Not sure if I agree with this. If there are three goals scored in a soccer game, then that’s a lot of goals. If only three touchdowns are scored in an American football game, it’s a low-scoring game.
Again, I’m not suggesting that the rule should be changed, I’m just giving what I think is the reason a lot of other people don’t like or don’t understand offside in soccer. Your statement that it’s harder to tell when the ball passed the last defender as opposed to when it was passed is ridiculous though. Under the current rule, which again I like, the assistant referee has to be able to see the origination of the pass (which could be 10 or more yards away), see the potentially offside attackers, see the second to last defender (the last being the goalkeeper), and determine if the potentially offside attackers are involved in the play, all at the same time. That can be an impossible thing to do at times. If the second to last defender represented a moving blue line, the assistant referee would simply have to remain roughly even with him to determine if the ball crossed the “blue line” before the attacker or not. There would still be bad calls, they happen in hockey all the time, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to watch a single plane than it is to watch 3 or 4 different areas of the field that may or may not be close to each other. In case it’s not abundantly clear, I’m not advocating such a change. I like the current rule for the reasons I gave previously and isildurr explained better(although he apparently didn’t bother to read my post when he decided to edit his post to give his examples).
Pickup football, which I played every week as a kid, requires at least 5 guys per team to be any fun and requires a much larger space than is often used for “small pitch” soccer (I don’t recall the official name). Almost every game ends because someone gets hurt.
Assuming there is a hoop available, pickup basketball is pretty comparable to pickup soccer, which is why it is far more popular than soccer, or any other sport for that matter, in US inner cities.
Pickup baseball requires at least 7 per team to be any fun (you can do without a catcher and use only 2 outfielders), but again it requires a lot of space and everyone in the field needs a glove. Poor kids used to play stickball, but no one seems to play that anymore, not sure why.
Pickup rugby and cricket are not played in the US, so I won’t comment on them except to say that they both require a lot of space.
None of those require “a lot” of space, a small public park, which are everywhere, is more than enough for every one of them. For cricket, kids play in whatever space they can get. If your thesis was correct, kids all over the world would be playing pickup basketball, but they’re not. It has nothing to do with the “cost” of playing the game.
Pickup football requires a close to level space at least 30 yards wide and 60 yard long to be fun. I don’t know where you live, but not many parks have that. The only places that do are schools and you generally are not allowed to use their fields or empty spaces without permission (most are used by youth soccer leagues on the weekends).
Have you ever tried playing baseball without a dirt or well maintained grass infield? It can be done, but the game is not even close to fun and can actually be quite dangerous because the infielders have to play dangerously close to home to have any chance at fielding a ground ball intime to throw the runner out.
A basketball court has to be hard, level and free of even tiny debris (try dribbling a basketball on an imperfect surface and let me know how effective you are driving to the basket). And oh yeah, it has to have a basket with a backboard.
I used to play pickup soccer in grammar school and high school We played on a somewhat level grassy area in a local park. It was about 15 yard wide and 25 yards long. We played 3 on 3 with no goalkeepers. The goals were small logs we found in the nearby woods. If you hit them it was a goal.
Look, you like soccer and are passionate about it. I get that and appreciate it. It seems to me, however, that it’s not enough for you and a few other here to simply love your sport. Instead, you find it necessary to belittle other sports and those who enjoy them. Soccer is a great sport, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. That doesn’t mean they’re idiots who lack the ability to appreciate the sport. I love cycling and watch the TDF and Tour of California religiously every year. 99% of people in the world don’t care about cycling and have no understanding of the nuances of the sport that make it facinating to watch, they just see a bunch of drug users in shorts riding bikes and that is boring to them. That doesn’t make those people uncouth morons, it just makes them people with different tastes.
You could say a lot of the same things about soccer, it’s really fun, when you have a big open pitch with well maintained grass, but that doesn’t stop people from playing on concrete courts. Cricket is ideally played on a huge field with white clothes and pads, but that doesn’t stop kids from playing on tennis court sized pitches with makeshift bats.
Anyways, where I live, and wherever I’ve seen, there is no shortage of public space to find a 30 by 60 field. We used to play in parking lots…
^ Go play a game of American football in a concrete parking lot. After you get out of the hospital, tell me how much fun it was.
