Americans are right - soccer is a ridiculous game
"the ball bounces around randomly for about an hour an a half, then suddenly it hits some guy's head and accidentally goes into the net, everybody goes crazy, and somebody's lost really bad and somebody's achieved a great victory" - a paraphrase of an American columnist, possibly PJ O'Rourke, describing their attempt at trying to appreciate soccer, done from memory.
Austria:Poland - 1:1
The setup: Euro 2008. Poland has lost to Germany. Austria has lost to Croatia. The looser of the Poland/Austria game is eliminated from the competition. Austria dominates for first 30 minutes. The Poles get a lucky, though very elegant goal ... which might have been an offside (similar situation occurs in the Poland-Germany game with Poland the worse off). Energized by the goal the Poles control the rest of the game although they do not manage to score again. In the 92nd minute, at the very very very end of injury time, the ball is kicked into the Polish penalty box and an Austrian player very clearly either slips or takes a dive. The referee awards a spurious penalty kick to the Austrians which they take advantage off to tie it up. The Poles, or at least this one, feel totally cheated and for all practical purposes both teams are eliminated.
In American football, basketball or baseball, a bad decision by a referee will give one team a slight advantage (in critical situations perhaps a crucial slight advantage) in terms of winning the game. In soccer a bad decision by a referee not only can very easily determine the outcome of a match but in many cases the entire standing in a group/division and even advancement to the next round (i.e. play offs). There are huge discontinuities in terms of the marginal effects of a referee's decisions.
To be exciting games we like to watch and play need a mixture of uncertainty and reward to skill and effort, unless one's a gambling sort who thinks that roulette is an intellectually sophisticated game. In this respect however soccer is worse than pinball. True, skill plays a role - you can rely on Argentina to beat up on The United Arab Emirates every time. But if the teams are even remotely evenly matched in terms of the randomness/skill content it's not even a pinball game. It's a pinball game with broken flippers, a roulette wheel where a referee occasionally decides to magically and arbitrarily move the silver ball closer or farther from the number you picked.
The great power wielded by the referee and the impossibility of double checking his decision (by design, since the technology exists to do this and American Football, for example, has managed to implement it successfully) also creates great potential for corruption. And any honest assessment of team sports is pretty much bound to conclude that FIFA and its various national counterparts are rife with it. From how locations are chosen, to how groups are selected, to how matches are adjudicated.
In addition to corruption there's other problems that this huge amount of uncertainty combined with power of no appeal on part of the refs creates (in addition to the fact that soccer refs are the least respected among their type/proffesion across the sports). First there's an obvious incentive for players to learn how to "game the ref" rather than focus on skill - the dives, the fake injuries, the prima donna acting that characterizes many a "star" team. Second, since with this much uncertainty it really is hard to objectively rank teams in terms of their skill, the all to human referees come to rely on certain rules-of-thumb, strength of tradition, and "I think thats right because it seems to have been right in the past". Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Italy win because... well, they're supposed to win, particularly if in terms of fundamental objective skill the game's close.
Of course this begs the question - why is soccer popular in the rest of the world, but not so much in US? Here everyone's got their favorite answers which either boil down to assertions that Americans are too crude and brutish to appreciate the grace and beauty of the game, or, on the other side to mistaken assessments that "soccer is a game for teenage girls" (as anyone who's ever played it knows, soccer is as physically demanding as American football, probably more than basketball, and certainly more than baseball). But the simple truth is that it's all about tribalism - in its national or regional forms. Without the tribalism the game of soccer looses most of its appeal. It can best be seen as either a very beautiful excercise in synchronization -in which case it should be judged in the same way as ice skating competitions and water ballet. Or as a simple spin of a roulette wheel. Or perhaps both - a spin of a very beautiful, ornamented and elegant roulette wheel.
