Goals from turnovers must have been staggeringly high, given every defender was 100 yards from the goal they’re supposed to be defending?
It’s not about how well I understand the game. Not even soccer fans can agree on why the offside rule exists, what it’s supposed to be preventing/encouraging, and what soccer would look like if the rule didn’t exist. Just read the thread.
Only because on most of the planet there’s no other sport worth watching. If you could go to NFL games or NBA games everywhere else soccer would wither and die, unless they changed the offside rule or something else so that something happens in the game.
And stop saying we don’t understand the game. You obviously don’t understand it’s boring. That’s why the fans have to attack each other and spend the whole game making horrible noises with a plumbing fixture.
Dear Og! Soccer is even more boring than baseball. Hard to believe anything could be.
All the best things in life happen rarely. If it happens every second like Basketball it becomes meaningless.
It’s like a good slow burning thriller v a constant dumb action movie.
Basketball is popular in lot of football countries anyway so people have the choice and always choose football first.
The NFL is supposed to be exciting? How can anything be duller than watching for hours to see 10 minutes of anything at all happening. There’s a good reason why nobody else watches that. If it was a choice between Rugby and that nobody would watch it, never mind football.
Soccer is the McDonald’s of sport because it’s the cheapest sport to play so even third world countries can participate.
LOL! As if they can’t watch NBA games or NFL games in Europe if they wanted to (some of them are broadcast, they just don’t get ratings - and why would they? Basketball, for one, is an incredibly dull sport where you can just watch the last 5 minutes and be fine).
I wouldn’t call it the McDonalds of sport, but there is a lot of truth in that. Three kids, a tennis ball and a couple of jumpers for goalposts and you’ve got yourself a game which with you can practise some of the skills.
Maybe, if you’re so fixated with scoring being the be all and end all of sport, could I recommend Test Match Cricket to you? There are regularly over a thousand runs scored over the course of five days.
Can’t really argue with you on this one. And if we’re talking game time (as opposed to actual time) I’d say more like 2 minutes.
I find the unending scoring in basketball particularly dull.
It’s the only thing I hear when I hear “most popular sport in the world.” So too is McDonald’s the most popular restaurant in the world. In neither case is popularity evidence of excellence.
Though, on the other hand, European countries, who don’t really have to care that much about playing a sport cheaply, are crazy about the game.
And is NFL better? I will admit that I find NFL boring. Because I don’t understand the intracacies of the game. I wanted to like it, and when Channel 4 (UK) first aired it in the early 80’s I tried to understand it. I soon recognized that , unless you had been brought up playing and/or watching the game you would have to invest a great deal of time to really get to grips with it.
I’m not slagging NFL off, it’s just a cultural difference.
I was talking about live sports. I find most sports on TV boring. Sports on TV is something happening while you hang out with people. Basketball isn’t a good one for that because as you say only the last few minutes matter anyway.
In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I find soccer to be extremely boring, and even more so on TV. I will continue to insult the sport. However, if you enjoy, and millions of others enjoy it, then I am happy for you. Still, I don’t understand why soccer doesn’t change some rules to increase the chance of scoring, to add some significant action. Make the net bigger, move the lines, make the field shorter, do something. But if you guys like it the way it is then I understand why you wouldn’t want to change it. The American League tried to add a little action to baseball with the DH and they ruined the entire sport. Even though the NL plays the game right they still have to play World Series games using the DH. That rule is so bad that even if they get rid of the DH the sport will be tainted for all time just from the knowledge that such a travesty once existed. And I have to admit baseball can be a pretty damn boring sport.
This tangent was inspired by the “most popular sport in the world” comments. In terms of that, Europe is irrelevant. There aren’t even a billion people in all of Europe combined, and soccer is the most popular sport by a margin of a billion. So remove ALL of Europe (not just the European soccer fans; assume every single man, woman and child in Europe is a fan and remove them) and soccer is still the most popular sport in the world. In that context, the point that much of the popularity stems from the low overhead very much still stands.
Billions, not millions. Google indicates that soccer has 3.5 billion fans worldwide. (The second most popular – cricket – has 2.5 billion fans.)
The craziest stat has to be the third most popular sport in the entire world, with 2.0 billion fans: Field Hockey. Uh, what?
You are clearly ignorant about the game if you don’t realise that all those suggestions and many more are used every day across the world. They are just incorporated into other (less popular) forms of the game and the protagonists never feel the need to bring them to the full 11 a-side game. It exists as a low-scoring, high skill, high degree of difficulty form of the game.
The vast majority of people with experience of the game has played the game under a variety of rules, pitch sizes, goal sizes, number of players, touch restrictions etc. etc. etc. In a lot of cases far more goals are scored than an average 90 minutes under association rules. Each of those increased goals matters far less to the individual/team/supporters.
In fact during training and casual games you will often see teams introducing arbitrary rules in order to restrict the number of goals scored. (headers and volleys only, “wrong” foot only, only inside the area, two touches only) in order to increase the skill needed to score and maintain the currency value of a “goal”
I’ve said it before but it bears repeating, low scoring is a feature not a bug. It means that, not only every goals counts for more but every near miss, every upright hit, every save by the keeper, every last-gasp tackle by a defender brings with it a level of exicitement that is not necessarily present in other sports for non-scoring incidents and that is due to the relative rarity of goals and the high stakes involved
I usually say to people that I like all the common American sports, hell I like sport in general, except Basketball. Football, Hockey and Baseball (hell, I watch Baseball here in Sweden, Stockholm play around the corner from my house) are enjoyable. But Basketball, it bores the living shit out of me. I’ve never been able to really put my thumb on exactly why, but the main one seems to be it is more of an event when someone doesn’t score, which frankly devalues the concept of scoring. Yet I like cricket (and am listening to TMS’s coverage of the England - Pakistan game right now)
But all is cool. If other people like Basketball I’m not going to judge them. But it does absolutely nothing for me and I really, really don’t want Football/Soccer to do anything that might get it closer to that.
So I guess the real difference between us is that I don’t feel the need to be a dick about “continu[ing] to insult the sport”.
India is crazy about it.
Actually that sums it up well 
And if anyone is interested, a little picture of me enjoying Baseball in suburban Stockholm, Sweden.
