For me, the problem isn’t the lack of scoring opportunities. Far from it; every game has tons of them. The problem is that defense has it so easy, and there are so many things that can go wrong, and the windows are so tiny, that there’s absolutely no way of telling if Great Opportunity #1, #5, #9, #14, or #55 is going to hit the jackpot. I’ve watched hundreds of hours of soccer in my life, and barring penalty shots and complete defensive meltdowns like that infamous Brazil-Germany semifinal, at least 75% of the goals I’ve seen were flat-out flukes.
Consider football. You know when a team is making progress. You know when it’s in good position to score a field goal or touchdown. You can tell, just by the numbers, if the offense is clicking. If it’s a low-scoring game, it’s because the defenses are dominant and shutting down scoring chances. Likewise, in baseball, the bases dictate whether there’s a good chance to put a run on the board (it even has a term for this, “scoring position”). A low-scoring game is a classic pitcher’s duel where both sides’ batters struggle to put men on base and move them. And of course, in both sports it’s possible for a score to happen suddenly from a spot not normally considered a good opportunity; a 60-yard touchdown pass, a home run with a runner on first, and these are fairly frequent occurrences that add more excitement to the game. Even hockey, probably the sport most analogous to soccer, has multiple lines, a relatively small playing surface, and an extremely fast-moving puck. There are plenty of ace shooters and more than a few suspect defenses. Furthermore, hockey has power plays, which are specifically designed to give one team a better chance at scoring (as opposed to soccer’s utterly impotent free kick). Bottom line is that the excellent opportunities tend to pay off, and even the weakest offenses can usually find the net at least once.
I think the biggest problem is the rock-and-a-hard-place the situation the game put itself into by refusing to make any kind of reasonable compromise on the poaching issue. All right, all right, I concede that allowing the feeding of passes to an attacker parked in front of the net would be a bad thing. There absolutely should be a limit on how far he’s allowed to roam. So why not do the sensible thing and draw a line? Y’know, like hockey? That way there would be an definite, easily-understandable limit. Instead we have allow the position of the freaking defender to determine whether the opponent is “off his side”, leading to the utter garbage of the “offside trap” and strangling the best attacks in the crib.
Yes, there is excitement in soccer, and yes, there is a lot of scoring (there seem to be a lot more blowouts this year, I don’t know why). But never having the faintest idea when it’s going to happen kinda spoils it for me. It’s like a televised Congressional hearing. Sure, there could be an earthshaking revelation, but I’m not sitting through the whole two hours to find out.