And US is a very non-tribal place. While some folks in the South may still smart about those damn Yankees, for the most part a Wyomingian, or a Rhode Islander tend to have fairly weak connections to their place of residence. This is compounded by the fact that often times, for real tribalism to be strong, a Nebraskan-of-Guatemalan-origin would have to feel very strongly about Nebraska, a Delawerian-of-Vietnamese-descent very strongly about Delaware and a some white bread Oregon hippy about Oregon. To be sure, these kinds of feelings do exist but compared to ROW they are very muted, for fairly obvious reasons.
The outcome of the Austria-Poland game wasn't even that unfair. Both teams played well and they were ... evenly matched. Both goals had a good bit of arbitrariness about them (though of course I think the Poles were "border line offsides" when they scored their goal whereas the Austrian penalty kick was clearly undeserved). But the game was a really good illustration of why soccer is a very ridiculous sport.
Some notes:
1. American College football competition actually shares some of the defects of soccer competitions - mostly due to the institutional design where the (top 25) winners are chosen by voting by folks who obviously have vested interest in the outcome. And given the large number of college football team you get intrinsic intransitivity (haha - alliterative joke alert) - A beats B, B beats C, C beats A, so who's 1st, 2nd and 3rd?. As a result, much like refs in soccer, the NCAA voters choose teams who are "supposed to win" (or in this case, be ranked high) even when facts on the ground - given that there's room for interpretation - speak otherwise. So USC, Florida, Ohio State ... a few others ... are pretty much always guaranteed spots in Top 10/Bowls even if they get stumped once or twice by gutsy underdogs (which actually happens quite often in college football, which makes it more exciting than soccer (which is too random) and NFL football (which is too predetermined)).
2. I don't mean to imply above that there's a HUGE amount of corruption in soccer competitions, or in particular in regard to this particular game. I don't think the ref was "bought" or even incompetent or anything like that. I do think there is enough corruption in it, created by the nature of the incentives of the game as she is practiced today, and enough uncertainty which makes this corruption possible to pretty much make it a coin flip.
3. I got a post on the difference between games that we enjoy playing and watching and the games that game theorists analyze coming up, but I think I need to cool down a bit. Go outside and smoke three more cigarettes in a row or something. So later.
4. Sorry, Michael, though I don't know if this is your thing.
5. Also note that what American Football, Baseball and Basketball all have in common is that there's a lot more "points" scored in each game than in a soccer game. From point of view of Economics of Sports this makes a lot sense. If each "point scored" is a random draw from some distribution (which could favor one team over another) then with the absolute outcome of a game depending on a large number of points scored that outcome is more likely (by sort of wavy-handy law of large numbers) to reflect the "true" underlying skill of the two competing teams. Of course if the number of points required/time allowed is too large, then not only do we as spectators loose our attention span, but the outcome becomes too predetermined. You want some variance in there to make it exciting. But soccer's got too much of it.
Austria:Poland - 1:1
The setup: Euro 2008. Poland has lost to Germany. Austria has lost to Croatia. The looser of the Poland/Austria game is eliminated from the competition. Austria dominates for first 30 minutes. The Poles get a lucky, though very elegant goal ... which might have been an offside (similar situation occurs in the Poland-Germany game with Poland the worse off). Energized by the goal the Poles control the rest of the game although they do not manage to score again. In the 92nd minute, at the very very very end of injury time, the ball is kicked into the Polish penalty box and an Austrian player very clearly either slips or takes a dive. The referee awards a spurious penalty kick to the Austrians which they take advantage off to tie it up. The Poles, or at least this one, feel totally cheated and for all practical purposes both teams are eliminated.
In American football, basketball or baseball, a bad decision by a referee will give one team a slight advantage (in critical situations perhaps a crucial slight advantage) in terms of winning the game. In soccer a bad decision by a referee not only can very easily determine the outcome of a match but in many cases the entire standing in a group/division and even advancement to the next round (i.e. play offs). There are huge discontinuities in terms of the marginal effects of a referee's decisions.
