I should add that I say this both a soccer fan and somebody that thinks that scoring in soccer could stand to be very slightly higher (say 0.5 to 1 goal per match). I wouldn’t support any massive rules changes to achieve this goal, but rather believe that stricter enforcement of existing rules (particularly holding on corner kicks and encroachment on free kicks) could go a long way.
I would also be a bit stricter about sending players off, which could also lead to higher scoring if more matches became 10 v 10 or less.
The goal of the game is to entertain - it’s not a scientific study. Therefore this is also missing the point:
The popularity of such a change is 100% relevant. And most football fans do not “admit” such a problem exists - or they certainly don’t consider it especially important to change.
Whether or not ties “matter” is entirely subjective, and it’s not a major issue with football fans in general. Personally, I think there’s too much violence in ice hockey, but I think it’s fair to say it would be rather arrogant (and pointless) of me to say “we must look at ice hockey to discover if it is more violent than other sports, and if it turns out that it is, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, we must fix this problem!”.
Please tell me these psychologists didn’t get paid to uncover this truth.
Just for completeness, other sports use ‘penalty shootouts’ as well. Field Hockey, Handball and Waterpolo for instance; even in Cricket there can be ‘Bowl-outs’ (according to wiki).
Penalty shots in Icehockey are also pretty much the same idea; they actually tried this kind of thing in some football youth tournaments, but going one on one with the goalie is just as arbitrary as a pk from 11 meters.
BigT, I’m afraid you have missed the point spectacularly. You should accept that league and knock-out are two very different concepts.
As has been said time and time again (twice by me!) if you want to be certain of finding the best team then you run a league. Round-Robin, home and away and the most points at the end of the year is the best team.
No-one that I know would seriously suggest otherwise.
If you want to run a time-constrained competition that gives you a decent, but not absolute chance of identifying the best team then you have a a hybrid mini-league and knock-out tournament.
The fact that the knock-out stages offer the chance of upsets makes it very entertaining and that, rather than finding the “best” team, is the actual point of the tournaments. (though as I said before, they very often are won by the best teams)
If you wanted to find the absolute best teams in any sport, you run a league. Entertainment and upset? run knock-out. Football does both.
There is a balance to be had for the sake of entertainment. Too many upsets, and being a good team doesn’t matter, the outcome is simply random chance.
The point of the game is competition and entertainment. I think penalty kicks fail on both scores. The action is over too quickly and the kicker has far too big an advantage over the keeper, and it doesn’t particularly reflect the skill of each team.
As a tiebreaker it’s not unreasonable, since the other tiebreaking options seem to be worse. Though I think a pre-overtime tiebreaker would be a much more entertaining option than a post-overtime tiebreaker.
So what level was that and how does it compare to now? I’ll save you the bother. In the English highest division, the average goals per game in the 60’s is just half a goal higher than the average of the last decade.
So you think an extra goal every two games is the optimum?
Huh? One obvious characteristic in football that makes it appealing is the possibility of one team coming back from being goals down. You can score two or three goals in quick succession and totally turn the game.
I can’t think of anything more tedious than being guaranteed to see a certain number of goals per game. The fact that a 0-0 is possible makes the 3-2 more exciting.
I wouldn’t call it “just” half a goal. That’s 20% more goals, quite significant in my book.
I would certainly like to see more goals in knockout football, to reduce the possibility of (a) unsatisfactory tie-breakers such as penalty shootouts and (b) inferior teams winning tournaments. I always feel that the titles of world or European champion, not to mention club champion of Europe and similar tournaments, are a little suspect because you can clearly win those things by getting lucky, without necessarily being the best team. You can’t win one of the major leagues while being inferior to any other team in it.
Well if that satisfies you then natural variation may lead to that again, no real revolution needed. Couple of tweaks here and there as suggested by Jas09 and we are good to go.
If you always want the objectively best team to win every tournament then you can’t have knock-out football. End of story. Increasing by a goal or two a game may not lead to any meaningful reduction in draws and penalties and to be certain of high enough scoring to accomplish that you have to change the game significantly.
Anyhow…which of the last 10 World cups produced obviously suspect winners?
Which of the last 10 European Championships?
Which of the last 10 Champions League?..oh Chelsea you say? Barcelona or Bayern were obviously more deserving weren’t they? After all they did both run away with their own domestic leagues and were so obviously the best in their own country…oh, wait.
