Brian Goff 6 August 2014 - With its compact schedule over a month, the World Cup exposes everything to like and dislike about soccer.

I don’t claim to be among the most ardent devotees to the game, but I started watching the World Cup in 1982, watched the WC extensively since 1994, and have steadily increased my viewing of English Premier League games and highlights as they have become more abundant in the U.S. over the past 15 years.  I not only have “tried” to enjoy soccer, I have enjoyed it.  Yet, every time I think I’m really sold on the game, its ugly side bites me again.  Below, I list the 5 things that I like best and least about soccer:

Best Things

1. Incredible Skill:  the ability of the top players in the world to use their feet and chests like most people use their hands and arms amazes me.  The skill I find most dumbfounding is the ability to receive a lengthy pass on the full run and deaden the ball.  This video from the 1998 WC quarterfinals shows the Netherlands’ Dennis Bergkamp do this, immediately make a move on the defender, then shoot the ball with the outside of his foot past the goalkeeper.  That is soccer at its very best. (The Dutch announcer’s narration is priceless also).

2. Impressive Stamina:  Its obvious to any viewer paying attention that soccer involves a lot of running, but it’s easy to under value just how much.  FIFA keeps track of “Distance Covered”  with Celso Borges of Costa Rica leading the way with 60 kilometers over 5 matches.  That’s 37 miles or 7.5 per game.  The USA’s Michael Bradley covered an average of 8.5 miles per game during his four matches.  Moreover, only a portion of this is at a leisurely pace and some is at sprinter speed.  The top speed of 33.8 kilometers per hour translates to a 100 meter time of 10.7 seconds.   In this regard, athletes in soccer, basketball, and hockey are very impressive.

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3. Worldwide Participation: One of the coolest elements of the 32-team World Cup finals is that, like Olympic running events, the WC pits the best against the best drawn from a large talent pool. Practically every country on earth fields a team and plays in qualifiers for it.  Even deeper, the sport does not have income or facility barriers to early participation millions of youngsters play the game around the world, on streets and fields in both organized leagues and on their own.

4. Varies Sizes:  Soccer is a game that invites players from a wide range of body sizes.  Lionel Messi, the phenom for Argentina and Barcelona, stands only 5’7″. Even in the U.S. with many other sports drawing participation, millions of young boys and girls play youth soccer.  Of course, the problem for the U.S., as seen even at the WC level, is that hardly any of these youngsters eat and sleep with their soccer ball 24-7-365 as is seen in many other places, so that the U.S. players, even the very best, develop the very fine technical skills seen among the most skilled WC players.

5. Running Clock:  As more and more sporting events suffer from slower and slower progress — tennis players toweling off after every point, golfers having coffee shop conversations withe their caddies, endless commercial breaks and end-of-game timeouts in football and basketball — I’ve come to really appreciate the fact that the clock keeps moving in soccer.  The 90 minutes (plus) with a 15 minute halftime means about a 2-hour commitment.  The knockout rounds for the WC can involve an extra thirty minutes, but that’s it.  Grantland’s Bill Simmons has a 150-Minute Rule stating that pretty much everything, even very enjoyable things, need to be under 2 1/2 in length.  Soccer wins major points with me on this.

Football player Neymar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 Worst Things

1. Diving-Faking-Exaggerating:  Probably the single hardest element for me to get past with soccer is the constant theatrics.  Watching more soccer doesn’t help this; it only gets worse.  The WC tournament is terrible in this regard, much worse than the EPL with many of the world’s best players committing the most heinous offenses.  Brazil’s Neymar and the Netherland’s Arjen Robben are two of the worst and have decided games with their antics.  Sometimes they just fall down without a touch.  Other times, they vault into the air with the slightest touch in hopes of gaining a foul, and, particularly, a penalty kick.  Referees can penalize such behavior, but they seldom do, and in the WC, I have yet to see it.  FIFA doesn’t permit post-match penalization of such players (the Euro soccer authorities seem to think the theatrics part of the game), so with nothing to lose and a lot to gain, it becomes a diving contest.  This isn’t dislike.  I truly hate this aspect of soccer (I also hate flopping in college and pro hoops, by the way).   The first cousin to diving is the ridiculous  writhing that takes place after many fouls whether to gain a moment’s rest or to encourage the referee to penalize with yellow cards.  Sure, sometimes guys get really knocked in the head (as with Clint Dempsey’s broken nose) or sustain painful blows to their legs.  Still, when a player writhes for 5 minutes, and maybe carried off on a stretcher, only to return a minute later, it’s just silly. Soccer should adopt a rule that if play stops for an injury, that player cannot return to player for 5 minutes (or some time frame) so as to discourage the antics.

2. Poor Penalty Policies:  Soccer suffers from a two-edge problem with respect to fouls — either they aren’t penalized enough or are penalized way too much.  Common fouls meet with so little cost to the offending team and player (a free kick) that teams utilize them liberally and strategically.  This becomes more pronounced when teams know that the referee isn’t likely to kick anyone out with two yellow cards.  The Brazil-Columbia game devolved into a foul-fest where any player in space (especially Columbia) quickly found himself on the end of an intentional foul.  At the other extreme, any fouls in the 18-yard box default to a penalty kick, so that the penalties for fouls swing from a gentle wag of the finger to the death penalty.  The same harsh penalty applies whether a player is about to score and is brought down in a cynical fashion or if he is near the edge of the box and feet get tangled (along with a healthy exaggeration).  The severity of the penalty leads referees to rarely impose it, prompting all-out wrestling matches on corner kicks because players expect a free pass.  Then, the infrequency of the imposition of the penalty means that when it is imposed, it tends to be very arbitrary.  Whether common fouls or fouls near the goal, soccer needs more gradations.

3. Refeering/Offsides:  Refeering in soccer is notoriously bad even with highly-trained officials.  The field is larger than a football field with as many players as football, but soccer utilizes one referee (with two sideline assistants).  The distances and sightlines involved are too large coupled with the speed of the game for accurate decisions.  The offsides call, in particular, ranks right up there with the block-charge call in basketball as common calls on which there might as well be a coin flip.  In the U.S.-Belgium game, the missed goal by Chris Wondolowski that would have likely won the game for the U.S. was flagged for offsides when it wasn’t even close.  Soccer could implement a “play-on” rule and utilize video technology on offsides calls.  The technology is already available and used on replays.  Or, if FIFA is averse to technology, they could install a second sideline assistant out there and both assistants much flag offsides in order for the play to stop.

5. Soccer Snobbery:  There exists a kind of snobbery among some soccer advocates in the U.S. that shares similarities with opera, movies like Inception, or expensive wine –” anyone with refined tastes and intelligence would like this.” Another version links disregard toward soccer as akin to the “ugly American” syndrome  – “the rest of the world loves it, you must be very boorish not to.”  Like soccer or dislike it, but as noted above, soccer contains some  attractive qualities and a worldwide following but using it as a test of refinement or intelligence? Soccer’s emergence in the U.S. as a bit of an “indie-alternative” aspect to it, drawing fans who knowingly or implicitly desired to follow a sport without the mass appeal of football, baseball, and basketball.  As more people watch soccer in the U.S., there would seem to be less of either the “alternative” or “refined” aspect.{jcomments on}

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