To be exciting games we like to watch and play need a mixture of uncertainty and reward to skill and effort, unless one's a gambling sort who thinks that roulette is an intellectually sophisticated game. In this respect however soccer is worse than pinball. True, skill plays a role - you can rely on Argentina to beat up on The United Arab Emirates every time. But if the teams are even remotely evenly matched in terms of the randomness/skill content it's not even a pinball game. It's a pinball game with broken flippers, a roulette wheel where a referee occasionally decides to magically and arbitrarily move the silver ball closer or farther from the number you picked.
The great power wielded by the referee and the impossibility of double checking his decision (by design, since the technology exists to do this and American Football, for example, has managed to implement it successfully) also creates great potential for corruption. And any honest assessment of team sports is pretty much bound to conclude that FIFA and its various national counterparts are rife with it. From how locations are chosen, to how groups are selected, to how matches are adjudicated.
In addition to corruption there's other problems that this huge amount of uncertainty combined with power of no appeal on part of the refs creates (in addition to the fact that soccer refs are the least respected among their type/proffesion across the sports). First there's an obvious incentive for players to learn how to "game the ref" rather than focus on skill - the dives, the fake injuries, the prima donna acting that characterizes many a "star" team. Second, since with this much uncertainty it really is hard to objectively rank teams in terms of their skill, the all to human referees come to rely on certain rules-of-thumb, strength of tradition, and "I think thats right because it seems to have been right in the past". Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Italy win because... well, they're supposed to win, particularly if in terms of fundamental objective skill the game's close.
Of course this begs the question - why is soccer popular in the rest of the world, but not so much in US? Here everyone's got their favorite answers which either boil down to assertions that Americans are too crude and brutish to appreciate the grace and beauty of the game, or, on the other side to mistaken assessments that "soccer is a game for teenage girls" (as anyone who's ever played it knows, soccer is as physically demanding as American football, probably more than basketball, and certainly more than baseball). But the simple truth is that it's all about tribalism - in its national or regional forms. Without the tribalism the game of soccer looses most of its appeal. It can best be seen as either a very beautiful excercise in synchronization -in which case it should be judged in the same way as ice skating competitions and water ballet. Or as a simple spin of a roulette wheel. Or perhaps both - a spin of a very beautiful, ornamented and elegant roulette wheel.
And US is a very non-tribal place. While some folks in the South may still smart about those damn Yankees, for the most part a Wyomingian, or a Rhode Islander tend to have fairly weak connections to their place of residence. This is compounded by the fact that often times, for real tribalism to be strong, a Nebraskan-of-Guatemalan-origin would have to feel very strongly about Nebraska, a Delawerian-of-Vietnamese-descent very strongly about Delaware and a some white bread Oregon hippy about Oregon. To be sure, these kinds of feelings do exist but compared to ROW they are very muted, for fairly obvious reasons.
The outcome of the Austria-Poland game wasn't even that unfair. Both teams played well and they were ... evenly matched. Both goals had a good bit of arbitrariness about them (though of course I think the Poles were "border line offsides" when they scored their goal whereas the Austrian penalty kick was clearly undeserved). But the game was a really good illustration of why soccer is a very ridiculous sport.
Some notes:
1. American College football competition actually shares some of the defects of soccer competitions - mostly due to the institutional design where the (top 25) winners are chosen by voting by folks who obviously have vested interest in the outcome. And given the large number of college football team you get intrinsic intransitivity (haha - alliterative joke alert) - A beats B, B beats C, C beats A, so who's 1st, 2nd and 3rd?. As a result, much like refs in soccer, the NCAA voters choose teams who are "supposed to win" (or in this case, be ranked high) even when facts on the ground - given that there's room for interpretation - speak otherwise. So USC, Florida, Ohio State ... a few others ... are pretty much always guaranteed spots in Top 10/Bowls even if they get stumped once or twice by gutsy underdogs (which actually happens quite often in college football, which makes it more exciting than soccer (which is too random) and NFL football (which is too predetermined)).
2. I don't mean to imply above that there's a HUGE amount of corruption in soccer competitions, or in particular in regard to this particular game. I don't think the ref was "bought" or even incompetent or anything like that. I do think there is enough corruption in it, created by the nature of the incentives of the game as she is practiced today, and enough uncertainty which makes this corruption possible to pretty much make it a coin flip.
