Post-Cup Rant -- Soccer doesn't have to suck so much

The 'World's Sport'' can save itself by making a few obvious but long overdue changes that will make it less boring, less idiotic and more entertaining to Americans who are right to dislike it.

It’s up to America to save the game of soccer.

As the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina just proved, soccer is not a spectator sport.

For Americans, it’s an ordeal, a cruel form of quadrennial mass torture that somewhere around 50 million Americans claimed to have watched on Sunday without falling asleep or deciding during the second hydration break they’d rather clean out the garage than watch a nil-nil game featuring one team that had taken no shots at the other team’s goal.

We Americans know it is supposed to be the “World’s Sport.” For decades we’ve heard the BS about the superiority of soccer from the Euros and our own America-hating elites.

Soccer, we are constantly lectured by Europeans who’d rather die of heat stroke than use air-conditioners, is not like the crass, commercialized and brutally violent American brand of “football.”

It’s a simple and pure game of skill with working-class roots, national and cultural importance and high sweat socks.

But it doesn’t matter to Americans what the Euros claim about the exalted virtue of soccer.

It doesn’t matter how many billion people around the world are willing to watch great athletes imported from other countries for an hour and a half as they kick a ball back and forth while chanting and singing and waiting and waiting and waiting for an explosive goal that will have a 80-20 chance of being disqualified because the toe of the scorer’s left Adidas F50 was 4 millimeters offside.

OK. That’s a slight exaggeration and a little unfair. Some soccer sucks a lot more than others.

According to this expert, the World Cup style of slow-motion soccer doesn’t come close to the excitement of the English Premier League’s, where there’s less fiddling around, more intensity, fewer fouls called, more upsets and more attacks on the goal.

Nevertheless, we ordinary NFL Americans know the truth when we try to stay awake to watch a soccer game.

Soccer – the game itself – is intrinsically boring and every four years the World Cup comes along to remind us how painfully true that is.

During this year’s World Cup run I suffered through at least 24 hours’ worth of televised soccer. Lucky I didn’t try to listen to the games in my car on SiriusXM.

I admit that for the first time in my long, sports-saturated life, I actually enjoyed the more important games. I rooted — naively, I now realize -- for little countries like Norway to upset England or underdog Morocco to top France.

It was especially touching to see the nationalistic fervor shown by the rabid mobs of foreigners who followed their teams to American host cities like Dallas and LA.

They proudly wore their countries’ colors, waved their flags and belted out their anthems without shame or irony for the wars their kings and queens started or the Atlantic slave trade they invented and perfected. Even the zillionaire superstar players didn’t lip-synch.

I’ve learned more about how soccer is played in the last month than I did in my previous 78 years.

And now that I’ve become a “football” expert, I feel as qualified as any aging American sports fan to offer some fundamental fixes to a global sport that most of us in the USA will forget exists for the next four years.

Sadly, it’s about 150 years too late to fix soccer’s foundational flaw and the root cause of its infamous tedium – the outlawing of the use of hands and arms.

That rule was implemented in the 1860s or thereabouts when the local English “football” clubs of the era foolishly banned the use of two of our species’ four limbs because the games were being ruined by too many bloody drunken fist fights.

I don’t pretend to know what can be done about FIFA’s alleged corruption. Corruption is the true global team sport, so maybe it’s a job for the experts at the UN or the Trump administration.

But soccer isn’t hopeless. It can be fixed with good-old American know-how.

It doesn’t need to be turned into a three-hour profit center like our brand of pro football has become.

It doesn’t need dozens of commercial breaks, more hydration timeouts, squads of nubile cheerleaders, woke halftime rap concerts or scary B-2 flyovers.

But here are few obvious but long overdue changes the planet’s most popular sport can make to bring itself into the 21^st century.

— Reduce the size of the “pitch” by a third. Running alone, even when kicking a ball in front of you, is not exciting after 40 yards.

— Institute a shot clock to outlaw the “four-corner offense” that lets teams pass the ball around in their own territory for half the game. The shot clock saved college and pro basketball and the pitch clock has saved major league baseball. It would save soccer from its major flaw.

— A trip to a penalty box for serious fouls. It works great in hockey and the threat of being short a striker or defender for five minutes would reduce fouls (and injuries) and increase scoring. Waving yellow cards at players is silly.

— Eliminate or loosen up the offside rule. No one understands it or sees it occur except the refs. Defensive players can manipulate it to their advantage, and it negates half of break-away goals, which are already nearly non-existent.

— Penalty time for all writhing, flopping and embellishments. Five minutes in the box would stop the bad acting, speed up the game and end the embarrassment of seeing superb athletes pretend to be dying for five minutes and then pop up and run 50 yards.

— Use tearaway jerseys to stop the blatant holding that constantly goes on and is rarely enforced.

— Finally, no tie games. Ever. Extra time plus shootouts should decide every game.

These fixes would save soccer from its tired and often silly scoreless self. They would make it more popular (and profitable) in the USA, where all the big money is.

And no matter what country you come from or what you call it, “football” would be a much more exciting game to watch from a stadium or your living room.

Bio

Bill Steigerwald is the author of 30 Days a Black Man, which retells the true story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle’s undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. Sprigle’s original series is in Undercover in the Land of Jim Crow. Steigerwald also wrote Dogging Steinbeck, which exposed the truth about the fictions and fibs in Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people. And in 2022 he published Grandpa Bear Goes to Washington, a satirical kids book for all ages that all polar bears and lovers of freedom will like.