If they got rid of the offside rule each team would simply park an attacker in front of their opponent’s goal and do nothing but try to send “deep passes” (actually they’re more commonly known as “long balls”) to him. The passing game would disappear and then those of us who actually follow the game would find it boring. No thank you.
I agree with this, but for interest sake, if you look at field hockey for comparison: the offside was removed from the rules about seven or eight years ago, and the game became significantly faster and more fluid. Some teams did have a player hanging on the line ‘talking’ to the 'keeper for the first 10-12 matches or so, a lot of goal-hanging and ‘mooching’ as we call it, but teams soon learned that you were basically wasting a player who could be useful elsewhere in the game. So the play finally settled back to structured arrangements and flowed better than before. A lot less free hits and whislte blowing, and more goals. It made the game freeer and more exciting to watch, albeit tougher to play. (for a defender)
Can’t see the same change in football, but it might be an interesting move to try in a one-off tournament. We always played ‘no offside’ as kids, as it was a hard to police on our makeshift pitches.
ruadh, Aro - IIRC, FIFA tried the no off side rule in the Far East a s couple of seasons ago (I think it was in an under 21 tournament). Pretty much as described, no midfield, no shape, no ballance,no build-up, no nothing, just humping the ball from one end to the other – no point in doing anything else.
If it’s less interesting, why are they playing it in greater numbers than those ‘US’ sports – cos they hate it ?
The main issue, as I understood it around the time of last years’s World Cup, was contracts. The established US sports can offer networks existing and substantial advertising income streams. So, they can negotiate with the networks from a much stronger position than can MLS – anything MLS offers contractually is a shot in the dark (unknown revenues).
I don’t know where you’re watching football or whether things have changed, last year folks were complaining they had to watch the US play* in the World Cup *on Spanish channels because even ESPAN wasn’t covering the game.
If that’s still accurate, then it ain’t coverage in any sensible terms – you’re not telling me, presumably, that the networks alternate prime (sports) time between all the US sports and world football ?
I suppose it depends on the forward(s). A Larsson or Henry would still be part of the action. A Viduka or Inzaghi would probably only cross the halfway line on their way to or from the tunnel.
If the US ever takes soccer (football damnit – the clue is in the name foot - ball) then I think we would have a major player on the scene, though not necessarily dominant.
However I don’t think they will take it seriously until they can dominate it.
In Baseball, Basketball, & American Football there is hardly any other countries to compete against and even hockey seems to be just US, Canada & Russia.
“World Series” always seems like a bit of a joke
why football will never be a major sport in the USA:
It’s pretty simple really, and I’m suprised it hasn’t been mentioned. For there to be a sucessful football culture there has to be a deep and strong fan culture.
In Britain (and pretty much every where else) the teams are named after where they come from and they always stay there. We do not have the franchise system, and the sense of belonging is deeply held within communities.
This has it’s downside (eg crowd trouble, although some , ie me, would argue that this is an important part of the football experience and a rite of passage).
It is my understanding that most US sports don’t have a large contingent of away fans at games, and don’t have the singing (non-orchestrated) that is part and parcel of the football experience.
Until you have that you will never understand football.
And if you want a quote; this is from Dany Blanchflower:
“The game’s about glory. It’s about doing things in style, with a flourish. It’s about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.”
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Is this only unique to soccer or is this fan culture found in other sports? As far as the media goes we certainly direct a lot of our attention to baseball, football, basketball, and more recently hockey.
I lived in Dallas when the Stars (professional hockey team) moved there. Before the Stars came I knew very few people in Texas who were interested in it. I predicted that Hockey would never fly in Texas but it turns out I was wrong. My point is that a sport can catch on very quickly and become quite popular even among those who have never played it.
Marc
In my experience it is unique to football (at least in Europe)
And the idea of a team moving is so totally anathema to what football is about, that it is inconcievable.
My Local team - Wimbledon - are a reasonably sized professional club that have won the FA cup and have been in the top division recently. The owners of the club decided to move them to Milton Keynes - 100 miles away. The club has died and the supporters have set up their own club AFC Wimbledon that now get much larger crowds than the fully pro “franchise”.
Who is they? Americans? They only play it in greater numbers at the organized youth level. Then they switch over to the other sports around high school. Plus, kids are more likely to go pick up a basketball and shoot some hoops or throw a football around than to go play an impromptu soccer game in their free time, in my experience.
Plus, it’s a fun game to play. I think just about everyone has played soccer in the country. But the interest to watch tends not to hold at the professional level.
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MLS currently has television contracts with Fox Sports and ESPN to air their games.
Considering that MLS has been operating for 8 seasons, their contract situation and the ratings they will attract are not really shots in the dark. It’s been pretty steady, as far as I know, except two franchises went out of business.
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**Both last year’s and the '98 World Cup played on ESPN, ESPN2, and ABC - one of the big 3 television networks. The problem was that they aired live, but early in the morning for last year’s. The Spanish channels has the replay contract for a lot of the games, so they would air the replays at a more watchable hour.
