Video Games Are Changing the Way Soccer Is Played
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Mostly it's about tricks that are much more prominent in the video game than they ever can be in real life, because the gameplay is not entirely realistic. The gameplay on screen rewards visual stunts that are much less effective in real play. The movement of ball and players doesn't actually have to be like it is in reality, because it is a video game. It's adjusted for visual appeal.
Where this is most often seen is passing the ball up in the air; this enables the video game to show amazing slow-motion captures of skill, but on a real football field such gameplay is not effective; in fact it is stupid.
In video gameplay, the characters make the ball traverse in a slo-mo arch, all the other moving objects maybe slow down, and the player receiving this pass then picks it up with amazing skill.
In real gameplay, it is better to keep the ball on the ground and pass quickly. A ball flying in an arch in the air travels more slowly, so the opponent has time to come close end press the ball; a flying ball is more difficult to control so it is slower to receive and pass on; making an accurate pass with a ball up in the air is much more difficult than controlling a ball rolling on the ground.
Thus, playing like FIFA just means you lose the ball to the opponents and you lose the game.
Also, things like a bicycle kick tend to succeed in a video game, but in real life they are exceedingly difficult to score with.
I play FIFA (and soccer IRL) quite a bit and the highest level players (yes, there are professional FIFA players) actually play the game much closer to what you're referring to as the optimal style of play: short ground passes, keeping possession, playing backwards to keep possession, very little trying to beat your man one-on-one, creating chances by making runs, defending by jockeying your man without gambling, and good shots from good positions. At a high level, it's well understood by players that most scoring opportunities are created by causing the opposing team to lose their defensive shape through probing passes and runs, and then capitalizing on that space. Of course FIFA is not a simulation and can't be fully realistic - you're generally fitting a 90 minute soccer match into about 12 minutes of real life gameplay.
What you're describing sounds like typical youth behavior, but you're blaming it on video games. Before video games, kids would try to do things they saw their pro idols do on television as well. It didn't ruin the game.
I remember learning the Cruyff turn before I could cleanly dribble down an open field. It was fancy and an obvious display of skill, so everyone wanted to do it - even though it's a useless technique if your control and acceleration aren't perfect.
If anything can be chalked up to video games, I would expect it to be aerial passing and a reluctance to play back. The rest - fancy moves and beating defenders - has been an ego issue since long before FIFA.
Sirlin's (fighting game player / game designer) has a good book/series of articles about this that's made the front page a few times: http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub
"I once played a scrub who was actually quite good. That is, he knew the rules of the game well, he knew the character matchups well, and he knew what to do in most situations. But his web of mental rules kept him from truly playing to win. He cried cheap as I beat him with “no skill moves” while he performed many difficult dragon punches. He cried cheap when I threw him five times in a row asking, “Is that all you know how to do? Throw?” I gave him the best advice he could ever hear. I told him, “Play to win, not to do ‘difficult moves.’”"
I had a friend who was a boxing coach in the sixties and seventies and he told me about all the young lads that tried to box like Muhammad Ali, but with painful consequences.
I agree with this. Beeing from Argentina back when we played in the neighborhood there was always a kid pretending to be Maradona who wanted to solo score from mid-field or make a luxury goal :p
I played the NHL series of games at a high level for a while and saw a lot of what you describe there, too. Tons of people just trying to run it up the ice and hammer away at the goal, but if you played it akin to how an actual hockey game is played you'd see a lot of opportunities open up.
Genuine flair is the ability to do the unexpected. At best, these games open our eyes to these possibilities. At worst, they teach style over substance, and our game is poorer as a result.
Here's a story: Growing up in India, we'd play football on this muddy ground next to an open sewer. There's only one field and maybe six or seven teams so we'd play golden goal or ten minutes. You had ten minutes to score to stay, but if your opponent scored you have to join the back of the queue. If you boot the ball too hard, it falls in the sewer and it's on you to go retrieve it among the shit and piss and everyone has to remember not to head it until it's washed off. It's also about 37 to 40 degrees outside and there's no shade, so losing is no fun since you may have to wait half an hour for your next game.
Amusingly, this ends up defaulting to the possession game with short passes. Unfortunately, I wasn't very good at the game, and so I played RB and had to retrieve the ball from the sewer many times before I learned to be a little better with my ground passes. I never did get very good, but at least I stopped having to go get the ball.
Maybe a few tropical diseases will fix your kids right up.
This is something you don't get nearly as much of playing video games or going to the mall. So many of our experiences are curated, artificial, and fall far short of the real-world level of complexity.
Depends on the group. Where I grew up, style was the name of the game. It wasn't good enough to do a layup. You had to do a trick layup with a needless underhand, etc.
The problem is that there was always one or two players that were naturally gifted and played all day so they could do any trick they wanted. Then, everyone tries to do it to show they have chops, too.
This reminds me of the kids trying to hit homeruns on an 0 - 2 count in baseball. They'll learn.
