The point of the article is that the goalies are too big and therefore you have to crowd the net to even get a chance of scoring. Banning the crowding does not solve the root cause. The result (if the article is correct) would be a game with much fewer goals, probably boring.
Maybe boring, but maybe not. Football does really well at attracting attention globally, and they only have a handful of goals in a match at most. Sometimes even zero.
(Germany scoring seven goals against Brazil in the World Cup a while ago was big news.)
Those type of events are outliers and not worth using
> Football does really well at attracting attention globally
That's only because everyone else is watching it. I got tired of following football around 14, its inherently repetitive and boring (unless you play it yourself) not to mention the extent of match fixing.
> Those type of events are outliers and not worth using.
Yes, that was exactly my point. A score of 7 is considered an extreme outlier. That tells you that normal scores are much lower.
> That's only because everyone else is watching it. I got tired of following football around 14, its inherently repetitive and boring (unless you play it yourself) not to mention the extent of match fixing.
I don't watch any sports myself, but I don't think the people who do so are all deluded.
Yes, there's a social aspect to it, but that's not the only thing.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_up_the_score
> Running up the score occurs when a competitor continues to play in such a way as to score additional points after the outcome of the game is no longer in significant question and the team is all but assured of winning. In the United States and Canada, it is considered poor sportsmanship to run up the score in most circumstances
> The term and the concept are not common elsewhere in the world.
> In professional soccer, the concept of "running up the score" is mostly unheard of;
Pulling your punches in the football world cup would indeed have been seen as the ultimate insult.
If you compare with baseball, I don't know that I've ever heard of a strong aversion to running up the score. Maybe you're not exactly sending out your substitute batter in the top of the ninth when you're up 10, but I've never seen a team give up and not put in a reasonable effort.
Wildly disparate scores seem pretty common in basketball as well. Even in college (American) football, scores of like 70-0 are not that uncommon. You only really quit trying in football when you can run out the clock, or you pull your starting players to prevent injuries.
I think a clear case of this though is when a team has the ball with the lead and less than 2 minutes to go, and the other team has no timeouts, it's customary to just take a knee ("victory formation") rather than going on a drive and trying to score again.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_cricket#Play, https://cricketershub.com/how-to-win-cricket-match/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_(cricket)#Winning_scor...
However, it may not have been the best strategy. It was a semifinal, the final was next. If you are dominating, it makes sense to calm down a bit to avoid wearing out your players and limit the risk of injury. Germany still won the cup, so we can't really criticize.
Even in international hockey: Canada, USA, Russia will thump teams 20-0 sometimes. There is no way any member of any team, coaching staff or otherwise, to ease off.
You need to design a sport so scoring is expected every game even if it’s rare within each game. A slightly larger net say 1 foot wider and 6 inches taller with an expanded goalie only area say extra 2 foot radius is a reasonable option. Tweak thing so the most common score it’s say 1-2 or 2-3 and you’re fine.
There's a simple change that I'd like to see tried in soccer that might up the action a bit in the second half enough to get more people in the US interested, without changing it so much that the rest of the world would lose interest.
Simply move the penalty shootout tie-break from after the second period to the break between periods. The penalty shootout would still only count if the game is tied at the end of the second period, but now the teams would go into the second period knowing who wins if it comes to tie-breaks.
In the second period there will always be one team in a "must score" situation, which should cause that team to play more aggressively. That might boost the action enough to get people in the US to watch.
This doesn't apply to soccer at all though. Even a 2-0 lead is often list in a few minutes. What makes soccer exciting isn't the scoring, but that you are always just second away from a goal that could change the game. That's why you'll hardly ever see in soccer that the audience leaves the stadium before the end of the game like you are in baseball all the time.
A lot of this is about audience perception, and considerations of what makes a good spectator sport in different cultures.
More than perhaps anywhere else, sport in North America often tends to be about the spectators. Think NASCAR where you can generally see the whole track and there is a lot of overtaking, and a lot of crashes, or basketball which is a high speed, high scoring game played on a smallish court that, again, maximises action. There's a noticeable emphasis on creating the most exciting and intense spectacle for the audience. I think the same is true of contemporary ice hockey, which is like a ludicrously amped up version of regular hockey: the high scores are all part of that.