3. I got a post on the difference between games that we enjoy playing and watching and the games that game theorists analyze coming up, but I think I need to cool down a bit. Go outside and smoke three more cigarettes in a row or something. So later.
4. Sorry, Michael, though I don't know if this is your thing.
5. Also note that what American Football, Baseball and Basketball all have in common is that there's a lot more "points" scored in each game than in a soccer game. From point of view of Economics of Sports this makes a lot sense. If each "point scored" is a random draw from some distribution (which could favor one team over another) then with the absolute outcome of a game depending on a large number of points scored that outcome is more likely (by sort of wavy-handy law of large numbers) to reflect the "true" underlying skill of the two competing teams. Of course if the number of points required/time allowed is too large, then not only do we as spectators loose our attention span, but the outcome becomes too predetermined. You want some variance in there to make it exciting. But soccer's got too much of it.
posted by YouNotSneaky! at 2:35 PM
28 Comments:
My personnal theory about why Americans can't get into soccer is that Americans are used to games with signaled events. Simply put everytime something happens in American Football, the game stops (and you get a replay and a long explanation of what happens). Soccer is continuous and the game only stop when there's a foul, a goal or the ball goes out of bounds. Hence the annoying focus US soccer fans have on shoots, goals and their unability to understand what defensive midfields like Pirlo do (lead the orchestra).
That continuity thing is also the main reason why the video thing is not as easy as it sounds. In American Football, the game is paused anyway and you can check. In soccer, the game is supposed to continue unless there is an off-side or a penalty. And pausing it kills the possibility of counter-attacks and all that.
The other thing is that the comparision with the NCAA team selection rules is totally unfair. Which soccer competition has anything remotely close ? Remember that England is not at the Euro and that effing Porto won the CL a few years ago.
Finally, the impact of referee decisions is not as big as one may think. Sure the Swiss would probably still be in the competition (i almost said stay home) and may Italy would have won if the referees had made the right call at the right time. But think about how often all that happens. How many teams had not won a major competition or got relegated based on one referee decision ? Compare that to the odds of an injury or an off-day for a good player or weather conditions or pure random luck.
Well put. It is very irrational and so forth, compared to many other team sports. My gf is even more irrational, still love her!
Soccer fans always take into account dubious refereeing. That is why the last minutes of any close game are always loaded with suspense. There is always the chance a player goes down in the penalty area and gets awarded, rightly or not, a penalty kick.
The trick is to keep attackers as far away from the box as possible.
Soccer isn't that random. Both players and fans take into the account refereeing.
And, yes, tribalism is very much a part of it. Still, I love to watch Brasil or Portugal or any other team with good technical skills and a positive game plan. Even if it is not my own country (The Netherlands).
It strikes me that, increasingly, penalities are a total anachronism. Pretty much gifting a team a goal for what are often minor infringements, in situtations where the attacking team were never likely to score in the first place. It creates all the wrong incentives.
They should offer the referee the alernative to offer a free kick in the area for minor infringements e.g. handball in a crowded area or a shirt tug at the edge of the box and a penalty when the attacking team is clearly denied a scoring opportunity.
My observations:
1 wrestling and fighting in the box at set pieces is a blight on the game
2 UEFA asked refs to crack down on this behaviour at Euro championships
3 In the Austria/Poland game just before the penalty incident the ref went into the box to warn players who were indulging in minor fisticuffs
4 Immediately after this it was clear that the Polish defender had hold of the Austrian's shirt and appeared to pull him down. Penalty.
One might say that 6 or 7 pens would be given in every game on this interpretation but in this game the ref seemed to give the players a final warning before taking decisive action. Good for him.
I don't buy your explanation that soccer is popular in Europe but not in the US because of tribalism.
