The main change I want to see is an end to diving and “professional fouls”. This could be helped a lot by reviewing footage after a match and imposing penalties for future matches on those found to be, essentially, cheating. It saddens me to hear things like “he took a yellow card for the team”, as one commentator stated yesterday after an Australian player fouled a Chilean. Someone has to take responsibility, and punishing players or whole teams after the fact would quickly get managers to keep their players in line. It would also make being able to keep one’s cool and play fairly a more important skill for a player, instead of allowing them to act like babies just because they’re particularly good at the game. It’s so bad and so ingrained in profession football culture that a player who doesn’t foul and dive is actually letting their side down. Surely that’s wrong.
I also wouldn’t mind a video official making calls on important decisions, as is done in rugby.
I can’t get behind the other changes mentioned in the OP. I don’t want to change the game, just get the players acting like adults, or “sportsmen” - a quality that used to be regarded as a virtue.
It’s a misconception that fitter players leads to better games, if anything the game becomes more entertaining when players become tired and make mistakes (second half yesterday).
Stamina and fitness are important indicators of how good a team is, ongoing substitutions would make that secondary (and plays in the hands of richer teams).
I wouldn’t suggest that we replay anything, or that it can be undone. But it can be prevented in the future. The only people that believe that Fred didn’t dive are Brazilians. Everybody else, including the announcers who have either played thousands of games or called thousands of games, saw it for what it was. The goal was a blow to Croatian morale? Sure it was. But a sanction would be a blow to Brazilian morale, which in the end is even more significant. Fred playing on eggshells so he doesn’t get sent off would affect his game, and would certainly go a long way to effecting change.
Some things that are “part of the game” absolutely should not be.
That is precisely the attraction of football, how long do you think it takes for a team to score a breakaway goal from end of the pitch to the other? (i.e. not a lucky strike)
30 seconds is plenty to turn the match around. a 1-0 lead is, at the same time, both decisive and a knife edge. Many, games have turned around in the space of a couple of minutes.
As to the OP generally. I’ve repeated my points before and others have mentioned them here as well.
Utter deference to the ref. Any back-chat at all is a card.
Give the ref access to replays for contentious issues ( TV ref up in the stands)
Allow two or three decision challenges to the captains
Citing commission (as in rugby or the stewards in F1) to retrospectively punish diving and unseen incidents etc.
If the match footage shows an obvious dive, the offending player should be required to play the next three matches wearing clown makeup, and a shirt with the text “I’m a cheating bastard”.
Type “marathon relay race” into Google and you’ll get a lot of hits. Some obviously consider that kind of competition worthwhile.
Just want to point out the philosophical difference here between hockey and soccer. In hockey with the unlimited on the fly subs the pace can be pretty intense. Now, maybe there are very good reasons that that can’t work in soccer-certainly if you have a philosophical objection to that notion, nothing more to say. Just pointing out that the current version of soccer’s core rule set didn’t have to have evolved the way it did; undoubtedly there are other timelines out there where it is played say 6 on 6 with unlimted subs and blue lines and a resultant blistering pace, but it isn’t this one.
Hockey did decide to do away with their 7th player a century ago-if they didn’t, there definitely would be hockey fans today who would blanch at the thought of eliminating it now, in the face of all the 1-0 games it certainly would have engendered-doesn’t necessarily mean that they would be right.
Yes it is. The game described by you is one played week in, week out. It isn’t objectively a “better” game than the professional 11 a side. I played a rolling -subs 7 a side game just this week. after 60 minutes play the score was 9-8 and I scored three but those three are no-where near as important as a single goal scored during the full match. Nor did the scoreline mean it was any more exciting or “better” than the 2-1 win we had in full format the week before.
How would this limit coaches? I’m sure they would still choose to remain in charge of substitutions; they’d just have many times more opportunities make decisions this way.
Why leave your strikers in with a lead? Because the other team is going to be adding additional strikers and pushing people forward, which means (A) your 1-0 lead isn’t necessarily that safe, and (B) there will be opportunities to counter-attack.
Physical fitness would still be extremely important – pacing yourself less so, but that’s ok unless you consider moving slowly to be intrinsically valuable to the sport in some way.
Man, the arguments that get deployed in defense of diving.
It’s part of the game? Only because no real effort has yet been made to rein in cheating and lousy sportsmanship. Much like, in baseball, terrible umpires and subjective strike zones are still “part of the game” only because people want to stick to the status quo for its own sake.
