The Football kNuts put up a fairly detailed post filled with ideas on how to fix the fundamentally broken game of soccer. Many people have complained about the state of soccer in the 2006 World Cup and many have been upset over the number of bookings (though others will say they are justified). Being an opinionated sort, I figured I’d throw my 2 cents into the kitty as well.
In a nutshell? I don’t think the beautiful game is as broken as we think it is. It all comes down to consistency.
First, read the entire post over at Football kNuts. I’ll include some excerpts here, but you really should read all the justifications for certain positions they have.
The first suggestion is a common one. There aren’t enough officials at a match to properly call fouls:
In professional baseball there are 4 umpires on the field during the regular season and 6 during the post-season charged with officiating 18 players. In NFL football, you have 7 officials tracking 22 players. In basketball you get 3 guys following 10, and in hockey you have 4 guys following 12. However, in football, you have 1 referee and 2 linesman calling the game for 22 players on the largest field of any major sport.
I think this is apples to oranges. In baseball the critical thing is watching pitches (home plate), watching tags at each base up close (all 4), foul balls (1st and 3rd base), and the outfield (the base umps). In football, there are so many technical rules about who can touch who in what area of the field and how, did players move before the ball is snapped, invisible lines (scrimmage), plus the guys watching the boundary lines that you need 7 officials. Soccer is a simpler game with action (and most fouls) concentrated around the ball. FIFA linked the ARs to the center by headset for a reason. ARs can often see fouls a ref might not (the head butt in the Portugal-Netherlands match is a prime example.) ARs are responsible for about 25% of the field with the center handling the other 50% diagonally. TheRef at The RefBlog has a nifty diagram of this. I’m not sure adding a second center will help much since most referees are trained to stay within their segment, ensuring at least one official is near the action at all times. As long as the ARs are willing to consistently raise their flag when they see a foul and tell the center what it was, things should work smoothly. UPDATE: WorldCupBlog has some debate on adding officials to the pitch as well.
They also feel implementing radical new guidelines for bookings at the World Cup was a bad idea:
The record number of yellow and red cards by the end of the Group stage didn’t simply materialize out of thin air – referees were clearly told by FIFA that they needed to call the game in a particular fashion before the Cup, and they tried to stick to that. Once again, in principal, cracking down on all the things FIFA wanted stopped, which includes tackles from behind and fouls that interfere with scoring chances, is a good thing. What’s shocking is that FIFA instituted new guidelines at the World Freaking Cup, and have then backpedaled in the middle because they realized they screwed up.
Fair enough. However, I haven’t heard most people complaining because of the number of bookings. Instead they are upset with the uneven issuing of the cards where a bad tackle in one match gets a foul while in another it gets a yellow or even worse, a red. It also seemed like diving was being ignored during the cardfest when it was expected to be carded often. The inconsistency has been a major issue and FIFA knows it. FIFA President Joseph Blatter said as much in a recent interview:
In the same way that our members send their best teams, FIFA owes it to itself, in its own flagship competition, to send out the best referees. Even more so because hundreds of millions of players and referees around the world are watching what happens in Germany with the desire to improve themselves and understand how the game is changing. Instead, I’ve noted that instructions aren’t being followed consistently from one match to another. When a coach complains to me that shirt-pulling earned his player a yellow card one night and nothing for his team’s group rivals the next, how am I supposed to respond? And then there are the tackles from behind I’ve seen go unpunished and the violent conduct that has escaped sanction, not to mention the serious errors made in applying the rules.
This has been a major problem. I for one believe that the only way to really get player’s attention is to card the heck out of them for cheating, diving, and bad tackles. Nobody wants a red card or accumulated yellow suspension and if the calls are accurate for the most part, the players will modify their behavior in a hurry. The problem is everyone sees the inconsistencies and thus is in an uproar. One ref sees a vicious tackle (red) while another sees a dangerous play (yellow). In the end you have some teams penalized by the loss of a player for a simple foul while others get away with murder and stay at full strength. Football kNuts has a possible solution for the former which I think has some merit:
I would make certain that every yellow and red card given out at the World Cup were reviewed for validity, and immediately reversed if found to have little or no merit. Refs screw up, we all understand that. Admitting it occurs should not be a difficult topic to broach, and it’s understood that what happens during a game that affects the scoreline cannot be questioned during the game, but after the fact is another matter entirely. By doing this and questioning the ref involved, you would not have Michael Essien watching Ghana painfully from the sidelines for a nothing foul supposedly committed against the United States that even Bruce Arena was scratching his head about. Once again, making sure the stars are on the pitch is prioritized, it doesn’t undermine a ref’s authority during the game, and yet it still attempts to make sure the calls are correct in the end. Everyone can see the referees are fallible – admit when something was wrong, fix it, and move on.
