The Beautiful Game, and why it doesn’t need to be fixed

Ever since the Women’s World Cup defeat of the United States at the hands of Japan in penalties, there has been quite a buzz about the need to “fix” soccer. People on a variety of sports shows and blogs have called for the end of penalty shootouts, in favour of an open-ended overtime with no time limit. In particular, this blog post on One Foot Tsunami has been cited as a good way to go to fix soccer. However, soccer is a game that has no need of a fix, for every one of the points presented in the post would be impractical at best, and downright stupid at worst. The beautiful game is one that has been enjoyed by generations, and there’s no reason to change something that isn’t broken. So, without further adieu, a present to you a defense of soccer.

Let’s tackle the first point brought up in the post: changing the clock. Soccer currently operates on a 90 minute clock, which doesn’t stop for anything except for halftime at the 45th minute mark. Because things like injuries can occur on the pitch and the clock doesn’t stop, stoppage time is added to the end of each half at the referee’s discretion. Because of this continuous time, soccer is unique in the fact that it doesn’t have commercials except for halftime. There are no unexpected stops, no short commercial breaks, no timeouts and no bullshit. It’s just the game, and that’s it. Changing the clock to stop for injuries and setting up set pieces would slow down the game considerably, and allow networks to take annoying commercial breaks. I don’t think any fan of the beautiful game wants to see commercials during the match, so changing the clock to start and stop on command is simply a stupid idea.

The next point the post brings up is to make the nets bigger so we can see more goals. When I started reading that, I broke out into laughter due to the author’s ignorance of the game of soccer. Soccer is a game of patience and tactics, where goal-scoring is very hard, and one goal could make or break a match. This sets it apart from most other sports, which seem to be a point scoring bonanza where individual points are essentially meaningless. The reason crowds erupt at the sight of a goal is because they are so rare, and they could have potentially watched the match-winning point. If we make the nets bigger and increase the amount of goals scored per match, the value of the goal itself decreases, and it wouldn’t be as exciting to watch a goal. Matches themselves would become somewhat boring, with teams scoring goals all the time. Not to mention the fact that the goalkeepers would be absolutely exhausted after each match if they had a bigger area to cover. Changing the size of the nets to make room for more goals changes the very game of soccer itself, and makes it less exciting.

The third point brought up is, surprisingly, one I think all of us can get behind, at least for the most part. It states that the players on the pitch should stop faking injuries and diving to get penalties, and simply play the game. Injury faking and bad sportsmanship has been a problem for soccer for quite a while, and it’s time athletes stepped up and played the game fairly. Unfortunately, I simply can’t see that happening anytime in the future. The post then brings up the idea of having a penalty box, which is a bit of a stupid idea. The idea of yellow and red cards already takes the place of having a penalty box; adding a penalty box would just further complicate a game that is supposed to stay as simple as possible.

The fourth and final idea brought up by the blog is to get rid of penalties and instead play an unrestricted overtime where both teams continue to play until somebody wins. Essentially, he wants to bring back Golden Goal with no penalty shootouts. If the author had paid attention to the international soccer scene over the past five years, he’d realise that golden goal was a flawed concept that was scraped by FIFA for good reason; it caused teams to play too defensively and made overtime unexciting. If the author does love goals as much as he professes to, then he should support FIFA’s decision to not use golden goal in favour of normal overtime that allows both teams to fairly score, rather than just having one team get lucky and score one goal. On the issue of penalties, they are a flawed but necessarily evil in the world of soccer. If we had endless overtime, the game itself would simply fizzle out into nothingness. 90 minutes is a long time, and 120 minutes is a longer time still. Soccer players are running around the pitch for those full 120 minutes, and any time over would have them so tired that many would be unable to run. Endless overtime works in sports such as baseball, because the players are nowhere near as tired as they would be if they were running around a soccer pitch for two hours straight. In soccer, it’d be cruel and unusual punishment to the players. Penalties decide a match quickly and somewhat fairly; luck is involved, but luck is involved in normal play, too. To win a penalty shootout, you have to have a combination of luck, skill, and determination to win.

Soccer is a beautiful game to watch, and an exciting one to follow. The excitement of a penalty shootout in the final of an international tournament is at a level that cannot hoped to be matched by any other form of competition in the world. There is no need to fix a game that is not broken in any way. Just because your team lost in penalties doesn’t meant that penalties themselves have to be scrapped. The beautiful game should be kept the way they are to keep the game just that; beautiful.