Presumably playing on a parking lot would be touch football, but I’m happy to spell it out for you since you have trouble understanding.
Touch football is not football, they are entirely different games that require much different skill sets.
Futsal is not real soccer, they are entirely different games that require much different skill sets.
Such as?
Passing range, positioning play, pace, and endurance for starters.
Simmer down, I edited it and gave the example before i saw your post.
Look each to their own, we get it. It’s a free world, follow what you want. The irritating thing is when people start to discuss how to ‘improve’ the game without understanding the game in the first place. There are posts where people mentioned taking these measures to pull more people into the game ignoring the fact that the game is dominating pretty much every other sport worldwide and doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.
People want to dilute and dumb down the game to pull more viewers ignoring the consequences, MK put it eloquently when he said you’re ignoring the soul of the game. It is quite understanding that you would scoff at such sentiments given American Sports, while they may be decent sports are glossy, packaged and manufactured. They are nothing but a ‘product’ and part of the great American corporate behemoth. Dodgers left Brooklyn after 70 odd years when the going got a little tough to represent another city. Football has a lot of those ills but like people have been trying to say there is still something very very real about it.
Anyway the remaining of your posts are all very logical but they’re ignoring passion. This isn’t really addressed to you but just some random thoughts. Perhaps Crazyman will be able to explain better but Brazil’s footballing infrastructure is probably well behind the German’s and Spaniard’s and other Europeans. Yet, they can compete and dominate them. I don’t know why. One theory is that since they’ve had so many superstars young Brazilians growing up in favelas look at these players and emulate them on the streets. They learn playing with rocks, without shoes and learn to keep their balance because if they fall they aren’t falling on grass like their counterparts elsewhere, they’re falling on tar and getting blood on their hands and knees.A similar corollary is India in cricket, Poor yet it can compete with wealthier countries with better infrastructure and more meritorious selection procedures. It is also proably why some smaller, not very wealthy countries produce some great players. It is embedded in their culture. Once that happens, Passion can overtake other factors like infrastructure.
You don’t need to change soccer to make it more popular in the US. Soccer already is popular here, many Americans either play or watch the game, and it is steadily growing and growing. Perhaps some of the posters here need to get out more.
+100000 to your whole post.
Understand the game first, then make suggestions. To the OP, shot clock and backboard??? That will never happen.
I have no problem with American sports and I’m not belittling them either. I like watching hockey. It’s just that soccer is easy to follow and I can appreciate the skill involved, whether it be technical, physical or mental. I want to help others understand the sport rather than it’s just “Europeans running or walking around”.
Off the field, no other sport has such a global impact. It can stop wars (Drogba). It gives opportunity to youngsters living in developing countries. I read an article (maybe it was here?) that Man U signed a 15 y/o Indian kid living in the slums whose mom is a prostitute.
But soccer is not perfect. I wish the diving and play-acting would stop. It’s up to FIFA and a country’s football association to hand out fines and suspensions. I would also like a more even playing field but we all know that is not going to happen. Fans would prefer to watch Arsenal than a smaller team such as Coventry.
So then the worldwide popularity of soccer, at least from the perspective of people actually playing it, is grossly overstated. Perhaps futsal is actually the world’s most popular sport then?
The easiest way to become number 2 is become comfortable being number 1.
Coincidentally, there’s a Yahoo article on this today.
About half the world’s population, loves soccer. That’s 3.5 billion people. But in the U.S., the sport barely cracks the top five most popular. So we wondered, what if soccer, became America’s favorite past time?
No hands, no timeouts, nowhere near the popularity of other sports in America. Soccer is that ‘other’ football that just can’t make it past the youth leagues with American sports fans, often criticized for being a bit dull.
I think a lot of people just aren’t’ familiar with the game,” said Jozy Altidore, striker for the U.S. National Soccer Team. “They don’t know the basics of how it works. I think when it gets to that point I think it’s going to be great because soccer is a great game to watch live.”
