It would take top soccer teams about six minutes to adjust to unlimited substitutions.
The nature of unlimited subbing in soccer would, in any case, be pretty simple; you’d probably just be rotating in two guys, three at most, to give players a little more wind. A player given a yellow card might be rotated out more until the game was closer to its conclusion, the way a basketball player who gets three early fouls will sit out some time. Towards the end of the game, if it were close, they’d keep the starters on. Frankly, most of the time I don’t think you’d even notice it.
Not to press the issue, but the difference is that a soccer team does have other players available. More substitutions just means you have the option of using the bench more. In doubles tennis, the doubles partners ARE the team. They don’t have substitutes available, and it would be pointless to have them because there’s almost never be a use for them.
All team sports have some sort of limitations. Basketball doesn’t allow subs during play, nor does football. Baseball doesn’t allow a player to re-enter the game once he is removed. Literally “unlimited” substitutions is not really what anyone’s suggesting.
I agree with your point. Of course it would take more than six minutes, but I know you didn’t mean it literally. Yes, pro soccer teams could and would adjust to unlimited substitution. Personally, however, I am against it.
I don’t want to press the point too much either. If I was discussing all this is person I would be rather low-key about it all. I simply prefer the way the timing and substitutions are handled now. I find those aspects of the game and the sport in general to be quite elegant the way it is.
But everything must go through changes. Everything evolves. I’m not going to get very agitated over the whole thing, but there are certainly some fans who would if anybody “messed with their game”.
What I think the problem is, though, is not the scoring, but how defense is viewed.
In American Football, a defense can be very exciting to watch. Big hits, big plays, fumbles, interceptions, etc. Though baseball is a completely different animal, for those who enjoy the game, a 2-1 pitcher’s duel can also be a very exciting game to watch. (I’ll digress on the story of having to explain a no-hitter to a foreigner ).
Unfortunately, in soccer, defense is not viewed as exciting, but rather a obstacle to action. I personally, see defense in hockey and basketball the same way, but the saving grace of these other sports is the fact that when on defense, you will likely regain possession and have a scoring chance very quickly. On a turnover in soccer, it will often take a long time to move the ball down the field back into scoring range.
Making the field smaller would help. Making the field 80 meters/yards long. Pull the sidelines in a corresponding amount. This would allow for a quicker transition from defense to attack. With the reduced space, drop it down from 11 to 8 or 9. This would create more lanes to attack through without having every attacker collapsed on by 4 different players every time they make a move.
Well, the point is that soccer really isn’t going to go anywhere until they jazz it up (in the USA of course) If soccer ever gets to be a popular sport, then it won’t be similar to European soccer. It’ll be different, with a shot clock, or maybe less players. Scores would need to be above 10 points on a typical game, and there would have to be rules that would prevent abuse such as diving. Watching a typical game, I see about 80 percent of this: (guy makes a pass, sees another guy looking like he could pass it to him, and his pass gets intercepted by the opposing side. The other side does the same, etc.
Football games don’t have ten touchdowns a game. Baseball might average 10 runs a game in a really high offense year. Why 10 goals?
Remember, a soccer game is a relatively SHORT sporting event as compared to baseball or football, and is certainly no longer than hockey or basketball.
I’m sorry, but the notion that soccer lacks action is preposterous. Professional (or college) football is excruciatingly slow as a live spectator sport, packing twelve minutes of play in amongst three hours of nothing. Baseball’s a very deliberate sport, and many games become plodding snoozers. NASCAR is essentially three hours of guys driving in a circle. Why’re they all popular?
Pro soccer lacks popularity in the USA (and Canada) for historical and business reasons, not because the sport’s boring. People around the world are not physiologically different from Americans; they’re not magically entertained by things an American brain finds boring.
You’re joking, right? Pushing a button during a period when time is being wasted (i.e. when there’s no actual soccer being played) will be a distraction? No.
