Soccer Madness

Everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football [soccer].

– Albert Camus

Soccer. Futbol (Headball?): A Critique by Tim McGarry

The 2022 World Cup in Qatar was recently completed with Argentina defeating France. Pele, recognized as the world’s greatest player, died on December 22, 2022. It is called “The Most Beautiful Game” (A soccer fanatic coined the phrase in a 1952 newspaper piece extolling the virtues of the game entitled “Brains of the Feet”).

I am not making this up. Soccer is the world’s most popular sport.

Some 250 million play the game. The fan base is estimated at 3.5 billion of what, can only be described, as sports’ most passionate fans. AII of this strikes me as rather curious.

The physics and rules of the game are odd. Timing of a match includes stoppage time and extra time, so right away we are dealing in the metaphysical. A match can last 90 minutes, but in case of a tie at the end of that time, two fifteen-minute tiebreakers are played. If still tied, the match is decided by penalty kicks, which consists of each team alternating five shots on goal. Ten kicks.

If still tied, then additional, sudden death kicks decide the outcome of the match.

Scoring is rare, in large part because each team has one player (the goalie) exclusively devoted to prevent scoring. The goalie is positioned in front of the goal (outfitted with a pair of Mickey Mouse gloves) and is the only player who can touch the ball with his or her hands without incurring a penalty.

Scoring occurs infrequently and this is where the physical dynamics of the sport come into play. Shots on goal are propelled by the feet (the players’ foot to eye coordination is incredible) or the head. The goal mouth is usually inhabited by a swarm of members of both teams crowded together in a scrum which resembles people in an overcrowded train station. Random striking of the ball in this section of the field, often erratic and even accidental, can result in a goal.

You rarely see a beautifully arched shot by a streaking player running down a sideline scoring a goal in a soccer match.

Evidence is increasing that heading the ball can result in chronic traumatic encephalopathy and dementia. Heading is being restricted in youth soccer. “As A Sport Evolves, It Increasingly Decides Against Using Its Head” New York Times, July 23,2022. Just to give you a head’s up, so to speak.

Scoring of a goal is greeted with a manic hysteria often characterized by the scoring player, sprinting away from the goal, dropping to the knees sliding forward onto in what should result in severe tendon, muscle and ligament damage, but rarely seems to. Fans greet scoring a goal with an insane level of music. screaming and physical gyrations. (It should be noted that most soccer fans never sit throughout a World Cup match, constantly cheering while waiting and hoping for someone to score.)

Scoring is so rare that the penalties and penalty kicks are exalted in importance because it is so difficult to score. Showing the video highlights of a soccer match is a brief affair.

Another of the unfathomable features of soccer is the offside rule. The rule states, “A player is offside if, during a move an attacking player, when in the opposition half, must have at least 2 players of the opposing team (including the goalkeeper) between him and the opposition goal when a pass is being played to him”.

The equivalent of adopting the offside rule in basketball would be to eliminate the fast break, or in football to prevent a receiver from running past a defensive back. Memo to FIFA, abolish the offside rule.
In soccer the offensive team spends an inordinate amount of time retreating from the opposing goal. In a recent match one team did not even attempt a shot on goal so that the result of the match would be decided by penalty kicks.

Soccer players are physically fit. On average a player will run l0 kilometers during a match. Their play is often characterized by what in soccer is called ‘tackling,’ where one player attempts to wrest control the ball from the advances of an opposing player. This action resembles the street crime of mugging and can result in a free kick, often simply greeted with the referee saying “play on”.

There is also an amazing scoring phenomena called an “own goal” whereby a player of the defensive team puts the ball in that teams own goal. The most memorable “own goal” was scored by Andres Escobar in the 1994 World Cup involving the team from Columbia. Escobar inadvertently kicked the ball into his teams goal resulting in their defeat. When Escobar returned home, as he exited the plane, he was shot and killed by a disgruntled fan. Now that is fan loyalty.

The metric of sport is scoring. Scoring is how the match/game is won or lost. To increase scoring, I thought about suggesting getting rid of the goalie, but that would offend the purists. The penalty kick decides too many matches almost dwarfing the number decided by goal scoring. What about making the goal mouth bigger? That would inject some scoring into the game and put an end to the dreaded nil-nil match.

The 2022 World Cup final was a high scoring affair ending tied 3-3 after extra time and stoppage time. The match was decided by penalty kicks. It was dramatic and riveting, but still decided not by team play on the field. Something is decidedly wrong with that.

Yes, even the beautiful game could be improved.

“When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening’s Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. […]

“By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn’t watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless ’em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don’t hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.”
― Robert Stacy McCain