Its kids learning the game, and kids being kids rather than simply being chess pieces for a 40 year old dad.
Doing it over and over in a game, even when your coach and teammates tell you not to, is stupidity...
I was writing in the context of 17-19 year old kids who have trained football for a dozen years and perhaps played advanced computer games for almost as long. It falls into category of the Einstein's quote about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
...and they almost made it past the Wildcard Playoff game.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/split.cgi?t=b&lg=M...
Even the Orioles had a low OPS in 0 - 2 counts.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/split.cgi?t=b&team=B...
basically, your approach should change in an 0 - 2 count:
http://www.ahittersedge.com/AboutUs/ArticlesBlog/tabid/4804/...
Ronaldinho would like to have a word with you.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IBERQ9abkk
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0ksVaLlaIw
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6mk0auHpis
* Edit: For the donwvoters: I used to play college-level football in the US and Brazil, and these kinds of plays are commonplace in Brazil. Kids learn to dribble before they even learn how to run. This is part of Brazilian culture: a player who can dribble is much more valued than one who can shoot or pass accurately.
But I do understand your feelings, since US football (or soccer as they call it) is more about about physical conditioning than skill.
This is true, but for athlete who takes the sport seriously, most of those mistakes are made during practice and not on match day.
I once had an interesting experience when referring to a bit of anthropology in a comment. I brought up the well known idea that the requirement for cooperation in traditional Japanese rice agriculture -- namely for the maintenance of irrigation -- had a strong influence on the egalitarian peasant side of Japanese culture. To this, an avid 4X game player replied in outrage, "AGRICULTURE!?" He then elaborated that he had been conditioned to think of it as the starting point on the tech tree, therefore base, basic, and completely insignificant. This is completely at odds with reality, however. There is a lot of skill and knowledge involved with agriculture, especially so when done with stone age technology.
Does this make games worse than other forms of media? No. You can find examples of screwed up ideas people pick up about things in all forms of media, going right back to ballads about princesses and war heroes in pre-literate cultures. However, I would say that the potential for both good and harm is especially strong with video, cinema, and games, because they can work on such a visceral level. (Also, is our culture as savvy with such effects from games, as it is about such effects from songs, novels, movies, and TV commercials? I think it's currently catching up.)
EDIT: Please don't automatically assume that I agree with the loudest voices when it comes to the analysis of media. I don't! Reality is complex and nuanced.
Also, if you have kids who can accurately do bicycle kicks, then you have a really good team.
I found in the past when playing that players who are convinced of their own greatness could ruin the game; maybe still get a win, but that was never really what I cared for.
Winning is the only thing lol.
In any case, if you have good players on your team, it's better to build on that foundation.
Everything else is just theory. One of those is o jogo bonito. Paid coaches are usually not so great a fan as a child among friends left themselves. In the end, objectively good players are in part objectively good because they've learned to receive aerial balls aerially and that enables them to play more quickly.
It's a case where kids are making themselves better despite the intentions of the adults taking charge. They're not just playing FIFA, their researching the moves on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH42LEhcV3Y (beware, the sound track is irritating)
Great football players often could make some reasonable freestyling that impresses laymen, but they don't get even close to a dedicated spacialist. And the dedicated specialist will loose the ball in an actual game quickly, because in freestyling, you don't learn to shield from a tackle and you're probably not good at all in running 90 minutes.
Moreover, football is a game where you have 22 players on the pitch, and at most one player has total control of the ball at any one time. Most of the game play is moving without a ball - but still it's very important; particularly, defending is all about where you are and how you move, but also in attacking play, the ball-less players make the opportunities.
In every case, the regular sport requires some of the technique and control of the performance sport, but comes with a rigid demand for efficiency.
a) spacing b) timing runs c) speed dribble
Perhaps the speed dribble is done by that time - whatever can be done - and the emphasis is on spacing when defending: "Get closer!" (or whatever the coach shouts in English, ours goes NÄRMARE!)
Well that's the problem. Quit leaving half the team on the bench and only practicing in 10 second bursts.
You're coming from a place where winning seems to be the goal. For a kids' team shouldn't having fun come first?
But as the kids get older, if winning and losing isn't on the table at all... what's the point? Why can't we use our hands? It's not like it affects the nonexistant outcome. Why are we chasing the balls instead of just running around on the playground? It's not like it affects the nonexistant out come. Why are we... non-existant outcome... etc. The whole activity has no foundation whatsoever if there's no victory state, and kids do eventually notice.
Yeah, some people get way too excited about it. This is not the dominant problem that I see; I see more people entirely destroying all reason to play the game at all by trying to remove the pain of loss, at the cost of the thrill of victory, any reason to work on improving oneself, and any reason to even be playing at all.