Like all those riots in the other sports. :rolleyes:
Indeed. Showing the official time fixes this.
Really? Thanks for pointing out the bloody obvious.
The clock? Seriously? There are things about college soccer that I think do hurt soccer (although I think the damage is very much exaggerated…count the former collegians who have caught on in Europe), but the clock? Give me a break.
I don’t believe it’s lots of scoring the US likes, it’s having lots of “scoring opportunities.” :::Snicker:::
Football is popular because the offense can break a TD run or pass on pretty much any given play. A homerun can be scored on any given pitch in baseball, and in basketball, you’re back on offense and in a position to score about every 30 seconds.
EXACTLY! And all this typically happens in an area where scoring is not even POSSIBLE. It turns the game into a snoozer.
That’s why I say shorten the field by 20-30% and reduce the number of players appropriately, and you got a popular game.
Yookeroo, I suppose FIFA could change the game to suit you personally, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I am sorry for this, but I believe that you are quite free to start your own brand-new, turbo-charged version of AmeriSoccer and take the country by storm.
Opportunity knocks…
More seriously and less snarkily–I won’t reiterate any of my explanations for why I feel the timing and officiating and the Laws operate as they do in international soccer. I am comfortable offering my opinion on soccer in general and officiating in particular. I will not offer up a CV, however, because I don’t want some pissing contest. (With many subjects on the SDMB I am more than willing to jump in, spout off, and get in over my head. Not with soccer.)
I am quite happy with the way the game is, but I am also quite happy for others to tinker with it if they see fit. If it works out and makes an interesting offshoot sport, that’s fine with me. I played indoor soccer for a bit. They displayed the time on a scoreboard for all to see. There were a lot of goals scored. It was a lot of fun. It wasn’t soccer.
I guess this is what you do when you can’t support your argument. MLS started out with a visible, official clock (one of the few changes that league got right. Amazingly enough, the sport didn’t self-destruct.
I don’t like using MLS for these sorts of experiments, it just gives the snots around the world (and in this country) more ammunition.
Why the quotes around soccer? It’s a perfectly legitimate term for the sport. Do you use quotes around “calcio”, too?
I’d say makiing a win worth 50% more is pretty drastic. Changing the offside rule form 3 players back to 2 is pretty drastic. Even eliminating the back pass the the GK had a pretty big effect.
You are aware that FIFA experiments with the rules all the time, right?
Can’t say that I’m surprised that most soccer fans are terrified of change. They’ve got to be some of the most conservative people out there.
Not everywhere. In Italy it’s called CALCIO. In the USA (and even in many other countries), it’s called SOCCER (and guess what, there are very good reasons they don’t use “football” in some of those coutries, I[ll clue you in if you want). In Croatia, it called NOGOMET. In Korea, it’s called CHOOK GU. Different countries call it different things.
You’re welcome. I’m always glad to dispel ignorance.
In England, the country which first formulated the rules of FOOTBALL, it is still called just that.
Now not being as intelligent as yourself :dubious: I’ll hazard a guess that the words used in Croatia, Italy, Korea etc translate to FOOTBALL. Of course I could be wrong.
Soccer is great when viewed as 10-minute highlights from each game. You get to see all the great shots and plays, and skip the boring parts
The offside rule is stupid when there are defense players in the penalty area, or anywhere near their own team’s goal.
It should only apply when there are no defense players close the goal (where ‘close’ is defined being past a certain line) to avoid teams just sticking offense players deep in the other team’s territory and waiting there.
One major problem I have with soccer is that humans just don’t have that much control of the ball using their feet.
As a result, even when the best players and best teams are playing, you constantly see ball possession changing sides. You see a lot of good plays starting, and then, after a couple of passes, the other team somehow gets the ball, and the process repeats as nauseum.
Only rarely, does the passing and tackling and dribbling result in a play that lasts long enough to be interesting. (See point 1 above)
I don’t like the low scoring, but I think it is one of the indirect reasons behind soccer’s immense popularity.