The main problem I see here is that everyone will start to contest every booking. It’s an administrative nightmare. Maybe only allow red cards to be reviewed and drop it to a yellow if the red was unwarranted to avoid the suspension. Given how close matches are sometimes scheduled you’d have to have a system that would be in place at a moments notice. How you would work it for the professional leagues, I’m not sure. One would hope that the increase in bookings is a temporary spike and as players get the message, things will clean up on the pitch and the bookings will come down again, making possible reviews less frequent. I know I know, and monkeys may fly out of … well you get the idea. Moving on…
Officials in all sports make mistakes. Calls for video replay in soccer have been around for years and the Football kNuts feel its time has come:
when the referee does something to actively change the scoring, like award a penalty kick, wouldn’t it be nice if someone were there to review it immediately? Forget simple games, entire tournaments hinge on these decisions. It only makes sense to get a second pair of trained eyes to at least take a look and see if they agree. Humans are fallible, especially when attempting to observe events occurring at an extremely fast pace – events that are often intentionally disguised or falsified by the participants themselves. Create an instant replay official to review goals, penalties, and red card offenses with a 60 or 90 second review period, and you will dramatically change the game for the better. If the replay official doesn’t see conclusive evidence of a change, then the referee’s call stands.
Many sports have instituted instant replay to overturn bad calls, but mostly in sports with frequent breaks in the action. Soccer doesn’t stop except for bookings and even then it is brief. That’s the way it should be. Cameras in the net to monitor the goal line plane make sense, since anytime the ball goes in the net there is a reasonable break when a review could take place. But most fouls barely stop the action as teams just drop and kick. Bookings take a little longer, but not much. Offsides doesn’t stop things for long either. While I have no problem reviewing if a ball crossed the goal line plane and possibly, possibly, the awarding of PKs, anything else will take too much away from the flow of the game. Red cards are sometimes going to be subjective even with a replay so I’m not sure it gains you enough definitive evidence like you would get trying to see if the ball crossed the plane. I’d say PKs probably fall into the same subjective category and more often than not there won’t be enough conclusive evidence to overturn one. I just don’t see where a video replay is going to provide enough benefit outside of the goal to counter the impact it will have on the game as a whole.
One sore spot for many fans is the problem of shirt tugging and other annoyance fouls.
Professional players are going exploit the rules to the absolute maximum that they are allowed. In fact, one could say that it is in their job description. Unfortunately, this desire is generally contrary to that of the fan, who would prefer to see good football, and referees are ill-equipped to make sure players follow the rules. Say, for example, a player keeps walking up the back of the other players in the middle of the field. This is an obvious foul and gets whistled constantly in every single game. How exactly does one penalize a player for this behavior? Now, the ref can eventually give this player a yellow card for persistent infringement, but say the player still does it, but this time only on important plays. Do you red card someone for it? Technically the answer is yes, but few referees I know of have the huevos required to do such things. Additionally, if they did hand out a red for such a thing, you could expect the ref to be ripped apart in the media and possibly by FIFA itself.
The Football kNuts suggest implementing blue cards, similar to some indoor leagues, which you accumulate for lesser fouls and if you get enough, you are sent off for a period of time. I’m not sure this is such a bad idea. Now I agree that referees have enough to try and keep track of and I’m loathe to introduce anything that will delay the restart of play after a simple foul. However, the fourth official definitely could keep track of something like this. Not sure you have to wave a blue card or have the center write it down each time. After a foul, the center simply relays the offending player’s jersey to the 4th official via headset and if they accumulate a given number of fouls, a tougher sanction is issued. As for what that sanction should be, I’m undecided. Maybe that is when you issue a ‘blue card’ – when they accumulate 5 or 6 fouls – and that means they are gone for the rest of the match, but not suspended for the next, similar to what the Football kNuts suggested. Or just keep things simple and make it a red card sending off with next match suspension to really send the message that repeated BS fouls won’t be tolerated. The problem with any of this is, again, it requires consistent calling of fouls, something we haven’t necessarily seen.