I'm not an avid follower of any of these sports but, as a casual viewer, I find I'm much happier to sit down and watch them than some of the original sports on which they're based because they're very accessible and high on action and entertainment value.
The one sport where this really comes unstuck for me is American football: the stop/start structure built into the game just drives me up the wall, and I find myself significantly preferring the (by comparison) rarely interrupted action and flow of rugby. That's not a critique of American Football at all - it's obviously a deeply tactical and nuanced sport: this is just my personal preference for a longer arc of play, on average. And, by the way, I'm talking specifically about rugby union: I've never followed rugby league.
Honestly, and I say that as someone who loves basket ball and often stays up during the night to see the NBA playoffs, basketball is often far from the level of tension and excitement you can get in (European) football. In football, most of the time a single goal is a game changer even when you have some margin (let say 2-0 and the opponent team is now 2-1,they have regained the momentum now and the match is totally different). In terms of adrenaline, the entire football game is like the fourth quarter of the seventh game and every single goal feels like a buzzer beater!
The scarcity of goals is invaluable.
Tennis is at the extreme end of high scoring and even watching matches you don’t care about between average players can be entertaining though not memorable. Longer term it’s only the truly exceptional games of any sport you’re going to remember anyway.
I think that’s cultural/an acquired taste.
One could argue the outcome of high-scoring games is more predictable, making them less tense.
If, say, on average party A scores a point every minute and party B scores one every 40 seconds, party B will win almost every one hour game against party A (the expected outcome is 90-60), and each individual score is only marginally important. So, why would a spectator be enthousiast about a (missed) score after 20 seconds of play?
If, on other hand, party A scores a goal every 30 minutes and party B one every 20 minutes, party A has a much higher chance of beating party B in a one hour game, and each missed opportunity becomes a potential game changer.
In soccer, some of the most tense games end in 0-0, 1-0, or 0-1 (especially at major tournaments, where, often [1], each result counts)
[1] for one where that wasn’t the case, watch West-Germany against Austria (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgrace_of_Gijón).
The problem with basketball is last two minutes. What should be the most exciting part of the game becomes a drag with timeouts and intentional fouling.
The fouling is usually by the team trying to mount a last-moment come-back (stop the leading teams momentum, hope they miss the free-throws, and then get possession and shot to close the gap). Making penalties more costly would prevent this and likely just allow the leading team t to win. Though maybe they generally do anyways, so no real loss? I'd have to look at past game stats.
TOs - We could probably do without them in the last moments. That would shift focus from the coach to the team captain to coordinate play. Less set plays, more fluid teamwork. Possibly a net gain for the viewer with no real impact on the teams?
Also, 0-0 ties and 1-0 wins don't really provide much information. These sports are typically played in the contexts of seasons, where teams are trying to win a championship. Very low scores don't really meaningfully establish which teams are better than others. 0-0 and 1-1 ties are obviously not really disclosing much, but winning 1-0 is really too low-granularity to mean all that much also.
Basketball is a bit ridiculous in the other direction, of course, but I assume that scores in the high single digits to low double digits should be the target, if we are to actually use them to figure out how to rank teams.
Hurling (teams typically score 10-30 points in a game) and baseball (5-20) seem like they're in the right range. Soccer / football (0-10, but often on the bottom end of that) seems way too low.
US NCAA basketball is, IMO, one of the most exciting sports for viewing. Scores in the 70 point range[2] (per side, 30-35 baskets at 2 or 3 per) in about 2 hours (40 min clock ends up close to 120 min actual game length).
1 - FIFA World Cup matches haven't averaged more than 3 goals per match since 1958. https://www.statista.com/statistics/269031/goals-scored-per-...
2 - https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2013/01/14/colle...
The goalkeeper in soccer (as the article points out) has a much larger space to guard, and this provides opportunity showcasing ability. Both for the shooter and the keeper, as well as other defenders who can make impressive saves without the use of hands.
