Yesterday I watched the finals of Euro Cup 2008. For those who don't know the Euro Cup is the European soccer championships. Working from home, I was fortunate enough to watch many of matches. During which, I tried to become a fan of soccer. I really did.
Soccer has a lot to offer. It has some really cool aspects that can't be found in most American sports. For one thing they have interesting tournament formats. They almost always have some group play aspect to determine which teams move into the playoffs. To best understand how this works, imagine the NCAA basketball tournament where the tournament starts with sixteen groups of 4 teams. The are assigned by the normal seeding process. The 4 teams would play each other. The team with the best results from the 3 games would move on to the sweet 16.
Another aspect I find interesting is their use of home and home games to determine who wins a round in the tournament. A home and home is where two teams play one game at each team's home field. The winner is determined by the aggregate score between the two games. Can you imagine NFL playoffs where teams would play a home and home and the total score from the two games would be combined to determine who moves onto the next round of the playoffs.
I also like the concept of promotion and relegation. The worst teams in a higher division drop down and the best teams from the lower division move up. Imagine if the worst three teams in major league baseball dropped down to Triple A while the best three teams in Triple A move up to the major leagues.
I would be sold on the game if the actual games didn't suffer from some serious deficiencies.
First, there isn't enough scoring in soccer. The finals were 1-0. That is like watching a 3-0 football game. Sure it is OK occasionally, but if that was the results of over half the football games it would not be fun to watch. I am not asking for 10 goals a game. But the games need to average 5 goals a game and not 2. The most memorable games in the Euro Cup were the 3-2 games and not the 1-0 games. The easiest move would be to make the goals bigger. Not a lot, just another couple of feet wider and taller. If all of the shots that hit the goal posts went in the scoring would have been more reasonable.
Secondly, the officiating is bad. I don't think the officials are necessarily bad, I just think it is hard for one person to see the entire game. The are inevitably going to be in a bad position during a play and miss an important call. Are there any other sports which have so few officials on the field? If soccer added two more officials on the pitch I think they could be able to make better calls and have less errors.
Lastly, soccer needs to rid itself of what I call the wimp factor. I don't know how many times I saw a player who was barely touched fall down on the ground writhing in pain only to hop up and continue playing 15 seconds later. In basketball you have guys flop in order to draw a charge. But they don't roll on the ground and act like they have been knifed in the stomach either only to hop up a few seconds later and continue playing. The player would be rightly ridiculed forever.
Until they can address these issues, soccer will continue to be anything but the "beautiful game" to me.
