Over the past few months whenever I've been somewhere with cable or satellite TV, I've watched some professional international soccer - aka Football, as the rest of the world calls it - on the various soccer channels.
Being a soccer player - even at 35, I'll play pick-up soccer during the warmer months , and I've been playing for many years - I like to watch the pros play for a while to see their moves and skills.
But I can tell you, pro soccer can often be a lot more boring than our pick-up games.
In what other sport does scoring happen so infrequently? In soccer, you'll be lucky to sit through 90 minutes of back-and-forth play to see one exciting goal!
In American football, teams score a multitude of times - last week the Denver Broncos beat the Cincinnatti Bengals 24 to 23 - 9 scores in all, counting touchdowns and field goals. In college football, scores can be even more inflated.
In basketball, players obviously are scoring constantly. It's not whether you score, but how many times, and with what finesse or dramatics.
In baseball, you have your low scoring games, but you're also seemingly guaranteed your high scoring games. Final game of the 2006 World Series, St Louis beat Detroit 4 to 2, 6 runs scored. That's a decent game.
In hockey, the Detroit Red Wings just defeated the Columbus Blue Jackets 7 to 4.
But if
you look at these soccer scores from the English Premiership League, it's the lowest-scoring sport there is. Though these scores are actually impressive: there's a 3-1, and a couple 2-2 games. Those are pretty exciting soccer games.
These German scores, also contain some rather impressive scores, a
3 to 3 game between Hamburg and Alemania Aachen in the German League (click the link to see an article on ESPN).
But such games are the exception to the rule - all too often games are 1 to 0, 2 to 0, or 2 to 1.
Are such low-scoring games really doing enough to showcase the skills of these professional players? Another characteristic of pro soccer is a rarity of displaying individual ball-handling skills - that is, trying to fake out and dribble beyond the defenders.
So, again, unlike in American Football, where you often appreciate amazing plays that don't lead to a score but are very impressive on their own, in Soccer, there's so much passing of the ball and tackle-fouling of players that takes up the game time, and not enough showcasing the amazing ball-handling skills these pros possess.
What I'm wondering is - for soccer buffs - if there should be some modification to the
offsides rule in soccer, to make the game more offense-focused and make the game a higher scoring one.
In soccer, an offensive player must not pass the opposing defenders before the ball does - if he does, he's "offsides," and a penalty is called and play stopped. This rule obviously forces the offense to be more restrained to some degree.
The defense already has a major advantage in the game, and this rule only strengthens that advantage. If the rule was somehow relaxed - just to prevent blatant cherry-picking near the opposing goal, but not called on players who are just a foot or two beyond the defense - you might see higher scoring and more exciting soccer. Who knows what would happen if you got rid of the rule entirely? It might be interesting to experiment.
I've seen refs call "offsides" when it was a very close call and seemed really unnecessary, during a strong offensive run, which really disappoints the spectator. It seems like a rule that's ready to be modernized.
FIFA might also want to consider
toughening their stance on tackling, where a player trips another player with his legs, when he's supposed to be going for the ball. Tackling often leads to players faking injury and takes away from the game's momentum.
When I play pick-up soccer, there's no offsides rule. There's lots of scoring, lots of excellent ball handling - you'll see more sweet tricks in one of our games than any pro game - and it's lots of fun. Maybe the stuffy pros could learn from the amateurs. Professional Soccer could make some changes to show us more of its stuff.
Updated: 12/30