I even remember once in my 20s in a local basketball league, we only had four players show up one night, including one fat guy who didn't run and couldn't shoot. We defeated our opponents who had a full bench and a couple of subs, who on a normal night were only slightly below our team's ability at normal strength. Rather than feeling elated that we defeated a full team when we were almost at half-strength, we felt bad for our fellow team, that they had such a bad night that they were defeated in such a way.
Winning is fun and a rush, absolutely, but I've had plenty of boring wins and plenty of awesome losses - there's more interest in a good challenge than a win, per se. If you distill the success of the game (in a local league, at least), just down to win/loss, you're doing it wrong, IMO.
Not everything has to be competitive. I mean, duh, right? But taking an activity that was designed to be competitive and then trying to strip out the competitive part isn't a good idea. Far better to start over again and design something not competitive from the get-go.
It's like you have never even played California Games.
Looking clumsy or looking skillful is a consequence in and of itself.
For young kids, the focus should be on fun (otherwise they won't play) and skills development (fundamentals). Of course you try to win the game, but the idea is that you don't try to win at all cost, especially at the expense of those other two things.
The strategy you would employ with a team of kids to win as many games as possible is very different from the one you would use to develop them the most as good future players.
Teaching ball control and possession are probably better suited for more organized, competitive leagues for older children.
When it's boys nearing adulthood supposedly playing more seriously, a few of them dreaming about pro careers, it looks silly and is frustrating to observe.
One essential thing to learn when you study football is that you have to respect and listen to your coach and also the teammates: don't lose the ball stupidly.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-numbers-game-chris-ander...
to start. I also have a small number of articles I found interesting on my G+ soccer page
Now, this may not be true for everyone but I really looked at FIFA as an entirely separate thing from my real life playing of the game.
Perhaps it is more fans/casual players of the game that are being influenced by FIFA more so than more serious and experienced players. In Iwobi's case it may help them get a sense of who the player is but it's nothing compared to the scouting reports they go over with their managers in the days leading up to the game.
The biggest area has to do with the use of space; when to expect other players to make runs, when to receive the ball and pivot and switch the sides. I of course would have those instincts from playing for real, but having gotten to do them in-game (with a nice top-down view) has helped me think about my play in real life.
One thing to try if you haven't - play a Fifa player career locked to a specific player. A lot of feels like real life - off the ball movement, finding space, when to call for a pass, etc. Obviously not 100% true to life but felt closer to real life than typical Fifa.
>The biggest area has to do with the use of space; when to expect other players to make runs, when to receive the ball and pivot and switch the sides. I of course would have those instincts from playing for real, but having gotten to do them in-game (with a nice top-down view) has helped me think about my play in real life.
I get how this could be, but I learned so much more from my coaches, from what moves to learn, to when to make a run, when to make certain decisions. Anything I might have picked up from FIFA was subconscious.
It's always the same. When you're a kid, you want to do the flashy stuff like a guitar solo, you'll learn the basics later once you figure out how important they are.
Nothing to see here, move along.
A lot of his highlights are... ridiculous. Normal humans cannot embarass NBA level athletes like that.
Just like Fifa glorifies insane athletic moves.
In particular, they quoted one actual NFL player who was running to score the winning touchdown with seconds left to go - but the score would not be so large that the opposing team couldn't steal the victory on the last possession. He ran to the 1 yard line and juked laterally across the field to run out the clock, basing the technique on similar theatrics in the Madden game.
But I'm not sure if it's exactly the one I read years ago. It doesn't talk as much about strategy as I remember, and no mention of juking, so it's probably not yours. There's likely at least one more out there.
I'm curious if videogame playing athletes do better than their non-gamer colleagues.
He had some good hits and is actually asked by scouts. He also had some pretty big misses ("this Luis Suarez guy, he's not THAT good")
In Spanish:
http://www.aguantenche.com.uy/2014/08/el-trabajo-mas-lindo-d...
When it comes down to sharing their own sports data there’s undoubtedly a big gap between the live experience on the field and the conversation about it online. Apparently, there’s no need to highlight themselves to their friends with their match results, to post video’s of amazing actions or make a comparison with other players. In other words, talking about your own sport is too boring.
So, the sport definitely is changing because of esports and games. And it's great!
How?
As a long-time gear head I know that quite a few professional race drivers express appreciation for some of the simulators on the market currently. If anything for track memory assistance, because, well the 'Ring is almost 13 miles.
Their considerable amount of revenue comes from kids who loves to shoot, dribble, and do some skills without thinking about physical reality side of it.
Actually it comes from kids who love to open packs of cards.
I have no idea why professional footballers can stomach FIFA/PES and aren't infuriated by it.
But you're right, I haven't spent more than an hour with any of the games since '99 (most recently FIFA '16 came with my PS4) so I'm definitely not very skilled at all!
I stopped playing video games in the early 2000s, games post PES 2003 had no more appeal to me, it was a bad blend to new tech and less fun. I missed the arcade sim of first PlayStation PES (and yes, official names didn't matter).