That’s a rather ironic jibe, considering that I was simply standing up for my right to speak freely about the problems I as an American see with soccer, defending my doing so on the basis that it is after all the topic of the thread.
You are advocating “long ball football” - the term is a slur that most managers try to avoid being accused of. It is just another version of anti-football - deskilling the game for the sake of expediency. It is generally the resort of teams that cannot complete on skill.
Rapid counter-attack football, using a series of shorter passes between pacy breakaway forwards is a different matter - it needs the team to press the ball generally which carries risks of it’s own.
My opinion is that there should be more scoring with less 0-0 1-0 games in soccer. YogSogoth makes some good points. They would probably just need to widen the goal by something like 2 feet (1 foot on each end). I wouldn’t adjust the height. There’s often so very little scoring that I change the channel to something else out of boredom, return to the game an hour later, and it’s still 0-0. All of that running around and diving for nothing. Often they’ll go 10-15 minutes without even a goal attempt. I’m sure it’s good exercise for the participants, but not too meaningful for the onlookers. The only real negative of adjusting the goal size is that it would be hard to compare current, after-change play to pre-change play.
I would increase the width of the goal just enough to bring the average final score up to 5-6 points per team. I don’t think they need to score in the double digits on average to make it interesting. I don’t watch basketball anymore because it’s too easy to score, but the games strangely quite often end going down to the wire. My conspiracy theory is that the refs subconsciously try to keep the game close for the spectators entertainment.
If soccer games were scoring 5 or 6 goals a game average per team, it would reduce the number of times that you get bored watching a goal-less game, change the channel, then return an hour later to find the game still tied 0 to 0.
Also, historically, have soccer games always been so low scoring, or did the scores gradually decrease somewhat over time as the goalies have become maybe more skilled or maybe the defense strategies have become more sophisticated over time?
Did we already cover cutting back on semi-meaningless tournaments and exhibitions during the course of a league season?
“Well, we got too fatigued playing those extra games to win the league championship, but at least we were first runner-up at the Inter-Pan-American-Eurasian Tourney and won the Athletic Supporters’ Shield for fewest fans injured in riots.”
Not all sports. Field Hockey used to have an Offside rule (identical with soccer), but it was dropped in the 1990s.
There are the usual opinions as to whether the game is better or worse - what no one disputes is that the game is now different. Different tactics, different game flow.
An offside rule has a huge impact on how a game is played. If you remove it, what you have is a different game. It may well be a worse game.