The Second Goal
June 21, 2010 13 Comments
I was reading this worthwhile soccer rant by Ferdinand Bardamu when I recalled my idea for fixing soccer:
Add a second goal.
It could be just a little goal, even hockey-sized. Just a little goal off to the side of the main one. Still worth one point.
Can anyone honestly say this wouldn’t make soccer dramatically more exciting?
The problem with soccer, clearly, is that there just isn’t enough scoring. I gather that soccer enthusiasists would see that as an ugly-American, no-attention-span, TV-addict type of complaint. Because all Americans have ADHD and sub-Neanderthal IQs thus need constant scoring to pay attention. But that’s not the main problem with too little scoring at all. There isn’t that much more scoring in baseball yet it’s far more tense.
The main problem with soccer is that (unlike even baseball) the outcome of a game isn’t in doubt for nearly a high enough percentage of the game. At any given time in a game, if you look at the scoreboard, you’re looking at the Most-Likely-Final-Score. If it’s tied, chances are, the game will end in a tie. If one team is ahead, chances are, that team will win. So why are you still watching? is a question you can ask yourself of every soccer game – at virtually any time in the game.
Games are only interesting if the outcome is in doubt. Right? Imagine a limiting case where the goals were one inch wide. No scoring possible. The score will be 0-0, regardless of either team’s ability. Can we at least admit that this would be a boring game to watch?
Soccer is not like that, obviously. The goals are wider than one inch. They are wider than the ball. They are even wide enough to allow for (I guesstimate) about 0.9 goals per game. So soccer is unlike my limiting hypothetical ‘no-scoring-possible’ game. It’s just that it’s not unlike it enough.
Now compare soccer to basketball. In a typical pro basketball game, each teams scores perhaps 40-60 times per game. Does basketball really suffer from this? The outcome is in doubt a lot. It can swing back and forth. Yes, one team might dominate from the start (due to better ability). Shouldn’t they (if they have better ability)? But as long as teams are not hugely separated in ability, chances are, a basketball game will stay interesting to watch for most of the duration. And teams can beat better teams, it happens all the time. So there is doubt in basketball. Clearly this is a better-engineered sport than soccer. And I say this even though I’m not really a basketball fan.
If you think about why basketball is this way, it’s primarily because it’s far easier to score. Teams score on a significant percentage of their attempts (I don’t know whether it’s 20% or 40% but it’s significant.) Why couldn’t soccer be this way? What’s the reason?
One reason seems to be that offensive attacks are too hard, and defense too easy, in soccer. Well okay then, make defense harder and offense easier. One way is to just make the goal bigger. I’ve considered this but not sure that’s the way to go, because you’d just increase the number of Hail Mary-type kicks.
A ‘second goal’, however, and suddenly you’ve got something. Does the defense keep two players back? Do they still just keep the one goalie back and hope he can run to the side goal if need be? With two goals to cover, chances are only 9 instead of 10 guys get to cover their half of the field for defense. Now you’ve got more holes and lines and angles. The offense will have an easier time.
The only counterargument I can see to this is “the offense will have an easier time!” Yes, the offense will have an easier time. Exactly. Feature not bug. Do you want to make soccer better or don’t you?
I get the feeling people don’t. If soccer were more interesting, certain folks wouldn’t be able to get nearly as much mileage out of pretending to like it.
Greetings – interesting argument ….. but
I recall seeing a piece of research (sry no link to hand) that showed that the reason that soccer was the ‘global’ No 1 game was that the low scoring meant that, although (as per your assumption) the score at any time has a high probability of being THE score, the outcomes over a season were more random than for other sports – therefore although the best teams do win on average (ManUtd, Chelsea etc) the result of each game is more random than other ‘pro’ sports and therefore more exciting to the fans…..Go figure, who’dathunkit……
Hi Arthur –
That does make some sense – with so few average goals per game, a 1-0 upset is far more possible. Kind of like how you might be able to detect a biased coin in 1000 coinflips, but not in one or two. I don’t know that ‘match outcomes are more similar to coinflips than in other sports’ really works for me as a defense of soccer however.
Baseball seems to have pretty ‘random’ outcomes (even the best teams lose 35-40% of the time, the median score is probably something like 5-3) but they make up for it by having a huge # of games (162 per season, 7-game playoffs). Suppressing scoring to encourage ‘random’ outcomes when there aren’t that many games to begin with, tournaments are single-elimination, the games are otherwise 90 minutes of nothing (soccer is amorphous and featureless outside the scoring – I know, I know, it’s ‘fluid’ and ‘beautiful’..whatever) just seems like a recipe for masochism.
Seems to me that the only concept behind low-scoring-for-random-outcomes is that the underdog could score one goal out of luck, hold the line, and win 1-0. In other words, if scoring is rare, then an underdog’s luck could more easily tip the balance. This may be true but there is more than one way to construct a game where luck can play an outcome. I think my second-goal idea actually accomplishes this. With a second goal, you would see some scoring on some wacky plays – i.e. lucky plays. If luck favors the underdog then a second-goal should favor the underdog.
