Indeed. A thread without a goal? Perfect for soccer.
Jackmannii scored here, but on replay it was seen to be off side. 
Agreed, Germany were great. I may be English but one thing among many that I thank my parents for is that I grew up with a sense of fair play and without a sense of misplaced nationalistic pride and xenophobia. I can actually take pleasure in other countries achievements as well as my own.
And Technology? well it is here, now, and ready to use. And in a game awash with billions of pounds the cost is trivial. And lets face it, the TV companies will start using it sooner or later unofficially anyway (a la “hawkeye” in cricket).
Some accommodation needs to be made within the rules of the game but I’d go down the tennis route.
Give each team 3 challenges per game for a pre-set type of situation (i.e. offside, over the line, penalty) use them up incorrectly and you have no more.
Let the game continue until a natural break in play. Simple. All other details can be sorted out in an afternoon by a panel of refs and players. It really isn’t rocket science.
“But what about making the game the same for everyone at all levels?” cry FIFA
Well Sepp, I’ve got news for you. It is already different. When I play on a Sunday in a proper FA league sometimes we don’t have enough people to use as linesmen so guess what? We do without. Same principle applies for any tech you care to use at the top level.
Emphasis mine: and why would 11 vs. 10 not lead to significantly more goals, while a hockey power play on average will? The real problem with this sport is that there’s too many players on the field. This clutters up the passing zones and short-circuits a goodly number of offensive opportunities: in many cases someone else can cover if one of his teammates fucks up. Knock it down to 9 a side (8 + goalie), and all of a sudden there would be a lot more action, and goals per game will go up by 1 or so per team. In ice hockey there’s always tension because one screwup can lead to a big scoring opportunity, as typically the only guy who can now bail your ass out of the doghouse will be your goalie. For similar reasons I favor 4 on 4 in playoff hockey overtime BTW. Now, just as it did last time, this is sure to elicit howls of outrage from the True Defenders of the Faith here, but think about it: would you like to have 12 a side? How about 13? At what point would you say “enough!” and then limit the number of players? If this sport was invented whole cloth, year 2010, I guarantee you they would go with 9 per or so.
This all assumes that the problem with football is that there are not enough goals. You may be surprised to find out that many disagree with that idea.
I do not care for soccer either, but I have enjoyed the World Cup until the USA lost.
To me it’s two hours of kick the ball, run, not score, kick the ball again, etc.
It would not be a bad sport if there was more scoring.
I also hate ties. No game should end up with a tie!
I think mothers rather have their child play this much more than American football, or even basketball or baseball. They think it is safer. I used to play the game as a child.
I think the end zones should consist of iron walls covered with spikes that gradually converge, reducing the size of the field and ramping up the intensity as the game goes on.
Fucking golfers. They get all the time in the world, with no defenders, and they miss the fairway. Fucking pathetic.
You have somebody pick out clubs for you. Not even your own strategy.
Pitiful.
This is supposed to be a game of skill? I’d dumb luck, pure and simple. A bunch of primitives waving a stick at a ball.
Baseball - hah! I saw this guy try to hit a ball and totally fucking missed. Are you kidding me? You’re supposed to hit it you moron. Absolutely ridiculous. I can’t believe he makes $20m dollars a year and hits the ball less than 1/3rd of the time.
I was watching this American football game once, where this guy had the ball held for him by another guy. To help! Can’t do it on your own? HAHAHA. Then, he kicked the stationary ball, towards a goal with nobody in it. And he missed by a mile. A professional, with another professional helping him and you can’t hit it? Unbelievable!
Then this guy was throwing the ball to another guy that was wide open, and he threw it to the other team! Can you believe people watch this game with such uncoordinated people? Crazy.
I disagree, the more goals you have the more you dilute the excitement and importance of each individual goal. That, in essence, is the beauty of football.
As for ties, well seeing as the purpose of the world cup or any other league is to find the overall winner, and I have yet to see any footballing trophy shared, we seem to manage just fine.
Many US sports use an arbitrary method of deciding stalemates, Football just delays the point at which they bring that in.
OK, now explain the Proustian defence.