What’s not hard to understand is what would happen to ticket prices if soccer got as big as baseball. Right now, premium seats for a New York Red Bulls soccer match go for 200 dollars. With more fans lining up, tickets could reach the price of a New York Yankees game – a spot behind home plate goes for sixteen-hundred dollars.
And at those prices, fans would expect to watch a better product on the field.
You need stars. You need to have the guy that people will go to see,” said Bob Ley, from ESPN. “You need to have that theatrical attraction.”
But theatre on the field wouldn’t come cheap. Soccer stars would laugh at their current salaries, averaging $160,000 a year, and push for something in the ballpark of their baseball brethren’s paychecks, of more than $3 million dollars.
That’s if soccer became as popular as baseball. Which, could happen if by some miracle they were to win it all and bring home a World Cup.
If they won the World Cup, I think the nation would be gripped by that,” said Paul Crowder, director of the documentary, Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos.I mean when World Cup fever grips a nation, it completely takes over and the whole country just joins in. A victory in the world cup is like no other.”
Then again, World Cup in hand, the American sports landscape would change dramatically. Maybe the kids will swap their Derek Jeter jersey’s for Clint Dempsey’s.
I think there is ultimately room for soccer to be a major sport. But some of the other sports will have to give a little bit,” said Andrew Zimbalist, co-author of, National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and the Rest of the World Plays Soccer. I think the NFL is coming under a lot of very serious scrutiny right now around concussions and other injury issues in regard to the sport. Another sport that might suffer in the United States anyway, is hockey.
“I think we should never drive to say we want to be as big as baseball or football or basketball,” said Jurgen Klinsmann, head coach of the U.S. National Soccer Team. “I think we just need to drive to have our own spot in this whole huge country with more than 300 million people.”
I know you guys are trying to “beat” each other’s points but, if you’re ranking by how many people practice it, what every kid call soccer isn’t soccer nor futsal - it’s what isildurr described: you pick whatever you can think of as a ball (sometimes a rock), whatever you can think of as a goal (often 2 rocks) and tries to emulate soccer.
I’ve played soccer all my life and yet I can count how many times I’ve played it in a proper american style field with green grass all over the place. So if we use a narrow definition of soccer, US is by far the country with the most kids playing it, and has been for a couple decades. In reality though, basketball is the closest thing. Kids play 2-on-2 or whatever, get good like Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson in that movie, and then they may pick up the extra skills when they make it into the leagues.
I think this thread ended up much better than I’d thought. Some things that crossed my mind:
On penalty kicks: Penalty kicks are really fun to watch because of the tension – one team WILL get eliminated there. But they suck when it’s your team playing because they feel a lot like coin tosses. They are not – they have a lot of psychology involved and some goalies are much better at playing this sub-game than regular soccer. What sucks is that it seems like you’re deciding a Street Fighter tournament with the top two finishers playing Mortal Kombat.
However, I’m not sure how to improve on this. Penalty kicks are a lot of fun when deciding a match, but they would feel somewhat boring before extra time. Golden goals were not that bad, I guess, but they don’t change that much anyway.
Video replays: Those could be good. The only thing I don’t like about it is the time wasted, so maybe they could be used only for tough decisions on penalties and offsides that became goals.
Ohai has a good point in which there is no infrastructure for this in many leagues, but that’s because FIFA is really stubborn. Have videos for Wold Cups and Champions Leagues - don’t have them where they’ll be too expensive.
Diving: should be punished harder, but I personally hate red cards - they change the balance too much and this makes some referees cheat by default. It is all too common to see a player get punched in the face and be expelled along with the guy who punched him. This is a bit crazy for conservative soccer fans, but maybe a clear dive should force a substitutions instead of a yellow or red card and then those players could be punished by being out of a couple games as well - that would teach them without disrupting games all that much during the transition.
I think soccer can be improved, just like any other sport. But, if you’re not a fan, what would improve the game to you will often be different than what would improve the game for people who see the specifics of the game (such as low scoring) as virtues.
I know it’s easy to hate on a different sport. I feel an irrational urge to hate on american football or cricket because they seem boring to me. Yet, if I grew up in India or US I’d probably love one of those games. All of them clearly have the potential to entertain or they wouldn’t have the followings they do.