The truth is unknowable? Sometimes, but often the fakery is quite obvious. Sometimes a player’s acting isn’t as good as he intends it to be, and when that happens there ought to be serious consequences so that maybe he’ll have a reason not to break the rules. Really, what percentage of dives actually receive a yellow card during the match? Certainly not greater than 1%. Why are we just accepting that this has to be part of the game when there’s been no effort made to offer a deterrent?
And yes, a perfect remedy is not available. But handing out post-match yellows would be a good start towards discouraging the behavior.
It really makes the sport look, to the casual outsider, like it’s designed for a bunch of little babies (who are also cheaters). I know the sport is popular, so maybe no one cares, but even if the rest of the game interested me, I think this aspect alone would keep me from being a fan. Imagine second basement in hitting the ground sobbing after every hard slide to break up a double play.
I think most of us who are fans would tell you that we do care about diving, the issue is finding a solution that isn’t worse than the problem. After all, if you get too strict on diving, you end up giving players an incentive to kick each other with impunity.
This would easily be avoided with video evidence. Yes, it’s possible to make a mistake with videos, but it’s unlikely that a kick will be missed. As I suggested earlier, if you can make the team suffer for a players’ silliness, managers will be forced to consider it, and players can’t control themselves and play like adults will quickly become worth very little. You could start small and just punish the worst offenders after the match and go from there if it’s successful.
How about “if you are really so hurt that you have to fall on the ground and lay there in agony, we’ll automatically put you on the 15 day disabled list to help you recover.”
Well, it’s possible to be temporarily incapacitated but not be seriously hurt. Any guy who’s ever been kicked in the balls can tell you that. I’ve been winded a few times playing soccer. It hurts like hell for a few minutes then goes away.
Coincidentally, this is also how I’d solve the problem of diving. If you start rolling around like you’ve been kneecapped, you’re heading off the pitch with a broken kneecap, one way or another.
Diving stops the game: my impression is that they are wusses who want attention, like babies crying for their bottle, or professional wrestlers. If a player goes down, play continues until stopped by goal or out of bounds ball.
Intentionally putting the ball out of bounds during an injury: this is supposed to be the “gentlemanly” move, showing respect to an injured player on the opposing team. What this says is that you don’t want to win. You play until either physically unable to or ref stops play.
Clock keeps running: Some refs are slow, just stop the clock already.
“Extra time”: Seems completely arbitrary to me. Make the rules transparent.
Substitutions: This is virtually the last team sport in the world without unlimited substitutions.
That’s just unsportsmanlike. Not that diving isn’t unsportsmanlike, but pressing your advantage when a guy is genuinely hurt is simply the wrong thing to do. Which, of course, comes back to divers, faking, and destroying credibility.
The rules are transparent. Much more so than they used to be, in fact. The ref used to keep time on the field and everybody could only guess when the game was going to end. Now he tells the sideline officials how much time will be “added on”. Of course, it’s not added on, the game is still 90 minutes, but the clock runs for the benefit of the fans and spectators even though the ref stops the clock on the field. I suppose he could have a way to stop the clock on the scoreboard, but why? Watch enough soccer and you get a feel for it. Also, it is in the interest of the fans that the ref let an attack play out before ending the game. If you notice, he will never end the game while an attack from the losing team is occurring.
The problem with the players knowing exactly when the game will end was magnified at the end of the Ivory Coast-Japan game tonight. Suddenly the Ivory Coast players started to fall like dominoes, all needing attention and help off the field. The ref used his discretion to “add” 2 more minutes to compensate for the stalling, and the players couldn’t have known how much time was left. If they did they could have stalled much more effectively, which is bad for the game. It also makes for exciting endings when the trailing team goes all-out to try to tie without knowing exactly how much time is left. It increases the urgency.
As far as I remember, it was only one player,Konan-something, who fell three times late game, apparently quite hurt, since he actually had to leave the game with an injury. As a guy who’s been in that situation, the urge to get out and play often override rational thinking, and many players try to play after getting what they believe to be a minor injury, then realise after a few tries it’s futile. Though tempting, it is usually a bad idea, and may result in lasting injuries. In my case I got a permanent knee-injury after doing it for a few years (I was a loud player, playing defense and beeing rather good at it. The opposite team usually got annoyed and kicked me down on purpose to remove me from the game). Football can be really damaging to the body! Not all of it is filming, even though it may seem like it sometimes.
As for the rest of the thread: I agree with using video-replays as evidence, but I disagree with having out-of-game punishments. Give them a yellow card for filming then and there, and be over with it. If they repeat it, give them a red card and send them to the locker-room.
Offsides, time-keeping, penalties and substitutions should stay the way they are, or else it would be a different game entirely.