Anyway, who am I to ‘fix’ soccer, right? Doesn’t matter whether I like it, plenty of others do….
Sometimes I wonder if even the soccer audiences really are into it for the game itself. How can they have time to pay attention to what’s going on in the field when they’re so busy drinking, puking, rioting, painting themselves their team colors, chanting, waving flags, blowing on those annoying little horns, and so on? And here comes an American who actually tries to pay attention to the game (what he can see of it through the puke haze, the rage sweat curtain, and the girls with bare titties painted the colors of the Brazilian flag), and he realizes that there’s nothing going on on the field except some guys in shorts kicking a ball back and forth for hours, just like they did when they were kids playing all day in the streets of their favelas instead of going to school.
Hmm, I don’t see any earthly way that soccer beats Brazilian-flag titties in a pay-attention face-off.
You’re right: Americans who claim to like soccer do so because it’s so boring. The whole bunch of nothing that’s happening on the field allows certain folks to blather on about about “nuances” and pretend to all types of esoteric knowledge they don’t actually have, and when the rare, fluky goal does happen (and almost all of them seem to have a much higher luck factor than anyone acknowledges), these people can claim they saw the whole thing coming based on their minute analysis of the entire field of play. In traditional American sports, by contrast, it’s easier to see which is the better team (or which coach has the better game plan) because fluky plays can only account for some small fraction of the total points scored.
[that this sounds exactly like how liberals describe their policies, and that those Americans who are most vociferous in their love of soccer are invariably liberals, is a correlation I'm not qualified to comment on]
Actually most of the Americans I’ve heard praise soccer (i.e. pretend to like it) never get as far as pretending to actually like its ‘nuances’ etc. Far more common is the American whose praise for soccer consists mostly of praising the fact that other people – i.e., Third World people – like soccer. The subtext here is ‘it’s sure nice all those low-class masses have a game to distract them’. In the same vein, a bit of faux soccer fandom is always nice as a form of slumming. Since it requires no genuine appreciation of soccer per se, this can be easy and highly effective as a posture to signal that you’re superior to the other upper-class white Westerners around you because of how in touch with the masses you are.
And there’s your correlation with leftism….
I’m not sure this is exactly right, but I think it’s on the right track. I wonder, as per comment #1, whether Americans are more pro-meritocracy than other countries; we see a game where there are two scores per game, both of which seem to be entirely random, and say “WTF?”, and foreigners say, “How exciting, can’t wait to see which marble comes out of the urn next.” Maybe this is also why they tolerate penalty kicks and even worse officiating than we seem to get in our major league sports.
Some smart alec — though maybe not an intentional one — suggested that if Americans didn’t like the low scores they could multiply them by 7 as we do in football. Leaving aside the fact that it would still be much lower scoring, in football, a 20 yard gain is meaningful; a turnover is meaningful. Neither of these results in points, but they do substantially affect the probability of the next score; part of what annoys about soccer is that you can’t place a 25% chance on the goal’s being scored until the ball is most of the way from the foot of the kicker to the goal and goalie.
There’s a website that has a huge database of NFL games and has worked out, for any given score differential, time on the clock, field position, down and yards to go, what the probability (based on historical data) is of each team winning. They calculate this and plot it over the course of a game; you get small jumps when a team scores or turns the ball over, and larger ones near the end of close games, but it tends to be fairly continuous; you can see a team gradually accumulating an advantage. If you did something like this with soccer, the plot would be pretty much featureless except for large jumps when goals are scored. I think this encapsulates what turns off a lot of Americans about the sport, even if they wouldn’t put it in these terms.
I’m not, incidentally, particularly anti-soccer. I like to monitor the exploits of our national team, even when the World Cup isn’t taking place. I don’t usually watch a whole lot of actual play, though, and when I do, I think of it as about as engaging as Two and A Half Men.
Funny, I mentally divide football scores by 7 anyway…and what’s with the slight against Two and a Half Men??
The point about accumulating an advantage in football, and the fate of the game being relatively continuous, vs random jumps in soccer, is right on. Of course, according to the first poster, that’s precisely why soccer is popular. Go figure.
I do wonder if it’s really, empirically true though that the low scoring favors upsets/surprises. Doesn’t it still seem like the good teams dominate and the bad teams don’t have a chance? Seems to me the low-scoring environment just forces good teams to focus more on defense than they otherwise might, but overall, they win the same % of the time. Not that I pay enough attention to soccer to really know. But I wonder.
I think leave soccer be. There are more vital things to take care of.
1. I was thinking that in basketball there should be 6 or 7 players and 2 balls! How about that?
The idea of a second basket also came to mind.
Sometimes the same team would be attacking with 2 balls. Other times one team would be in possession of 1 ball and the other of the other. You can’t say it wouldn’t be interesting.
2. More daring: In Tennis (which I’ve come to love and since you never mention, you probably don’t) I hope that for one year, women will have to wear evening gowns and purses, possibly also mini high heels and men, just to be fair, will have to wear suits, ties, the lot. Possibly with a small briefcase.
I’m totally on board with all of that.
Good. Relieved (was worried the men’s briefcase was over-the-top).
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