While taking a class in soccer in college in New York, the offsides rule was discussed and a student asked why the rule existed, and the soccer coach explained that the reason many Americans favor abolishing offside was because Americans tend to be entertained by high-scoring games with lots of offense (i.e., soccer scores of 4-3 or 6-5), but the rest of the world wants to retain offside because they are more purist and like low-scoring defensive battles (2-1 or 1-0).
I have noticed this with the NFL as well - that the more “purist” fans decry high-scoring 45-38 shootouts as shallow and superficially entertaining and prefer the low-scoring defensive battles like 10-7 instead (such fans often sang the praises of the Ravens vs. Steelers defensive battles, for instance.)
Wonder if there is indeed such a correlation - that the more “purist” sports fans are (however one defines that term,) the more they like sports games to feature sparse scoring?
I can see your point on soccer a bit, but I’ll disagree with your point on football. I’m not a soccer purist by any stretch and, to be honest, I’m barely a fan. That being said, I would hate it if the offsides rule was lessened because it puts a massively unfair advantage to the offense. It’s not a purity thing, it’s a fairness thing. Besides, all the scoring would probably get boring.
I am much more of a football fan. I would hate a 45-40 final score not because of purity, but because that’s really shitty defense and not necessarily fun to watch. I want the best possible game, oftentimes that means lower scoring.
Purists just want to adhere to the traditional rules of a game, whether new rules would allow more or less offense. In most cases, progressive rules probably do favor the offensive side of the game.
The only counter example I can think of at the moment is that the MLB purist might not like new slide rule on double play attempts, even though the rule benefits the defense.
This was along the lines of what I was going to say. Purists favor a balanced game over one in which offense has a heavy advantage over defense.
My other thought is that, to a large part, I suspect that “purists” are more likely to appreciate good defense than casual fans, and that this is because scoring happens in a single exciting moment, while good defense has to be kept up continually over the course of a whole game. For a baseball example, compare watching a player hit a home run to watching a pitcher throw a no-hitter.
How can you even define an “even match between offense and defense”? It’s obviously not a game where both score the same number of points, because defense doesn’t score any points (well, outside of unusual turnover situations). Where the defense prevents as many points as the offense scores? That’d mean that if you took an unopposed offense, let them rack up the score, and then divided the total by two, that’s how many points a “balanced” offense should score, and I think everyone agrees that’s way too much. The defense keeps the score down to where it “should” be? Then you’re just shifting the question back to what the score should be. The kind of score you’d get when the best defensive players in the world play against the best offensive players? We’d have that regardless, and what score that means depends on the rules.
And then you have the “pinball millions” issue, where pinball games used to have six zeroes painted on to the right of the scoreboard to increase the scores, but which doesn’t actually change the gameplay one whit. Is a 14-7 American football game really “higher scoring” than a 2-1 soccer game?
The only sports I know anything about, I guess I would consider myself a purist in the sense of the OP, where I don’t like rules changes that make scoring easier.
It used to be in sport judo that there was only waza-ari, and ippon. Two waza-aris added up to one ippon, and you could only get ippon if you landed him on his back with force, pinned him for thirty seconds, or submitted him with an armlock or choke. Then they added yuko, which was less than waza-ari but didn’t add up - if you scored ten yukos and he scores one waza-ari, he wins. Then they added koka, which was less than yuko and still didn’t add up to anything. And they loosened the judgment of ippon to where practically any time you rolled him on his back even a little, you got ippon. Then they changed a pin to twenty-five seconds, then to twenty, then they got rid of yuko and koka altogether, but changed the definition of waza-ari. They added all kinds of stalling penalties - there was a Brazilian who won gold in the Olympics without scoring a single ippon - he just got his opponents penalized for stalling (while waging what was called “proper false attacks”, where he didn’t really attack but made it look good). Then they eliminated leg grabs.
I heard it said that the rules changes made boring matches longer and exciting matches shorter. And don’t get me started on rank inflation.
In powerlifting, the changes were to allow knee wraps, then supersuits, then knee sleeves, then bench shirts. And they changed the judging so that legal depth in the squat got higher and higher. The totals kept going up, but it was less and less muscle and more and more technology. An anecdote - one coach talked about one of his lifters warming up and very nearly failing with a warm up squat of 473. They then spent twenty knuckle-busting minutes getting him into his super suit, and he went out and opened with 585.
No. We want a match where it’s not regularly a case where teams run up the score or deny each other all night. When I started watching soccer in the early 1990’s defence was at a premium, see Italia '90, and you saw some very cynical play designed to defeat some free flowing attack, and that was bad. Thank God the game has improved since then.
Good attacks and good defenses are both needed. I loved seeing Barca cut Man Utd and everyone else in Europe to pieces under Guardiola and Messi Suarez Neymar have their encore in 2015. I loved seeing Cannavaro and Company’s defensive performance in the 2006 World Cup Final.
And tactics can also make a matchup interesting, Chelsea in 2012 were compelling even though they were outmatched.
The 2014 WC Semi Final, was very high scoring,7-1. No one would call it a great match.
Not really. Scoring is easier in American football, while its a lot harder in soccer. In Gridiron (and Rugby) the “score area” is the entire width of the field, in soccer its only a small box.
As a sports ignoramus, I’m wondering how a sport like soccer compares to a sport like basketball. Does basketball give a massively unfair advantage to the offense?
I grew up in Chapel Hill, so as much as I understand any sport I understand basketball, and its pacing and rate of scoring seems to me the perfect rate for any sport. I know that’s ridiculous, but that’s how it seems :).
Scoring is definitely easier in American football (or, at least, it happens more often), and a lot of the rule evolution over the past 100 years (and, particularly in the past 40 years) has focused on making it easier to move the ball downfield (and, thus, in theory, easier to score). Chronos’s example score of 14-7 would be a surprisingly low-scoring game in the NFL – not that it doesn’t happen, but it’s the exception.
In 2017, NFL teams scored an average of 21.7 points per game; that came from scoring, on average, just over four times in a game (2.4 touchdowns, 1.7 field goals).
The reason for the offside is to eliminate goal-hanging and bunching at the two ends which kill the enjoyment and spectacle of a game by minimizing or eliminating its best aspects. In pick-up games the offside rule isn’t strictly enforced, but goal-hanging is usually barred in some way.
In basketball, the entire game is played with goal-hanging and bunching. The court is 94 feet long, but when one side loses possession around their basket, they immediately run back the full 94 feet, making no effort to defend the space in between. In ‘desperation’ time at the end of the game, they might apply a press, but not usually. The court may as well be 40 feet long.
Professional sport is an entertainment package. Most of the rule changes recently that offend the ‘purists’ are those designed to a) increase highlights and b) encourage close games. Because that’s how you get eyes on the TV, and increased ratings.
The most common highlight is scoring, so many rule changes are implemented to increase scoring. By increasing the ease of scoring, you also encourage more close games (or the impression of close games), because it is more likely that scoring can happen in a short space of time.
But yes, you can always tell a purist - the first words out of their mouth are ‘When I was a little tacker, we played the game the game the right way’.