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I don’t think you quite understand the sports set up in the US. It would be entirely possible for one of the networks, most likely NBC, to pick up a contract to air the Premier League and put it in a prime sports slot. And they’d do it if they thought it would attract significant ratings. NBC doesn’t have any sports contracts outside of some golf tourneys and the Olympics and they’ve been desperate to get back in. CBS only has an American football contract. So there’s plenty of opportunity to get in on the game if they wanted.
As it stands right now, in the summer, the only sport that soccer competes against is baseball. All the others are in their offseasons, although football will be starting again in about a month. And baseball is only aired on the major networks (ESPN, FOX, ABC) about four nights a week. If it was profitable, there’s plenty of space to air soccer on any of the networks.
And while MLS and the World Cup do have television contracts and are aired regularly, AFAIK, you can’t get world football like UEFA or the Premier League without a satellite dish. Except for the Mexican leagues, you can get that on Univision.
I just think there are too many established sports in the US. American football, baseball and basketball already dominate the US sports world. It is extremely difficult for another sport to penetrate the already saturated market.
The UK, for instance, has soccer, rugby, cricket. It’s just impossible for American football to become popular there. Same as in Australia, for instance.
In other countries, soccer has become quite popular when there aren’t too many established sports present. Korea and Japan come to mind. (This is just purely IMHO, BTW.)
In fact, if anything, I think soccer has been doing extremely well in the US, relatively speaking. If the US didn’t do well in the last WC, MLS would’ve suffered even more. If the US continues to do well in int’l competition and MLS can produce real good players in the future, soccer should be more popular. Aren’t the current TV ratings for MLS are about the same as NHL’s?
A simple question:
Why would anyone think soccer isn’t popular in the United States?
It seems to me that soccer is INCREDIBLY popular in the United States. It is arguably the single most popular team sport there is, as a matter of fact - as a participation sport.
Everyone’s assumption here is that soccer isn’t as successful as football and baseball as measured by the attendance and ratings of professional and college play. That’s true, and it’s easy to explain; baseball and football and basketball have simply been around longer, and the consumer dollar only stretches so far. There are major league baseball franchises that have been in continuous operation since the days of Benjamin Disraeli. Football was a major spectator sport in the U.S. a hundred years ago. The U.S. (and Canada) now has four major professional sports leagues boasting, by my count, 121 teams, plus hundreds and hundreds of non-major professional teams, plus big money college sports, and then you’ve got motor sports, horse racing, AND individual pro sports like boxing, golf, and tennis. There’s no room. Soccer was just too late to enter the market.
But as a participation sport, soccer is MORE popular than football or hockey and about dead even with baseball. Why is that standard any less important that standards of participation? I’m sure anyone would agree that Scrabble is a very popular game, but you won’t find many people watching it on ESPN; its popularity is not based on spectation, if I may coin a word.
MLS’s future is definitely resting on the US’s ability to do well in international competition. If the US fails to qualify for next year’s World Cup, or if it doesn’t make it out of the initial group, it could hurt MLS.
As for MLS ratings vs. NHL, the NHL does better, but not by much. The MLS Cup usually draws around a 1.0 rating, or it has for the past few years. The Stanley Cup draws around a 2.0, maybe a 3.0 if it’s a really good matchup. Contrast this with the Super Bowl (40.0), the World Series (11.0-13.0) or the NBA Finals (10.0-12.0) you can see MLS has a way to go and that the Big 4 American sports should really be only the Big 3. That’s why I think it’s entirely possibly, and extremely likely that MLS catches the popularity of the NHL within the next decade. I don’t think it’s going to catch any of the Big 3 any time soon.
I’m getting a little annoyed with the assertion being made that soccer won’t ever take off in the US “because it is boring”.
Watching anything you know little about can be very boring.
I used to find (US) football boring, before knowing about it. It can still be boring - a game lasts for FOUR HOURS on TV but only consists of 1 hour of actual action, a lot of which is incomplete passes, penalties…etc
Basketball may well include plenty of scoring, but the setup of the game means that a lot of the time a winner is only decided in the last five minutes, with the last two minutes being a very boring foul trading match.
Baseball is another major time investment and I have to admit I find it prety boring unless it’s the tenth inning, even then…
Hockey can be exciting but I’m not a big fan as I’ve never played it and can’t really appreciate the game at all.
A lot of things are boring if you don’t appreciate the details. I could watch a fantastic foreign drama and find it boring if I didn’t understand the actors.
It would also help if the US was exposed to the best football in the world, as well as just MLS and the World Cup. You can currently get some Premier League matches on pay per view cable but ther’s no nightly or weekly rundown show with highlights, best goals, upcoming match previews and table standings.
I would love to be able to watch Real Madrid’s next season.
I think public demand would warm up some with more media exposure. Sportscenter almost never even mentions soccer, even MLS.
I sometimes wonder if it’s to do with a combination of advertising time within the game and the way that a lot of US media outlets have very close ties to specific US sports franchises - doesn’t Disney own a hockey team, a baseball team and ESPN and ABC (or CBS, I forget which)? I know Turner owns CNN, TBS and the Atlanta Braves.
