How Not to Fix Soccer

yes i see where you are coming from, some officials have been making bad calls. but some would argue that the refereeing is part of the game and instituting video replays etc might unnecessarily complicate matters and ruin the flow of the game.

i play soccer in an amatuer league every weekend and although the referees generally are not of a high standard, I still enjoy it. its part of the game.

Not really. This concept of "scalability", while alluring at first glance, falls flat on multiple counts.

First and foremost, it verges on a straw man; Felten argues against unspecified "Americans" with largely-unspecified views, when in fact criticism has been quite specific and has come from practically every part of the globe. The things people are asking to have "fixed" are not the lack of an official clock or any of his other examples; the things people are asking to have fixed seem mostly to be abysmally inconsistent officiating standards. Which, in an article praising the uniformity of the game at nearly all levels, is a glaring oversight.

Second, Felten's concept of "scalability" is deeply flawed; we might as well argue for the World Cup final to be played on a parking lot with piled-up sticks for goals -- after all, your neighborhood game doesn't have those big fancy stadiums, does it? Privileging some aspects of the game by allowing them to be radically different at higher levels of play, while arbitrarily requiring other aspects to be uniform at all levels, is frankly irrational.

Worst of all, he touches on baseball as a game which "scales", but fails to note that while the basic rules of the game are the same at practically every level, the implementation varies considerably and the game is better for that. For example, a local sandlot game doesn't need six professional umpires, instant replay and a strike-zone-tracking pitch-plotting camera system, but a major-league championship game does. This allows each game to have the level of officiating it actually needs, rather than forcing impossible burdens on the local game or false austerity on the professional game.

Can't remember which match it was I was watching but 2 minutes into a 3 minute additional time at the end of the match someone had a cut on their head or similar, at least a minute of play was lost but the ref added about 20 seconds additional time. Seems really unprofessional not knowing much much time is actually going to be played, especially at such an important tournament. Seems to be abused to, after the 90 minutes there seems to be a lot of pointless substitutes where the player walks off nice and slow to eat up time.

Three counter-points:

1. FIFA makes a ton of money from the World Cup. The sponsorship and protection efforts of the sponsorship are ridiculously elaborate.

2. Even FIFA doesn't scale the game linearly. In the World Cup there are always 3 refs on the field, even though really only 1 is needed. Further, there are many different types of football balls (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_%28ball%29 ), so again, the game played on the streets or school leagues is not necessarily exactly the same as the World Cup.

3. FIFA constantly innovates in the making of the actual ball. Every WC we get a new ball that has different characteristics. This year's ball is the most consistent in distance and trajectory in tests (i.e. hit it the same way and you'll get the same volley).

With all that said, I don't think "maintaining consistency" is the reason FIFA refuses to introduce replay refs. I think it's more about politics: they have always supported the number 1 ref as the final arbiter of play and introducing a replay ref would undermine this long-held traditional philosophy.

He forgets about one thing - pro football is not managed by a single referee because it'd be impossible, he has 2 side referees to help. Also, in amateur (edit: for fun, not non-pro leagues) football you usually play without offsides or almost without them; while in pro there is a ridiculous situation where a rule meant to prevent static play (standing in front of the goal waiting for a pass) is often ripping the game of dynamic (halted actions because the side referee saw that one player's foot was 10cm pass the line of defence).

Football is scaled down mostly because you don't need expensive infrastructure to play and train - 2 sticks in the ground or draw lines on a fence and you're ready to kick - no equipment (baseball, hockey) besides the ball itself, no need to build anything (basketball, hockey). I think that's a far more important factor in football popularity than the rules set.