Fans like showcases of ability. There are boring soccer games, just as there are boring hockey games and boring basketball games. But to me, a well-played soccer game is exciting almost all of the time. A goal can be scored from essentially anywhere on the pitch (much like basketball) and there are an enormous number of possible strategies to make this happen.
This article seems to indicate that there is only one viable strategy just at the minute, and that's detrimental to the game. I don't really care much about hockey, and I'm not well educated on it, but I bought the argument.
E.g. when one of your strikers is about to make a shot on goal, opposing strikers will likely move in anticipation that the goaltender might recover the ball and set up their own attack. Your defenders will need to move in response to this; if they mistake the play being set up, this can be a significant disadvantage. However, unless you recognize the play being set up, you don't see any of this and it just looks like a failed goal attempt.
Disclaimer: I don't actually know much about soccer/football, and am paraphrasing an explanation from memory.
That's entirely possible. I played very little soccer (or any team ball sports) as a youth. By high school I had moved on to rowing and mountain biking.
This is such an interesting perspective to me, because I get nothing out of basketball (although watching it in person with people is okay). It's just so repetitive, the same things happen over and over the whole time. Scoring is so constant that none of the goals seem particularly special or spectacular.
I feel like both American football and Australian football hit a kind of sweet spot, where there are a lot of different kinds of athleticism on display, different sorts of positions in which different things can happen, and scoring isn't rare enough to make ordinary gameplay boring (soccer) but it's still infrequent enough that each one feels like something it makes sense to stand up and cheer for. With American football in particular, you can really say that two games are very rarely alike, whereas both soccer and basketball have a kind of "seen one, seen them all" vibe to them, with some very rare special games that elevate above that, obviously.
As for American football - I used to be a huge fan of NCAA and NFL games, even though I never played myself. Of the core American professional sports, it's the only I used to watch regularly. My son played into high school. I happily helped coach his youth teams. But, with the discovery of CTE, I've gone right off watching it. Knowing that the players literally concussing themselves stupid took the fun out of it.
I agree - it's just that basketball is basically the same for me. The only difference is that with basketball, they score about 25% of the time (or whatever). But the scores are all kind of the same, with a rare spectacular three pointer. Whereas in American football the teams kind of "feel each other out" and change strategies over time, have different formations, and so on, to the casual observer basketball is just a bunch of guys running towards defenders, hoping to spot a weakness, and either succeeding or failing, over and over. And when they succeed it doesn't matter that much, it's 2 points in a game where the teams will score a combined 200!
I've attended two NCAA basketball games, SEC and Big 10 respectively. In both cases when our (the home) team scored, we didn't stand up and cheer, we clapped. I felt like I was watching golf!
> Knowing that the players literally concussing themselves stupid took the fun out of it.
You're absolutely right about this, I was praising football on the abstract level but actually haven't watched it in years. I've sort of gotten myself into watching the occasional Australian football game for exactly that reason; it has some of the same appeal to me without the physicality that creates so many injuries.
Wrong conferences. ;)
ACC games are bonkers.
This doesn't seem to have caused any problems for soccer.
One major issue is that because goals are so scarce and penalty kicks are so high-percentage, there is an extreme incentive to dive.
https://www.fourfourtwo.com/us/features/major-indoor-soccer-...
> Played on artificial turf in ice hockey arenas with teams of six, 12ft-by-6ft nets, a hi-vis orange ball and rebounds off the hockey boards, this was the Americanisation of football taken to its logical conclusion. Games would produce 10 to 20 goals; one 1980 match saw a record 165 shots on target. The American obsession with stats was also catered for: players were precisely graded with points for goals and assists. It worked. Supporters weaned on the all-action scoring of basketball preferred it to the 'boring' one-nils of the NASL, and flocked to watch.
21 seconds.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nhl/2020/03/23/bill-mo...
https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2017/06/13/six-of-the-fastest-hat...
Surely a game with more goals is therefore more boring, because it has more time with everyone dawdling back to the centre line and the referee holding the ball/puck/whatever.