In a high-scoring game like basketball, there are fewer “quantization effects”, and the resulting score is usually a reflection of the underlying strenghts of the teams. In a low-scoring game, the quantization effects are so large that you get some games between vastly unequal teams, where the weak team wins by 1-0. (e.g. it’s almost impossible for a country with a crappy basketball team to beat the U.S., but it’s not that unlikely for a country with a crappy soccer team to beat the World Cup winner)
Over many games, of course, the quantization noise averages out, and the stronger team wins the most games. But in a specific game, there always exists the small possibility that the much weaker team will win.
I think this makes World Cup games more interesting to viewers, because the games are not as pre-determined as in higher-scoring games.
And the game takes forever. There’s no such thing as momentum and it’s easy to lose focus during even the most exciting drives, even if you’re a diehard fan. (I blame that on the TV timeouts mostly, of course, but see what I said above about referees keeping the game moving.)
Are you familiar with a league called the NBA? I believe there’s a team near you.
I guess I believe you, but I don’t get it. The difference in pacing is why I can hardly stand to watch the NFL. And this is coming from a diehard football fan.
That would kill the point of the yellow card.
That’s because you’re not paying attention. Soccer defense is exciting in exactly the same way football defense is. Striking the perfect balance between giving enough space so you don’t get burned, and making the attacker feel pressured, is tough, and a defender who does it right often ends up with a “steal” or a “block” just as exciting as those in basketball or hockey. And I will contend that there are not many displays of athletic skill more exciting than watching Carles Puyol spearhead a defensive effort to block five shots on the goal line one after the other.
“Soccer” is an English abbreviation for “Association football”, and the fact that it was replaced by the more general term in some countries and not in others is a matter of timing, coincidence and context, not of “right” and “wrong”. To expand on Yookeroo’s point, is it “wrong” that the Italians call the game “calcio” when the Spanish call it “futbol”? (I’m too lazy to put in the accent.)
Bullshit. Ronaldinho can control a soccer ball with his feet much, much better than Jerome Bettis can control a football with his hands.
Then how come the US is defeated in international basketball games all the time while the same teams win in soccer year after year after year? It’s not unusual for the best soccer team to win five championships in a row in their league. It’s completely normal for a top league to have no more than three champions in a decade. Why is that, if the game so often comes down to chance as you say? The World Cup is the same way–half of the soccer world can accurately guess which team will win before the tournament starts, even though the second half of the tournament is single-elimination. All teams enjoy moments of good luck and suffer times of bad luck; in soccer, as in most worldly exploits, mediocre competitors fall in times of bad luck (Australia in the 2006 WC again comes to mind) while the best win regardless (most recently Italy in the 2006 WC and Chelsea in the current Champions League campaign).
Wow! The first half or more of my post were cut off by my bad luck in the cut-and-paste game. Let me see if I can paste it back together here. The intended beginning of that last post follows:
(to answer the OP’s question) Irrelevant. I like the analogy, and your heart’s in the right place–but there’s a reason soccer doesn’t have a shot clock: great goals are more like sentences than exclamation points. Each dribble move, stutter-step and fake-out is a word and each pass a space or a comma. A great goal, like a great sentence, is constructed gradually through creativity and the proper sense of pace. An effective choice of words or moves, and a few well-placed commas or passes, make the difference. Neither great poets nor great playmakers earn their living by pumping out frantic attempts under stringent time limits.
Hear, hear!
That said, there’s much less diving in club soccer than the international game. Watch the Champions League (the tournament between the best league teams in Europe) – the next games are on April 3 & 4 on ESPN2, ESPN Classic and ESPN Deportes, around 3 PM in your time zone I think – and you’ll see what I mean. The European club game is much more exciting than most modern international competitions.