And that is at the heart of the matter here. I have no problem with a record number of bookings if it means divers are getting carded too. However, up until recently, almost all the bookings were for fouls, or worse, fouls that didn’t merit a booking. The divers never seemed to get carded until the knockout round and even then it depended on the referee. The end result of this is fans got fed up and felt the refs were blowing every match and some focused on the sheer number of bookings as some sort of indication of this when it clearly wasn’t. The uproar over the Netherlands v Portugal match and the record number of bookings is a clear sign of this. I happen to think that while the ref probably could have shown his cards earlier to try and keep things in check, once both teams decided the could play a more physical game, most of his bookings were dead on. TheRef has a great post up with his take on that match, and he highlights the unsportsmanlike conduct of the Netherlands as a key factor in things going from bad to worse:
If there was a crucial mistake, it was the drop ball that the Netherlands, in a colossal show of disrespect, did not send back to Portugal. On Socref there are plenty of people who say in a similar situation they would invent some reason to stop and retake the restart; anything from a foul-throw, to my shoe is untied, whatever. To do so is to blatantly disregard the Laws of the Game for the sake of fairness, and had Ivanov done so, I’m sure Blatter et al. would be spitting venom as well – but we might have saved some, but not all of the battle from happening. In this case, we’ve seen what will happen if it’s not done (in other words, score one for disregarding the Law). Portugal took great offense from this move and took matters into their own hands, with brutal results, and in my humble opinion, was the biggest mistake, and caused the biggest hole for the referee.
Look, we all complain about the cheap fouls and grabbing that is ruining the game. FIFA’s answer is to card more often. I think this is a good plan, but you have to make sure your referees are ready to do that in a fairly consistent manner. This is no easy task, especially when you try to combat diving with increased bookings as well. Again, TheRef had some interesting thoughts based on a recent match that highlights why diving is so hard to call and the idea that because diving is considered such an evil thing and it is so subjective, many referees are very hesitant to card it:
She started playing much more physically, which as a player and observer I like, but as a referee I need to watch closely because all too often guys can’t handle a girl playing the same way they do. Then she took a dive. It was a good dive, too – I’m pretty sure I would have bought it if I were anyplace else on the field; she was trying to box in a defender with the ball near his corner and I ran to cover it from in-touch near her bench in order to be very close as it’s very common for elbows to be thrown when that happens in that area. I saw it clearly: no contact whatsoever, and down she went crying for a call, I waived her to get up in the fashion that trainers tell you not to do, but you see MLS refs do all the time, and let the game continue. Her bench even joked about the dive, "Can’t you give her something for her effort?" She was too close for me to joke back, so I stayed neutral, said no, and went back to play.
I should have carded her. The USSF said I should have carded her. FIFA says I should have carded her. Collina says I should have carded her. But I didn’t. I could have said it was because it was late in the game, would have only inflamed the situation (in fact, any tension on that team pretty much evaporated at that point – not sure why, maybe it was my showing that I really was on the ball even in such a slow game as that), but I would be lying to myself. I can’t speak for every referee, but I think even when we "know" it’s a dive, there’s something way back in the back of our minds that asks, "But what if it’s not? Would the caution make the injustice of a non-call, worse?"
It’s really easy to sell a call for a reckless challenge. There’s contact, it goes further than you want, and it doesn’t matter if the player got the ball or not – it’s simply a crossing of the line, issue the card. OK, there’s grey areas too, when you can at least try to get away with a stern talking-to because you’ll get more mileage out of it than flashing some plastic. Diving is cheating of the worst sort, and as referees, we, I, aid it because we want to be 100% sure before declaring that this player is of the worst sort; because when it comes down to it, I don’t think there’s anything referees fear more (aside from assaults, injuries, lawsuits, and others) than carding someone who doesn’t deserve it. [ed. emphasis mine]
And there you have it. FIFA made a conscious decision to increase the number of bookings to try and yank the players back into line. The problem is a booking is often a subjective thing and some referees are less likely to issue them than others. I’ll say it again, the record number of bookings this World Cup is NOT the problem. The problem is the inconsistent manner in which they have been issued. FIFA needed to make sure they had the referees on the same page and they obviously didn’t. Think about it – if the refs for the most part had called things consistently across the matches, the actual number of bookings wouldn’t have mattered. Instead, you’d leave with the feeling that all the teams got treated fairly and that’s just not happening right now. No amount of video replay, added officials, or foul accumulation can change that. For once I have to agree with Blatter: "I’ve noted that instructions aren’t being followed consistently from one match to another." No doubt. Fix that and we’re halfway there. Make sure those instructions ensure the divers get carded consistently and we’ll be a LONG way from where we are.
Soccer isn’t broken. But until we can have fouls and bookings called consistently in a manner that reduces the grabbing, cheating, and diving, it sure will seem that way.
