In the thread on surprising cultural changes nobody mentioned how much basketball has changed. It seems like college teams play with the skill and intensity that used to be associated with the NBA. I remember when Bobby Knight’s Hoosiers went undefeated in 1976 and how they played in a completely different style, full of strategy and defense, very intentional - much more like soccer.
Clearly people weren’t satisfied with that kind of play, so the shot clock was instituted. And now the game is more popular than ever.
Would a 3-minute (+/-) shot clock make soccer more popular in America?
Of course, it would probably also get us invaded by everyone else on the planet - “Those damn Americans, first they dropped the atom bomb, then they destroyed the climate, and then…then…they fucked up soccer! Barbarians! Kill them all!”
How do you define a shot, though? In basketball, the shot clock resets when a basket is made or the ball hits the rim. I can’t come up with a good way to define a shot in soccer.
It wouldn’t matter if soccer had a shot clock. I say get rid of the goal keeper . How boring would basketball be if Yao Ming just stood in front of the goal and just swatted the ball away? (answer: it would be so boring that people would start clapping and ooohing and aahing when someone got even close to scoring and the final scores would be like 1-0 after 2 hours of play)
If you get rid of offsides then you just have defenders that stay back and defend instead of going forward and attacking. There’d be less scoring than there currently is.
Here’s what would make soccer more appealing to Americans. You dive, embellish, or argue with the ref you get a yellow card. First time, no warnings. You knew what you were doing when you flopped just outside the penalty box, you do it again and you get kicked out. Also, penalties should be able to be levied after the fact by looking at the tapes. Sometimes a ref will make a mistake about a dive or a foul. Give the player a fine after the game. That’d reduce downtime by a ton, and if games were reffed better attacking players wouldn’t be mugged so badly and would succeed more.
I think they should let you use your hands. Instead of a net, just make it that you have to carry the ball across some kind of a line to score. There should be some kind of tackling rule that says the play is dead only after you bring the ball carrier completely down to the ground. There should be some kind of rules about throwing the ball forward, but you might have to change the shape of the ball to make it more aerodynamic. My vision of the game would be pretty physical, so the players would probably have to wear pads. You could still have some kicking, but only like to start the game or maybe there could be some kind of point scoring alternative involving a kick if the team with the ball can’t get close enough to the scoring line.
The clock IS official, but the timekeeper is the referee. It you let other people decide when to add time to make up for stoppages then you take away the control of the match from the referee.
Eliminating offside would be a terrible thing to do to soccer. You would have people just standing around at the other end of the field just waiting to capitalize on a random, lucky ball popping out toward them. Ugly. It would be a little like eliminating the 10-second line AND eliminating over-and-back at the same time, in basketball.
Fighting is good in boxing, not in a game like soccer.
Exactly. I’m not a big soccer fan, but I’m a self admitted junkie for the international competitions. I do remember getting up at 4:30AM on a Saturday to watch the US play two World Cups ago.
During the last World Cup I stopped giving a shit whether we won or lost, at least we didn’t drop and cry like a little bitch every time we were touched. I took more pride in this picture than if we would have won the whole damn thing. I’m 100% serious.
I am very much a soccer purist and I am loathe to see major changes made to the game. But, it may be be time to move to another system of officiating, Perhaps a 2 or 3 referee system like basketball.
The way the Laws of the Game read right now you are supposed to be cautioned for those dives, embellishments and arguments with the ref. It’s just that FIFA and other FAs don’t have the referees cracking down hard enough.
I would love to see people cautioned and sent off far more quickly, but there is a risk of losing too many players in one match. As much as it pains me to envision it, soccer might have to move to some kind of penalty box system. The resulting power plays would be appropriate punishments for harsh fouls, but not so severe as to completely change the tactics and scoring chances for the remainder of the match.
Maybe stop it being too easy, by requiring all throws to be aganst the direction of play? That’d mean a lot of players would have to be coordinated in order to gain ground on the opposition. And tackling…well, OK, bring them to the ground, but continue play, allowing the other players to form a shield around the ball if they can…
These threads surface occassionally. And they’re ridiculous. Don’t like soccer? Don’t watch it. Like fast-scoring sports? Go watch something else. This idea that Americans have an inherent inability to cope with a sport which doesn’t have a shot every few seconds is silly.