Not that I consider that a bad thing. I’m happy to know there’s a chance of England winning (despite what the boring people say) rather than it always being one of a very small number of possibilities, as the Premier League winner is, for example.
Compared to nothing. Seems that this is a significant number of goalless games.
Why? These stats were posted upthread. Pay attention.
Sounds about right to me. Somewhere between half a goal per game and one goal per game sounds about right.
And on of the unappealing things is that this is so rare. And it’s even rarer for another lead change after that.
Nice dodge. Your Tivo has recorded 2 matches (let’s call them both WC semi-finals and you have no rooting interest in any of the teams) and you only have time to watch one. The results have been spoiled for you. One is 3-2, one is 0-0. Which match do you watch?
Me? I’m watching the 3-2 match. I’d bet most fans would too. Even the true fans.
So far none of the options listed works for me, but how about this: pull x players from one team - maybe 3? - and give the other team y minutes to score - maybe 10?
Making it more common makes it less significant. If it’s easy to score “two or three goals in quick succession” it doesn’t totally turn the game any more… or at least not in any meaningful way.
Not really a fair comparison. The 0-0 match will be much less exciting once you know that nothing will result in a goal. The 3-2 match has goals which are certainly more entertaining to watch than missed goals if you know the result, and throughout the match there is always the possibility of goals open until the final scores are reached.
I’m reminded of a Benny Hill sketch, where he comes home from work and anxiously sits down to watch a taped soccer match. His wife is itching to tell him what happened but he tells her to can it. She finally gives up and says, “Fine, but you won’t see any goals.”
Poor Benny can only look at the camera with an agonized look as his evening is now ruined.
Have the PK’s at the beginning of the game. Every game, not just elimination games. It doesn’t change the game until at the very end, when urgency should matter. Exactly 90 minutes and no draws, ever!
From an observer standpoint, goals aren’t the only issue with soccer, and possibly not even the primary issue.
But before my actual post, a couple notes:
Note #1: And just so you don’t think I’m picking on soccer, I personally don’t like to watch basketball for the same but opposite reason - 8,000 points per game is pretty meaningless. They scored, we scored, they scored, we scored…lather, rinse, repeat.
Note #2: I really enjoy playing soccer as well as basketball - it’s just the watching part of it I’m talking about.
And now to the point: when I watch pro soccer, I’ve noticed that the duration any team holds the ball and is able to do something that looks like it might get interesting, is very short. On average it seemed to be about 6 to 10 seconds and maybe a few passes. This is very similar to the whole basketball thing where it’s just continual back and forth - there doesn’t appear to any build up of a larger strategy, or if there is it gets cut short every 8 seconds after 4 passes.
I guess they could make it more like American football, where all the plays get called by coaches on the sideline, the teams get together for a strategy meeting before every play, and the rules allow a team to keep the ball even if the receiver drops a pass that is thrown straight to him or fumbles the ball after some arbitrary piece of his body hits the ground.
Don’t get me wrong; i love American football, and watch multiple games every weekend during the season. But there’s nothing inherently superior about its strategic model, nor inherently inferior about soccer’s.
But a league doesn’t do that. Putting together a bunch of matches with inaccurate results produces an inaccurate score at the end of a league. Furthermore, a point against a bad team is not the same as point against a good team. Yet, in how you are describing a league, these would be weighted the same.
I don’t believe I’ve missed the point at all. Why is the penalty kick up for discussion if no one cares about which team is the best at the main portion of the game? If excitement is the goal, the penalty kick tiebreaker delivers that in spades.
Oh, and other sports have no shortage of upsets, so an argument that changing the rules would remove that possibility is obviously incorrect. Not that I get why upsets are desirable in a sport where people pick teams to cheer for. If all you want is an interesting game, then who wins is irrelevant.
I am a relativist about most things and certainly don’t think any sport is “superior” to any other.
But, when viewed from the perspective of “what are the attributes of competition that humans have a tendency to enjoy watching” - I wonder if some sports are better aligned with what naturally gives us pleasure.
For example: I had never watched LaCrosse until my son started playing. So, like soccer, I didn’t have a history with it during my childhood that would imprint on me and cause me to view it through a positive lens (like I do with american football). But I enjoy watching LaCrosse, and I don’t get that same feeling of “we have the ball for 8 seconds, now they have it for 8 seconds, now we have it…”
In addition, I played basketball as I was growing up, and even with those positive associations, I still don’t want to watch it.
Also, I rarely hear people complain about watching rugby and various other team sports, so it seems like there could be something to the complaint about watching soccer.