It's all about the fact that history matters a lot in the formation of tastes. So it's a historical accident that Europe and the US have different cultural focal points. Once cultural focal points are established, they allow people that don't know each other to get involved in discussions and "rituals" that are more meaningful to them than talk about the weather. So it's hard to change those focal points.
I agree that by the nature of the game and some bureaucratic accidents, the referees have more power to influence the decision, and it's possible that the variance is higher.
However, in soccer instead of doing actual scoring often, you prove your skill by creating more opportunities and finishing off your opportunities more often than your opponent -- so the skill factor is still enormous.
Alex
random african: Your theory would work if it wasn't for basketball and ice hockey. Nice try, though.
Re: "gaming the ref": That's why I can't stand watching South American football (soccer), even though it is easily found on local channels. One minute, the guy is laying on the field, writhing in such agony that you start to speculate about whether they will need to amputate on the field, the next second, he's up and running end-to-end while throwing his elbow into somebody's throat (and receiving the same). And the diving? I understand that Greg Louganis has a lucrative career as a consultant in Argentina and Mexico.
Yep, diving should be instant red card with automatic video review.
There are well-defined "events" every 30 seconds in basketball!
Figuring out that there was nice block or a good assist is a tad easier than realizing that the Russian positionning is brilliant because Kuyt spends his time in the central area.
Hockey is actually the closest. But there too, a smaller field = the illusion of speed and intensity. Plus it's not exactly the most popular game here, is it?
Yep, diving should be instant red card with automatic video review.
Do you stop the game and do an instant video review everytime someone falls?
Because after all, the point of diving is to make believe there was a foul, right? You don't know for sure if someone dived or not before you check.
Clearly the solution is to leave it up to American sports enthusiasts. If they can't figure the game out, surely, no one else in the world should be entertaining themselves with it.
Perhaps everyone should be playing Cricket......
I think it's nothing more than the historical history, really. Besides, seeing as how most US sports were drawn/inspired by European sports (baseball/cricket, American football/rugby/football) it doesn't matter much.
Frankly, I prefer sports that have an international dimension to them. American sports, like Americans ourselves I guess, are way too parochial for me.
Really, how much does New York (Yankees) winning the 'World' Series really say about American sporting prowess?
At least we get a shot to shine at the Olympics, even if we were nipped at the top by China this Olympics...
Ever thought that soccer's lack of popularity in America could be due, in part, to its unfriendliness to advertising. Think about it. The game hardly ever stops. Commercial time is basically limited to halftime and pre/post game shows. In American football, the damn game seems to cut to commercial evry couple of minutes.
Just a thought.
i think your comments about two teams being = then the result is random is bull.
It's clear that you yourself doesn't understand what it takes to be a greet footballer.
The skill is in creating chances, but as it is a team game, that isn't enough it is also in coverting them and stopping them. Wastefulness is punished and efficiency is rewarded. if you can't finish off a team you are dominating then you weren't the best TEAM. you may have had the best players but the blame lies at the foot off your strikers.
The game is about concentration one mistake and you get punished. The higher up the less the mistakes and the more ruthless the punishment. Thats why prolific scorers who create as well are the most sort after players.
The reason why americans don't understand is they are not gratified by not being told who is better with stats, perception and subjectiveness is lacking. Things that a required to play and enjoy a fluid game.
Points are also needed to rank who is best, that's why every play results in something. Which is why each derives enjoyment in your country... progress, not the actual play itself but the fact you are moving closer to your stated goal, whether that be a victory or yardage.
in football a great "play" is appreciated for it's greatness regardless of whether it ends in something meaningful.
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sorry but we don't have the fault, that American soccer league be one of the worst in the world, and is true if you don't believe me, just consult the official FIFA site.
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It won't work in actual fact, that is exactly what I suppose.
The dude is totally right, and there is no suspicion.
Effectively set. It is extremely irrational and so on, in comparison to a great many other group athletics. Our gf will be much more illogical, even now really like the woman's!
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Soccer for one isn't a ridiculous game. Football is the ridiculous game. It doesn't teach character or value at all. Soccer does and their sports uniforms show it.
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