History has a lot to do with it as well - the bigger US sports were played by kids fathers, so they’ll promote thenm to the kids. Colleges offer far more basketball and football scholarships than soccer ones so naturally parents will push a promising athlete in that direction come high school.
Just MHO, but perhaps part of the problem that soccer faces in the U.S. is that the breadth of the field over which the “action” occurs is relatively small, and therefore can only really be shown on TV in a “birds-eye” format, which tends to be less interesting. Part of the televised appeal of sports in the U.S., at least, is the feeling that one is in the action, at the line of scrimmage, fighting under the hoop for the loose ball, on the mound facing down the batter, etc., etc. Soccer lacks that except when the battle goes down close to the goal.
Second, I think Americans may like fairly clearly defined times for “offense” or “defense,” whereas soccer has a more fluid dynamic. Basketball and hockey are probably the closest analogues where offense and defense change quickly, but in both sports, the relative area of action is somewhat smaller (so you get to still feel part of the action), and basketball has only ten players total on a relatively small floor at any given time. Both baseball and football have clearly defined times when one team is on offense and the other on defense.
Hand in hand with that is the idea that Americans like drama, and particularly the drama of the last-second heroic stand. Every possession in football is potentially a scoring possession, and the hail mary pass, the last second shot, the game winning homer in the bottom of the ninth, are considered the “great moments” in sports. These work because in these games, we know how long is left, we know when there is no time left, and when a moment is “do or die.” Knowing makes the moment dramatic.
What has always bugged me about soccer is that somehow, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, they still haven’t figured out a way to have the game clock bear some direct, identifiable relation to the time remaining in the game. I never know, from looking at the clock, exactly how long a team has to score, how much time is left to make that game winning shot. I never know when the game is about to end, and that makes it seem arbitrary when it does. In football, I know that the quarterback has just three seconds to lob that pass. In baseball, I know whether there is still a chance for the team to come back or not. But if the soccer clock says 91:30, does that mean that there are ten minutes left in the game? Five? Ten seconds? There is no way for the viewer or fan to know. And that doesn’t appeal to Americans’ desire for heroism.
They’ve tried, jeevmon. Near the end of regulation time a sign will be held up announcing how many minutes of “injury time” will be added on. This is a recent innovation, and it has made quite a big difference, IMHO (particularly in the Scottish Premier League, but that’s a Pit rant) - the exact time a game will end has become, if not predictable, at least a lot less UNpredictable than it used to be. And short of setting the referee’s whistle to a timer that will make it blow automatically when those minutes are up, there really isn’t a hell of a lot more they can do.
Soccer = low-scoring, yet football and baseball = high-scoring? Just because the final score of a football game ends 28 - 24 doesn’t mean it was high-scoring.
Think about it. If we, say, arbitrarily added a scoring factor to making a goal, and another for “coming close”, soccer would have similar scores to football. I don’t know, how about a factor of 7 for scoring, and a factor of 3 for hitting the crossbar?
Also - the fact that it is so hard to score a goal only adds to the anticipation.
I think it’s not so much that soccer is low scoring, but that the opportunities for meaningful scoring in soccer are fewer than in football, baseball, baseketball, etc. Every snap of the ball in football holds the potential for a score. Similarly, every at bat holds the potential for a base hit (potential score) or home run (actual score). Most soccer games I’ve seen have the ball bouncing back and forth around midfield and occasionally, very occasipnally, a scoring drive that actually results in a shot on goal. Plus, there’s the whole issue of tie games being decided by penalty kicks, which seems akin to deciding tied basketball games on the basis of free throws or one-on-one.
As far as the clock thing goes, maybe I’m missing something, but what exactly is wrong with stopping the clock for injuries and the other events for which “injury time” is added on? Other than that it offends hallowed soccer traditions? Since soccer, unlike football (with intentional grounding) or basketball (deliberate fouls) has less opportunities otherwise for clock-manipulating shennanigans at the close of tight games, it doesn’t seem like there’s any real reason for it to keep running other than that it’s the way things have always been done.
Americans like anticipation, but we like payoff even more. Someone once described soccer as 90 minutes of foreplay followed by two weeks of “wow, that was almost good sex.”
The average major league baseball or NFL team will usually score four to six times per game, with gusts up to 10 scores in the NFL and more than 10 in baseball. Even factoring out football’s scoring system, those sports do score far more often.
Hockey is a closer comparison; the average NHL team scores only about 2.5 times per game.
In general, though, I don’t buy it as an explanation. Nobody “scores” in NASCAR, but the sport is popular.
all this talk about action o the field can’t cover up the fact that after 90 minutes, the score is still zero… Nothing has happened.
And as for the claims that with so many young people growing up playing it, the sport will take off soon, just remember:
“Soccer is the sport of the future-----and always will be.”
I think jeevemon has it with the “scoring opportunities” theory. More chances to score == more excitement == more popularity.
Sure, but that’s because it replaces “scoring opportunity” with “spectacular crash”. 