FIFA has supposedly been testing out 2-referee systems and hasn’t found anything it’s liked. Now, I’m not one to trust FIFA when they say they’re examining progressive changes in the game with an objective eye. But it makes sense to have one referee: the whole reason the referee is there isn’t to keep the law, but to keep the game moving. Two referees would disagree about exactly where the restart would be, whether or not the foul was inside the box, whether or not the ball flicked across someone’s fingers, etc., and it could theoretically slow the game down.
Indeed, if the last World Cup taught us anything, it’s that soccer doesn’t have enough interpersonal conflict.
Not to mention that nobody calls traveling anymore, so that the tallest players can do some amazing dunk that everybody’s seen a million times before for two ill-gotten points. That’s one of a number of reasons I don’t watch the pro game anymore–but even in my high school league traveling was hardly ever called.
As it stands, each position has a very distinct role and each player brings a unique spin on it. If you don’t see that, it’s not the sport’s fault.
Do you know how much coordination it takes to run an offside trap? The defense has to see where the ball is going to go and trap the attacker before the pass, all as one unit, and if even one of the (generally) four defensemen mistimes his movement by a fraction of a second or misjudges the flow of the offense, the goal is almost guaranteed.
I don’t see how this makes sense. When was the last time MLB officially considered a Brazilian team the fifth-best in their league? And when was the last time Brazil fielded a team, let alone a relatively highly-regarded team, in a field of 32 MLB teams?
THANK you!
The difference is, the IIHF is completely ignored in the two countries where the world’s best hockey players dream of playing.
“Superior play”? Offenses who get caught in an offside trap get that way because they’re outplayed. Superior play is when a midfielder boots a pass to a striker right before the striker breaks free of the defense, collects the ball and scores. Cherry-picking is not “superior play”.
When an attacker gets fouled in the penalty area, he was probably 90% likely to score anyway. Almost universally, fouls in the penalty box–like handballs on the goal line–are committed as a last resort against a sure goal. Anyway, anyone who believes penalty kicks don’t involve skill on the part of the shooter and (especially) the goalie clearly didn’t watch the Germany-Argentina game in the last World Cup.
Bullshit. When a great offense is cutting up the defense with perfectly-timed passing and quickly heading towards goal, losing the ball for a restart can be devastating. It can neutralize momentum (sometimes up to 20 minutes’ worth) and crush morale. I’d argue that games are sometimes won and lost based on fouls that result in a free kick from “your own 18”, because of the ripple effect of the sudden momentum change.
It’s on DirecTV too, but you have to pay $12/mo extra for the sports package (which also gets you GolTV and Fox Soccer Channel).
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (In case you’re wondering, it ain’t broke.) As it stands, substitutes play a much different role in soccer than in other sports. Basketball subs each create a subtle difference in the game’s flow or just spell a winded player for a while. If a team is down 2-0 at halftime and they bring in two substitutes, the idea is often to completely rework the attacking formula for the rest of the game; though there are more recent and more meaningful examples, the one that sticks out in my mind was the group stage game between Australia and Japan in the last World Cup, where Australia brought in substitutes Tim Cahill and John Aloisi in the second half to overcome a 1-0 deficit and win 3-1. Cahill scored twice and Aloisi scored in stoppage time after the revamped attack they led wore down the relatively stoic Japanese defense.
Do yourself a favor and read “How Soccer Explains the World” by Franklin Foer. Most of the book won’t be as informational to you as it is to its American audience, which doesn’t have much exposure to the way the world sports culture works, but the chapter on soccer in America proposes (IMO) the best theory yet as to why: most Americans first came to know soccer as a way for upper-middle-class parents to keep their kids too busy to cause trouble; in addition (and partly because of that), the game’s serious adult following here is comprised mostly of misunderstood hipsters, nonconformists and the elite in general; and as a result the love of soccer is seen as snobbish. Ironic, considering that (the way I understand it) following soccer is considered one of the most low-brow, common-man pastimes in England. Anyway, young testosterone-filled American men hate soccer for the same reason they hate escargot.