You spray the opponents with a variety of perfume in hopes of distracting them with involuntary memories of their late mothers?
The recommendation is only partly based on scoring levels. Would a field crowded with 40 players be enjoyable to watch? How about 8 (4 per side)? The latter would resemble basketball more than soccer. It’s mainly about the aesthetics, the balances between offense & defense.
Frankly, I’m amazed that (for ex.) baseball has managed to optimize its scoring levels, all without really trying (with some exceptions, such as 1920, 1969, & 1973, when the equipment and/or rules were tweaked to increase offense). On the one hand, if defense dominated (say mound was raised, 400 foot outfield walls mandated all around, ball deadened, hell maybe a 4th outfielder a la softball), well sure some might find 2-1 games exciting (bunts and stolen bases galore), but batters would be so overpowered that on-field action would be rather limited. But go too far in the other direction, and pitchers would be so stressed that few would make the HoF, among other things. But we’ve managed to strike a happy medium with the current 5 or so runs per game per team-it’s been between 4 & 5 runs for most of the past 110 years. At that level both pitchers and hitters can succeed, often brilliantly, and the game remains exciting without 1-0 pitchers duels or 22-19 slugfests all the time.
I mentioned softball, and perhaps TPTB recognized that 8 fielders “in the field” (i.e. not including the C) would not be enough for all the hard hit balls whizzing around, and they made the appropriate adjustment to help keep offense down (doesn’t do much good albeit against long fly balls over the fence). If only soccer during its evolution had a governing body which understood the need for balance.
Without googling? I’ve no idea. But I’m keen to learn. Is it like the Chewbacca defence?
OK, now that’s funny!
Should the rules of football be defined by those watching it or those playing it?
Butthurt SOCCER fans are Butthurt.
Your game is small time.
Really? That’s even remotely good or clever in your book?
Are you 6?
How long did you have the thought “I’m gonna sound cool by using butthurt”?
By “small time” do you mean “the exact opposite of small time”?
Over a quarter billion people are estimated to have watched the last World Cup final. This is more than twice as much as the last “Super Bowl”.
(Hilariously, the Internet is full of places claiming that the total number of people who will watch the World Cup is 26 - 30 billion. I think we can all have a laugh over that bit of retardation.)
Well, maybe, but suppose you were designing a brand new game from scratch, and you find out that, with the rules you’ve implemented, games end up in scoreless ties like 30% of the time, and 0-0, 0-1, and 1-1 ties account for something like 60% of the outcomes.* Honestly, would you say to yourself, “Perfect! We don’t need to tweak a thing!”? Because it seems to me that most people would say, “Hmm, we’ve made scoring too hard.” And guess what? For many Americans, we are new to the game (the televised version, at least) and so we say to ourselves, “What the hell? They played for 90 minutes and nothing was determined? What bullshit.”
Or, to put it another way, I think you like low-scoring games because you like soccer, and low-scoring games are part of soccer. I could understand liking low-scoring games if they were rare and thus evidence of some great defensive players, or extreme parity or the like, but the fact that they’re common suggests to me that it’s more a feature of the game itself than the teams.
So while I dislike soccer (although not as much as Rystad, apparently), I don’t think it’s because the players are unskilled (I liken completely missing the goal that has Rystad’s panties in a bunch to missing an extra point in football – it happens, rarely, and certainly has no effect on the skill level of all the players). I dislike soccer because it seems that it’s slanted towards defense (as evidenced by the low scores) which, while fine in moderation, kinda sucks ass as a rule. It’d be like if cornerbacks, linebackers, and safeties were allowed to just flat-out tackle receivers in football, even if they didn’t have the ball, even if the ball was in the air. Scoring would go waaaaaay down, and the game would be much worse. I’m not a soccer historian, so I don’t know if scoring has always been as low as it has, but I do know that I don’t like it the way it is now. You do, but as I said before, I think deep down you like soccer despite the low scores, not because of them.
And really, the offsides rule? You’ve got a rule that serves to decrease scoring even further? Now you’re just being obstinate against scoring.
[sub]* (I don’t know if these are the actual stats in soccer, but you catch my drift, I hope).[/sub]