Soccer

The 2014 World Cup recently began in Brazil, a nation lacking in the sanitation, infrastructure, public safety, and financial resources that are usually required to host an international spectacle of this level. Yet, one other thing acts as a larger blight over the event than any of these others. That is the sport of soccer itself. I believe that soccer is an objectively bad sport — one of the worst sports in the world, in fact — and I will attempt to prove that here.

People often cite soccer’s popularity as a defense of the game and proof of its quality. This is an appeal to popularity, and it is a fallacy. Arguing that it is liked by a large number of people is not the same as arguing that it is good. A quick glance at the box office charts, or record sales, or television ratings will tell you all that you need to know about the validity of such an argument.

I want to begin with what I think is the strongest evidence against the sport of soccer. Let’s take a step back and say that we want to design the best game that we can given a couple simple criteria. The game must have two sides and must be symmetrical. That is to say that both sides start with exactly the same conditions. (In soccer this is true because both sides have the same number of players, the field is symmetrical, the win condition is symmetrical). Additionally, our game will have a point scoring mechanic which acts as the win condition, and we will also have a concept that only one side can score at a time. While one side is attempting to score, the second side is trying to prevent the first side from scoring. In essence, we have an offense and a defense. As you can see, these criteria apply to virtually every widely played team sport in the world.

One consideration that we have to make within our game is how difficult it will be for the offense to score. Obviously, the level of challenge for the defense is the inverse of this. The stronger you make the offense, the less interesting each individual offensive possession is. If the offense is very likely to score, then it is not very exciting when they do score, and instead a defensive hold impacts the game far more. And vice versa for a strong defensive game.

More importantly, the closer you come to an absolute offense (one in which the offense expects to score on every single possession), the less the difference in the ability of each team matters. If the offense scores 100% of the time no matter what, then a team of weaker players will still tie the stronger team every single time. As you approach that absolute, you are reducing the number of critical plays (in this case, defensive holds). The weaker team only needs to be successful a smaller number of times in order to tie or win the game, and you end up with a game that is poor at determining who is the better team. It becomes decided more by luck than skill. I think most people can agree that a great game is one in which the better team wins the majority of the time, and the larger the skill gap, the greater that majority becomes.

Thus, doesn’t it follow that in order to maximize a need for skill both on defense and offense, that we should weight these things exactly? That an offense matched up against an equally skilled defense should be successful half the time? Now, there is an argument to be made that offense is more exciting, so maybe it should be weighted slightly higher. Or that what makes offense exciting should come from its infrequency, so we should weight defense slightly higher. But we should not stray too far from that 50% mark.

In World Cup soccer, a team scores on average 1.25 goals per game. The most common score is 1-0. Clearly this game is heavily weighted for the defense. I could not find World Cup statistics, but in the English Premiere League, most teams average about 115 possessions per game. If the goal of an offense is to score, and the goal of a defense is to prevent a score, that means defenses are about 99% successful in soccer. Let’s compare that to the big four team sports in the United States:

In Major League Baseball’s 2013 season, teams averaged a score of 47.6% of their possessions. The National Football League had an offensive success rate of 33.6%. In the National Basketball Association, teams average about a point per possession. I could not find statistics on the average number of points gained on a possession when there’s a score, but I expect it to be about 2. Therefore, basketball comes very near that 50% weighted mark. In 2013-14, the National Hockey League saw about a 3.5% success rate. This sport clearly skews heavily defensive. Yet offenses are still successful 250% more often than in soccer.

Soccer is a poorly designed game. Defense is too strong, and the limited number of scoring possessions means a heavy reliance on luck and reduced opportunities to truly determine the better team. More subjectively, goals are exciting. By limiting them to such a degree, and by having such lengthy gaps in time between them, the sport itself becomes quite boring. Even a sport like basketball, with its 50% success rate, has exciting scoring. Watch any NBA game. The crowd will get just as amped after a crucial score as soccer fans after any goal. A sport doesn’t need such scarcity in scoring to remain exciting.

A spectator sport has to be judged by more than simply its rules, for they are not only meant to be played, but also to be viewed. A good spectator sport is fun to watch. Some can be an incredible experience to see live, but lose much of their appeal on a television. Others seem created for just such technology. Soccer, however, is bad in both environments.