And when was the last time you saw more than one quarterback and two halfbacks get serious playing time on a Super Bowl-winning team?
And the game takes forever. There’s no such thing as momentum and it’s easy to lose focus during even the most exciting drives, even if you’re a diehard fan. (I blame that on the TV timeouts mostly, of course, but see what I said above about referees keeping the game moving.)
Ronaldinho notwithstanding, do you disagree with my statement “even when the best players and best teams are playing, you constantly see ball possession changing sides. You see a lot of good plays starting, and then, after a couple of passes, the other team somehow gets the ball, and the process repeats as nauseum.”
Are they defeated by much lesser teams, and how often does this happen?
This is because, as I said “Over many games, of course, the quantization noise averages out, and the stronger team wins the most games.” That is why championships do result in the best team winning. But not necessarily individual games.
And this discrepancy between performance in individual games and longer term performance (as measured in championships) is wider in low-scoring games than in high-scoring games.
It’s just not likely that a bad basketball team “just happens” to score 97 points and win, but quite likely that a bad soccer team “just happens” to score 1 goal and win.
Turnovers happen frequently in basketball, pretty damn often in hockey (where you’re much more likely to see them happen because of handling errors, IME), are often the deciding factor in football games, and almost define baseball. In soccer, they happen relatively often, sure, but at the highest levels they’re far more likely to be caused by a brilliant defensive play or a generally effective defensive scheme than by a dribbling error.
In a word, yes. If you watch a game between any two decent teams in the English Premiership, players with little to no notoriety in the international game regularly perform dribbling moves that are amazing to the casual observer who pays close enough attention.
I stopped watching basketball shortly after it seemed to become a regular occurrence that our national team lost or came very close to losing to much lesser teams. Liechtenstein is the last example I remember. I concede that I may be exaggerating my memory of what could have been a handful of rough years. I still believe my point stands.
I don’t know. Most of the time, the team that wins an individual game earns it. IME as an obsessive soccer watcher and a former season ticket holder. I’ve also held season tickets for baseball and football, and played on a basketball team, and in all three sports I’ve seen a number of games where the outcome was often traced to a handful of simple mistakes and tricky bounces. (OK, maybe not so much in basketball. Mostly we lost because we were terrible.)
“More likely”, I’ll swallow, with maybe half a spoonful of sugar. “Quite likely” is a stretch at the highest levels. Again, keep in mind that the more important part of the World Cup is single-elimination, and even when “luck” or outside forces such as weather, bad calls, etc. come into play, the favored team almost always wins. Now, you could look at a game between two of, say, the four best teams in the world, and you might say that a couple of bad bounces broke the camel’s back, but I think in those cases you can still say that the winning team earned it. Again, I present the case of Italy v. Australia in the 2006 World Cup. It was the first single-elimination round, and Italy were awarded what was clearly a fraudulent penalty kick, and converted it to win the game 1-0 IIRC. Australians were pissed, as were many other fans, but I don’t think anyone will argue that Italy wasn’t far and away the better team of the two. As for the 1-1 tie between Italy and the US earlier in the tournament, Italy withstood a very long spell of shorthandedness and a series of bad bounces against a US team that was arguably playing its best soccer in a while, and still didn’t lose. IIRC, Italy fielded nine players for the majority of that game (or at least the majority of the second half), and seemed at times like they were trying to boost the morale of a country known for its work ethic. They practically wrote a Hollywood script for the American team, and still weren’t beat.
If, and that’s a big if, the USA really took football, OK soccer, to heart and put their all into it I firmly believe that in 20 years or less they would be the new Brazil.
Given the American will to win, the facilities available to all its athletes, the general desire to be top dogs I don’t in all honesty think they could fail.
).
How are these analogous? One is a punishment for a rules infraction, the other isn’t.
, the ecstasy of promotion 
, the winning of the FA Cup/Premiership/Champions League to name just a few. 