Of course the referees will need FIFA’s steadfast support in all of this and sadly, they haven’t gotten it so far. As TheRef so eloquently notes about Blatter’s criticism of the officiating of the Netherlands v Portugal match:
FIFA has emphasized for its referees to call the World Cup a certain way, and when the system he desires turns out not to work well aesthetically, he shifts the blame off to someone else. The reality is that both teams in the game played thugball, not football. And while you could say that one or two of the yellow cards were harsh, you could not say they were undeserved. NONE of those cards came from the referee being deceived. NONE. But because FIFA is more concerned about the product they’re pushing to the sponsors rather than the sport (one only has to look at how FIFA has treated Cameroon for the last eight years for that), they have decided that it’s better PR to blame the referees than at two of the world’s premiere teams that played a farse of a game.
Only one team came out of this game not smelling like shit, and that’s Valentin Ivanov and his crew. The sad part is that the organization that should be supporting them has decided to dump an additional load, instead of clean up the mess the players made.
Word.
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June 29th, 2006 at 10:09 am
Thoughtful response to an article that took me far too long to write and still overlooked some stuff.
To be fair, I didn’t review the consistency of calls because 1) Refs are always going to call things the way they see it and past experience has often shown the same behavior will get different calls regardless of how obvious it seems to one person. Additionally, if FIFA can’t get their shit straight regarding what is a foul and how it should be called, then there is no hope whatsoever for anything else proposed. This is the most fundamental level of officiating possible – not getting this right across the board is ludicrous and we may as well give it up if that is going to continue to be the case.
The summary includes the modified point to the thesis statement, which basically falls in line with yours: football as it exists in the rules is not broken. Football as it is enforced and whistled on the field of the play clearly is.
–TK
June 29th, 2006 at 10:47 am
Oh in terms of far too long I myself spent WAY too long on mine – going to bed at 2AM to write a blog post is just wrong. Soccer is cleary an addiction!
Refs will always call things differently and no two games will ever be called the same. But the differences should be subtle. I think most fans agree that in this World Cup the differneces have been HUGE and that is a major problem. The beauty of soccer is its simplicity. But that doesn’t prevent FIFA from issuing guidelines related to what types of fouls should bring out the plastic. And it’s clear that FIFA’s desire to prevent ‘simulation’ clearly wasn’t communicated in such a way that most refs felt comfortable calling it.
No matter what FIFA does, we’ll always argue about calls. But we shouldn’t have such a target rich environment. I’ve seen blog posts that went through a single match and brought up a dozen or more calls that they felt were suspect. Any more than a handle is a serious issue. These are supposed to be the best refs in the world and we had one sent packing because he issued 3 yellows. People make mistakes, but why wasn’t the 4th official keeping track as well so he coudl radio the center after the 2nd yellow and say ‘um pull the red’
June 29th, 2006 at 10:51 am
That last is a good damn question. FIFA is clearly setting referees up to fail with the support they are delivering. With modern communication technology, mistakes like the Graham Poll bit simply should not happen. This whole issue feels like it’s plagued by a cloud of stupidity.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:57 am
And that’s the part that is interesting. Some crews it is clear the ARs are telling the center stuff often and the center acts on it when appropriate. Other times it seems (but hell from TV you can’t really KNOW) that they ARs call their offsides and obvious nearby fouls but that is it. A good AR has got to have his center’s back and make sure they know when stuff is happening or overlooked. It seems on some crews it does and some it doesn’t. I thought the crew headed by Rosetti in the Spain v France match did well – heck Rosetti even overturned his own call based on input from one of his ARs. That’s how it is supposed to be.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Soccer absolutely needs more referees on the field to reduce the number of bad calls.
However, I’d like to change the subject of why I think soccer is fundamentally flawed and yet somehow is the world’s most popular sport. From an American standpoint, the lack of sustained offense dooms it from ever becoming a popular sport in the US. People from other countries keep saying it’s the most popular sport in the world, and therefore the best. I believe that it’s the most popular sport because of a lack of awareness and knowledge of other team sports alternatives. In the US we have American football, basketball, baseball and hockey. Soccer suffers from comparisons to each of these sports in different ways. I’m not sure of what other team sports options are available in Europe, other than England having rugby (a prehistoric, one-dimensional version of American football) and cricket (a distant cousin to baseball that I don’t think is all that popular even in England). I know basketball and hockey are popular in some countries, but what other team sports alternatives are there in Europe? If soccer is the only major sport in a given country and exposure to alternatives is limited, then by default soccer becomes popular, but not based solely on its merits.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:37 pm
S, There are many failed attempts to bring sports (either form the US or elsewhere) to soccer crazy countries – and they are quickly tossed onto the scrape heap of history. I’d venture that soccer remains king overseas because it really IS popular and crushes any other sport. Different folks, different tastes. England has an American football league IIRC and it does OK – kind of like Arena football here. But soccer is a pasttime overseas just like baseball here. Believe me, if some enterprising person with some cash felt soccer fans were ripe for the picking because they had no choice, there would be major attempts to bring new sports over to compete. But soccer’s popularity is very strong and deep and more ‘new’ sports tend to take up a niche more than anything else.
