changes, similar to baseball and basketball. And that has nothing to do with soccer being a low-scoring game, as the much higher-scoring NHL also had precious few lead changes in comparison. (Though more than soccer.)
Right, so what’ve we learnt? Sports are different. They’re all good in different ways. There’s no meaning to saying there “aren’t enough” goals (assuming there aren’t none at all, and that clearly isn’t the case), and we can all go home and enjoy what we enjoy without having football pitches extended behind the goal for no apparent reason that anyone can express. Hurrah!
So that’s it, then? The thread’s finished? I’m glad we sorted this out.
I’m still curious about what Latin American fans think of games in which offside is called tightly. That’s gotta kill them … when they’ve got loads of great strikers that get nailed on close offside calls all game long. Do they ever get in snits about the reffing, which in turn leads into snits about the nature of the offisde rule?
Great forwards know how to time their runs.
Struan: this type of language, addressed at other posters, is not permitted in Cafe Society. Please either express your frustration in move civil tone or (if you think there is a rules violation) report the problem to a Moderator.
Everyone please note: it’s not the language per se that’s a problem here. It’s the fact that this language is being addressed at other posters, which makes it pretty much a personal insult and thus a rules violation.
Many of the forwards that get consistently called for offsides all are older and slowing down (see Pavon, Carlos), and need to cheat a little to be able to get a step on the defender.