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How Not to Fix Soccer

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Re: How Not to Fix Soccer

#81

Post by Maro »

zalew wrote: post #25
Maro wrote: post #16

I am familiar with the FIFA's reasoning, and I just don't think it holds up. The best example is the NBA: advanced technical rules at NBA games aren't stopping anyone from playing basketball on the courts or at the High School level. Also, the rules are different anyways. At the FIFA level, games are played on large fields for 2x45 minutes, there are 4 refs, etc. AFAIR HS level games were 2x30 minutes and we were luc…

> lying about who touched the ball last, lying about what happened, lying to convince the ref. lying doesn't matter, it's just expressing emotions. you almost never see a referee backing up from a decision, more often discussions result a yellow card. > Would it really kill soccer if we had video replay? it wouldn't if they were limited, just as switching players is. if one team had one single chance of calling for a…

It's not just an expression of emotions. Modern players are trained to cheat and lie.

Re: How Not to Fix Soccer

#82

Post by jimbokun »

zalew wrote: post #25
Maro wrote: post #16

I am familiar with the FIFA's reasoning, and I just don't think it holds up. The best example is the NBA: advanced technical rules at NBA games aren't stopping anyone from playing basketball on the courts or at the High School level. Also, the rules are different anyways. At the FIFA level, games are played on large fields for 2x45 minutes, there are 4 refs, etc. AFAIR HS level games were 2x30 minutes and we were luc…

> lying about who touched the ball last, lying about what happened, lying to convince the ref. lying doesn't matter, it's just expressing emotions. you almost never see a referee backing up from a decision, more often discussions result a yellow card. > Would it really kill soccer if we had video replay? it wouldn't if they were limited, just as switching players is. if one team had one single chance of calling for a…

"if one team had one single chance of calling for a replay, it wouldn't kill the dynamic, but would solve the problem of nonaccredited goals or the Kaka situation with Ivory Coast."

This is roughly the system employed by the NFL, and it works fairly well. Coaches can challenge a number of calls per game (2, I think?) and are penalized with losing a timeout if their challenge turns out to be invalid. I don't know if there is an equivalent penalty that could be leveled at a soccer team for an invalid challenge.

Re: How Not to Fix Soccer

#83

Post by bukkake »

zalew wrote: post #38
_delirium wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One possibility would be to use after-the-game replays only to punish particularly egregious behavior, like blatant dives, with suspensions. Wouldn't interrupt the flow of the game, but would deter wrongdoing.

it's already being done, but not to punish dives. it's used to analyze more serious situations such as brutal fouls (a player can get additional punishment by football associations after the game, even to a complete season dismiss) or alleged corruption. dives are stupid and I hate them, but I think they are far overrated in the US (assumption from what I see in internet discussions)

I'll take it you meant "overblown" instead of "overrated". And no, that's not the case. We actually are incredibly offended by it. We see dives as part and parcel of corruption and as a "more serious situation".

Re: How Not to Fix Soccer

#84

Post by bukkake »

davnola wrote: post #76
bukkake wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a former ref and longtime player. I understand the flow of the game very well. Americans don't want to slow the game down in the slightest. What they want is more justice, post-mortem oversight, and less preventable human error. Anyone faking an injury on my pitch used to get a red card for conduct detrimental to the game. So I consider 5 minutes to be very generous. I'm aware that it's quite a long time. That's…

> Anyone faking an injury on my pitch used to get a red card for conduct detrimental to the game. Sorry, this is flat-out dangerous. You are not 100% certain who is really injured and who is not faking, and you are incentivising players who may not be sure whether or not they are injured to play on. I agree with your other 9 points, though.

You are correct. I was incentivising players who may not be sure whether or not they are injured to play on. Serious injuries (i.e. more than a sprain) at the amateur level are vanishingly rare.

If you want to overcome the "sport for pussies" stigma that American Football players love to attach to soccer, there's got to be some tough love, at least in the USA.

Re: How Not to Fix Soccer

#85

Post by _delirium »

zalew wrote: post #38
_delirium wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One possibility would be to use after-the-game replays only to punish particularly egregious behavior, like blatant dives, with suspensions. Wouldn't interrupt the flow of the game, but would deter wrongdoing.

it's already being done, but not to punish dives. it's used to analyze more serious situations such as brutal fouls (a player can get additional punishment by football associations after the game, even to a complete season dismiss) or alleged corruption. dives are stupid and I hate them, but I think they are far overrated in the US (assumption from what I see in internet discussions)

On dives, I agree they're seen as a much bigger deal in the US than other places. I think many people not very familiar with soccer/football tend to assume that they're a much more serious offense than seems to be consensus within the sport. Essentially, people assume that they're a form of deliberate cheating, which in many sports is a kind of offense that would earn you a multi-game suspension on the first offense, and long-term bans on subsequent offenses (say, if you were caught using a corked bat in baseball).

