Our futbol expert weighs in after the World Cup. What is wrong with soccer nowadays? I mean, I’ve always loved that sport and watched all World cups since I was 7 (1970), loving them. This year, however, ’m not enjoying many of the games, in particular those in which nobody scores for a long time. Extra time generally follows in those cases, very often followed by penalties that are kind of a casino-like way of deciding which team has to go on. Why is this so? Why teams are so good at guarding their goals but not good enough at scoring? The case of the very boring semifinal between Argentina and Holland is only the last example in this sense (while the other semifinal was more a collective psychodramma than a soccer game). I think the reason for that triumph of 0-0 results is simple, and it would be simple to fix it; however, Im sure this won’t happen for a long time. Today the players are very athletic, the vast majority of teams at a World Cup have very good technical skills and many are also very disciplined from a tactical point of view. In brief, reaching the other team’s goal is too difficult because the players are too good at defending and there are too many of them. A good solution, one that would make soccer games much more interesting, would be to play with only 10 players against 10 players (or even 9 against 9). That this would be good becomes clear even now, when in a game a red card kicks out a players for each team. At that point, the game becomes much faster and unpredictable. In one word, it is much more fun. However, the mystic of the number 11 is too strong in the world of soccer. Nobody will ever accept that there may be less player on a field than 11. Too bad that this magic number produces boredom. We are at an inflection point.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 18:39:46 +0000
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