As for cricket not being popular in England, well, maybe not as popular as soccer, but from what I’ve been told by British friends, it is still very popular.
July 1st, 2006 at 5:09 pm
I’ve now sat through parts of the quarterfinals today and cannot understand the appeal of this sport. 0-0 after overtime in the first game and 1-0 in the second game against the alleged best team in the world?? Brazil didn’t have a shot on goal until the 85th minute!! It seems the rules of soccer are designed to stifle offense (and therefore excitement): absurdly strict offsides rules, penalties and yellow cards for minor infractions, no hands allowed to touch the ball…..
In American football and basketball turnovers are a vital statistic. They’re relatively infrequent and measure when an offensive drive has been stopped prematurely. They usually contribute to the outcome of the game, with the team with fewer turnovers often winning the game. In soccer turnovers occur so frequently that it makes the sport seem like it’s stuck in neutral to me. Can someone please articulate what it is about the sport that is so appealing? The occassional brilliant one-on-one moves don’t make for a great sport when it’s not combined with some kind of offense and the potential to score, or at least threaten to score.
July 1st, 2006 at 5:33 pm
S,
I’ll give it a go….
1) None stop action. The clock never stops, the game never stops, except for injuries and cards. Granted, many World Cup matches have been a bit dull with heavy defense and little attacking. But watch Premiership on FSC sometime. Breakaways can occur out of nowhere. Most runs up the side are tense for fans. Seeing Zidane dance around, I think it was Ronaldinho, was a thing of beauty.
2) A 0-0 match can be very exciting, with shots on goal, incredible saves, beautiful footwork (See France just now – their footwork and ball control was amazing)
3) A Penalty kick shootout is extremely intense and exciting usually – the one between England and Portugal was.
4) Regarding turnovers, when you see a match like Brazil v France, they are less frequent since the players handle the ball very well. And personally, I’d rather watch soccer where a player who loses the ball can generally turn around and get it right back, where in basketball, a turnover is very difficult to do without pulling down a foul.
5) Brazil had an off match – one shot on goal for them is stunning. They had between 6 and 14 shots ON GOAL in their previous matches.
6) The beauty of soccer and it’s lower scores is on any given day any team can beat another team. Upsets are still rare, but do happen.
7) Limited subs – this causes the first half to often differ from the second half as the players get tired and rely less on speed and more on passing.
8) The fans. All fans cheer loudly for their teams in all sports, but soccer fans are amazing. To hear 40,000 England fans sing in unison during their match was just awesome.
9) Offsides is always maligned, but to me makes soccer what it is. You can’t hang near the goal. It forces the offense to stay near the defense which means they must break at just the right time and will usually always have a defender hot on their heels if they time it right. That’s exciting.
Some sports pack a lot of excitement and action into a small fraction of the overall game (think football) That’s fine. With soccer, you neevr know when all heck will break loose.
Don’t get me wrong – I like watching the NFL and college basketball. NFL is a tough and precise game. Basketball is enjoyable but I admit to hating the strategic fouls that make 30 seconds drag on for 15 minutes. Have never liked baseball – that to me is boring pitch after pitch after pitch.
Now diving is a problem and FIFA is trying to limit it – not sure if they’ll succeed or not. But a match like France v Brazil was great. Some cards, a couple that were questionable, but the players fought hard for every ball and there wasn’t the constant hitting the turf when you got near an opponent.
Sports fans like different sports for different reasons. As a coach myself, I love to watch players at the top level control the ball with such grace and agility. But that’s me.
Any other readers care to take a stab at it?
July 2nd, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Soccer Dad, Thanks for your reply. You bring up some good points and I’ll keep them in mind. I’m going to try to watch both semifinals and the finals of the World Cup.
Do you think that soccer will ever become a major sport in the US? I don’t think it will because I believe most US sports fans feel the same way about soccer that I do- not enough offense to keep it interesting. My curiousity with the World Cup is because it’s truly an international phenomenon and it’s only every four years. I can’t see myself ever getting interested in a professional soccer league where I’d watch it on TV or attend a game between US city or regional teams.