The interesting thing about being at an arena or stadium for a game is that you and everyone else in attendance can actually impact the game. At a basketball or football game, the home team’s fans will make noise while their team is on defense, disrupting the communication that is crucial to running an offense in those sports. It is similar in baseball, though due to the slower nature of the game, fans usually wait until critical pitches or at bats. At a soccer game, on the other hand, fans make noise all the time. No matter what is happening on field. Their team could be on offense or defense. Play could be dead due to an out of bounds or a foul. The fans keep making the same noise. I went to a soccer game where a guy in the section next to mine played a drum the entire game, even during half time. The only impact it had on anything was the young girl (his daughter, presumably) sitting immediately next to him. She’s probably deaf now.

Soccer is also a bad television sport. It doesn’t have natural breaks in the action. Fouls are infrequent and out of bounds only delay the action for a couple seconds. This means there are not good times for advertisements. There are not good times for viewers to use the bathroom or refresh their snacks and beverages. Additionally, due to the length of the game and the lack of meaningful events (events that contribute to the win condition), there is not a lot of interesting commentary that can be made by the broadcasters. It is a sport from a bygone era, for a bygone era.

Speaking of age, soccer is very old. It was invented in the second century B.C. and is truly a product of its age. It requires minimal equipment, primitive groundskeeping, and has a simple ruleset. There were very few other sports that it had to succeed against or learn from. We have had over 2000 years of technological achievement, game theory, and trial and error since then. Better sports have been invented. Soccer is popular because it is old and humans love tradition. It is popular because it can be played in any corner of the civilized earth, no matter how poor or behind the times. If we have the resources, shouldn’t we play something better? We didn’t stop competitive video gaming at Pong or competitive board gaming at Checkers.

Not only was soccer invented before modern technology, the sport also refuses to embrace any advancements, even if they have an obvious benefit. The best example of this is the clock. For one thing, unlike any other timed sport I can think of, the clock ticks upward. Along with the score, this is the most critical piece of information about game state, and it requires unnecessary knowledge of the rules and a mental calculation of how much time is left. Further exasperating matters is stoppage time. Instead of pausing the clock, which absolutely every other timed sport in existence does and we’ve had the technology to do for centuries, soccer lets the time run even during stoppage. This is made up for with extra time at the end of the game. What is completely egregious is that quite often this information is kept hidden from the viewers and even the players. In essence, the referee is making an unchecked determination about when the game ends, and neither team can strategize around how much time is left, because it is unknown. Furthermore, it is anticlimactic to the fans. Last, it also creates opportunity for fraud. The fact that something so critical is not public information is the absolute worst aspect of modern soccer. It truly baffles me that people accept this as part of the game.

One notable aspect of any sport is how it handles tiebreakers. There are two groups. Either you continue playing the exact same game under a new ending limit, or you modify the sport and play something entirely different to satisfy the tie. The first method is the preferred method, because under the second you are no longer determining who is better at the sport itself, but rather the more skilled at a completely different game altogether. Soccer chooses this second method, changing the game completely and resorting to a penalty kick shootout. This removes the notion of defense, spacing, team play, and conditioning. Things that are critical pieces of the sport. Instead, you’re not determining who is the better soccer team, but rather which team has better penalty kickers. It’s a ridiculous way to select the winner of a soccer match, and it’s a result of the sport itself being so overwhelmingly defensive-oriented that a meaningful tiebreaker has been rejected as impractical. I’ve heard from fans that they love the tiebreaker because it’s “exciting”. This is an admittance that soccer itself is less exciting if not unexciting altogether. If that’s the case, it sounds like penalty kicks is the sport (some) people actually want.

My last point has to do with soccer in the United States, and specifically the World Cup. Professional level soccer continues to lag in popularity behind a number of other team sports in this country. However, during the World Cup, its popularity peaks and it becomes a topic of conversation amongst many who would never discuss it otherwise. News outlets cover the event even if they rarely cover any other soccer, including Major League Soccer, the United States’ largest professional league. The people in this country who have interest in the World Cup and only the World Cup when it comes to soccer invariably root for the United States’ team. Sure, that makes sense. But they aren’t rooting for players that they know or care about. They aren’t rooting for a style of play that they’re familiar with. They don’t know much of anything about soccer or the players or the coaches or any of it. All they know is the country which the team represents. So you have people blindly supporting a cause simply due to a common governing body and geolocation. This isn’t sports fandom. It’s nationalism. And I can not and will not support such an institution.

Soccer is a terrible game. It’s a terrible sport to watch live. It’s a terrible sport to watch on TV. It’s run by luddites. It encourages groupthink and unquestioned support. We have better sports to play and follow. There is no good reason for it to continue as anything more than a curiosity. It is the most popular sport in the world, and it sucks.