Re: How Not to Fix Soccer

#86

Post by mirkules »

I think the game could engulf America, if the Television networks are willing to air two 45+ minute halves without showing a single commercial.

Note that every popular American sport has enough stoppage time during each break to show at least 4-5 highly-targeted ads. In my opinion, this is why the networks aren't really pushing soccer. On-pitch ads (i.e. sideline or sideboard ads) wouldn't really cut it because every network needs to have regional advertisements, and lots of them. Just my $0.02.

Re: How Not to Fix Soccer

#87

Post by jules »

ErrantX wrote: post #74
jules wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes. Alot. Injuries already interrupt the flow of the game - and one thing Football is good at is flowing (one reason I personally enjoy it). Many many injuries are players pretending to be injured. Video capture would stop those "injuries". And if there is an injury you don't need to stop for 30 seconds. Replay reviewing can be quicker than the time it takes for the player to get up. > bad decisions aren't all tha…

> Many many injuries are players pretending to be injured. Video capture would stop those "injuries". And if there is an injury you don't need to stop for 30 seconds. Replay reviewing can be quicker than the time it takes for the player to get up. Would it really? I don't think so at all - except in the most blatant cases. If contact is made, well, the player might be making a meal of it but the letter of the law is…

> And if we had to stop each time a player went down to decide if contact was made or not that would just ruin the game :P

Ehm, obviously the players would pretend less if they get punished for it. That's the idea of a working ref system...

> Current rules require the player to leave the pitch for treatment. IMO this is a much more streamlined solution. If you change that for the same initial stoppage, plus the ref requesting a review, plus a restart of the game (which may take additional seconds to sort out) it starts to add up. I fail to see how a TV replay shortens that at all.

It's not like it all has to happen in sequence. You have a crew of 20 people continuously reviewing the slow motion capture and they tell the results to the ref, who only after that decides what to do. The only difference is that instead of using the ref's eyes, you use super-eyes. A little bit slower but not significantly slower, and significantly more accurate.

> How do you define that though? Throwing themselves on the floor with no contact is, obviously, bad and should be punished. But if contact is made how do you judge whether an injury has occurred or not? It's next to impossible a decision to make. On many occasions players make the most out of it - on others the most innocent of taps can be excruciating (this is speaking as an ex-footballer in my youth :D).

Are you claiming that a ref in the field can judge this better than one looking at a slow motion video?

On TV it's often very obvious that they are faking it. But of course judging this is hard sometimes, the point is that it is way, way harder for a ref on the field to judge than for somebody looking at slow motion video.

> To me TV replay represents classic over-engineering of a problem.

It's fixing an obviously broken system.

Re: How Not to Fix Soccer

#88

Post by mhb »

hugothefrog wrote: post #4

I was trying to think of a good reason why FIFA continues to refuse to introduce any form of video replay/video referee, and the reason Ed outlines are just what I concluded. The game is supposed to be exactly the same when played at World Cup level as it is when played at Saturday morning club level, and even below that - the streets of Brazil, etc. Fifa has got its eye on the global market for playing football, whi…

Those reasons are ridiculous. Kids don't care if the game "scales". They'll play touch (American) football or half-court basketball in a concrete schoolyard or play football (soccer) in a vacant lot.

Re: How Not to Fix Soccer

#89

Post by dagw »

ErrantX wrote: post #39
bukkake wrote: post #26

The argument outlined in the article is absurd. Soccer is and has been by far the most popular sport participation wise in the USA for decades. I played and refereed it competitively for close to two decades until I started having problems with my knees. Most Americans are very well versed in soccer and have either played it themselves or have at least watched their kids play it. Most Americans have no problems with…

I think this is just differing perspectives; a lot of what you highlight, for me, makes US sports unwatchable (as i said elsewhere I can't watch all of a baseball game simply through boredom - despite quite liking the game). (though for the record post-mortems, referee training etc. are good ideas) Referees should be required to make distinguishing hand signals for each call. This would greatly aid the players, the f…

This just demonstrates, IMO, a misunderstanding of the game. 5 minutes may be no time in, say, American Football. In Football the game could be entirely changed in 5 minutes.

Being a man down for 5 minutes in American Football is a far far bigger disadvantage than being a man down for 5 minutes in soccer. In football it is not uncommon for a team to be a man down for half the game or more and still manage to win or at least hold on for a draw, I seriously doubt that could happen in American Football.

Re: How Not to Fix Soccer

#90

Post by rubidium »

zalew wrote: post #22
lenni wrote: post #2

Question for the Americans: Is soccer really on the brink of becoming a popular sport in your country? I read that ESPN is investing lots of money into the world cup coverage and reddit is full of related submissions.

follow-up question - did David Beckham become a real star and popularized football in the US?

no, not really. A foreigner has a hard time popularizing a sport.
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