Make any of these changes, and you turn it into a fundamentally different game. If you enjoy the resulting game, then fine. But don’t claim that it’s soccer. Americans don’t, in general, like soccer because they’re not, in general, familiar enough with it (which isn’t a criticism, just an observation). I find basketball and ice hockey to be duller than watching paint dry, because I can’t quite follow enough of the intricacies of the game. Knowing ‘a goal is when the ball enters the net’ isn’t enough to be able to follow 90 minutes of soccer.
Ditto that. Football (soccer, OK) didn’t have offside to begin with; it was introduced to eliminate what ILMVI is describing. In kiddie games peer pressure against “goal-hanging” is enough, but that wouldn’t work in a serious game.
You could eliminate offside, and you could let players use their hands, and eliminate goalkeepers. In that case you probably need to make the game more of a challenge by making the goal smaller and in the horizontal plane, not vertical. Then you might as well eliminate some of the players and bring the whole thing indoors so you can play when it’s wet outside, and don’t need studded boots which can cause injuries.
For the record, I happen to love soccer - at my high school, that’s what the best athletes played, and they were outstanding. Both our men’s and women’s teams competed at State level - the men’s team won one year.
Friday night football games, nobody paid attention and the place was half-empty. On Saturday nights, though, the place was packed and everyone was watching the soccer game. I saw one of our wings outmaneuver a fullback and avoid a collision by doing a mid-air somersault, and then pick up the ball right where he left off.
Several of my girlfriends were on the women’s team, including one sweet gal who’s still absolutely gorgeous. She had to get back in the car when we stopped for gas at the corner of North and Clark a couple of years ago, because she was actually stopping traffic and was gonna cause a wreck. But in high school they had to kick her off the team. She was an excellent player, but she was SO vicious, so mean, she’d get red-carded every game.
I wasn’t any good, just played at the local league level - but it was fun!
Anyway, my husband always complains about sports that favor defensive play at the expense of scoring. He doesn’t “get” soccer at all. He would’ve hated old-time baseball games, with the special tricks pitchers used to use.
If you want to make soccer more popular in the United States, you need to get rid of one of the other major team sports, or change history. It’s not an issue of the game being boring; Americans love some of the slowest games around. The two most popular team spectator sports, football and baseball, are games where in three hours you’re lucky to see twelve minutes of actual play. And all the popular sports have some sort of issue with play or rules. Basketball is still a foulfest in the last minute of any close game. Hockey still doesn’t correctly enforce half of its rules. Football games are preposterously long, horribly officiated, and devoid of action. Baseball has slowed down tremendously in the last thirty years for no good reason at all.
It’s just that soccer doesn’t occupy the place in the history of North American pro sports that have been taken by baseball, football, basketball, etc.
I’d probably me more apt to watch and follow soccer if they had a way of giving a slight edge to team’s offences. A game with a final score of 7-9 would probably be thrilling to watch.
Given that a typical soccer game has a score like 2-0 means not much in the way of excitement for the typical American. Even when baseball games have scores like 1-2 they are usually labeled a “snoozer”.
Basketball has the opposite problem. Too much scoring then why bother watching the thing till the last 5 minutes of the 2nd half.
There’s just no single rule change or reason that’s going to make Americans all of a sudden like soccer. It’s not the low scoring aspect. It’s not the diving/acting aspect. Every single sport just can’t be popular here. We’re loaded with sports as it is, and we have them all year round.
And, we have a long history with all of our tribes set in place with the other sports. . .teams that our fathers and grandfathers followed. Following sports is so much more than just the design of the individual games themselves.
. How boring would basketball be if Yao Ming just stood in front of the goal and just swatted the ball away? (answer: it would be so boring that people would start clapping and ooohing and aahing when someone got even close to scoring and the final scores would be like 1-0 after 2 hours of play)
