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Yeah, let's go ahead and change a sport that has been working for hundreds of years simply to satisfy the whim of idiots who don't understand it to begin with...
Why the is anyone still arguing with this jackass?
Not with the size of the pitch, you couldn't do a 3 second rule.
And disallowing camping inside the box would automatically force defenses to retreat to basically the goal line. You're actually making the game more defensive instead of more offensive.
You're simply not going to get the scoring of sports like Basketball or Handball in football. Bigger pitch, no hands, more players, different tactics...
You either like football or watch something else...
Yeah, let's go ahead and change a sport that has been working for hundreds of years simply to satisfy the whim of idiots who don't understand it to begin with...
Why the is anyone still arguing with this jackass?
They prevent REAL fast break opportunities (like we see in basketball). Players cant "release" and let their man go by to give themselves a one-on-one shot with the goalie (like we see in hockey) because they would be offsides!!!
As for "we dont want players camping in the goal box", I say:
1) They should be able to do whatever they want. Much like the three second rule, its giving an artificial advantage to the defense because league officials are afraid teams couldnt defend against it or make the other team pay for doing (which they could).
2) A "three second" rule in the goal box would be a much better rule than stupid "offsides".
All sports have rules that prevent you from either flat out cheating or taking away the spirit of the game. Basketball has a 3 second rule, hand check rule, basketball interference, etc etc etc.
Removing the offside rule from Soccer would be analogous to allowing Yao ming to camp under the basket in the NBA. He doesn't even need to come back and defend. It completely breaks the spirit of the game.
And the offside rule has been greatly softened over the years. It used to take 3 players, and it's been reduced to two. Also, later on, the concept of 'active player' was introduced, basically allowing the play to move on if the player that was offside was not actively part of the play.
Stolen from another message board:
"on why soccer sucks":
The offsides rule. So you can't pass the ball to your teammate who has gained an advantage on his opponent, right? Huh? In American football (and other sports) , that is the entire idea: Get behind the defense and score some points. God forbid The 11 guys on the field would be required to actually play defense. And, there is a goalie on the back end, to boot.
And another. I agree with this one 110%:
Soccer is the third world lowest common denominator sport. Its only "popular" in other countries because it takes less skill than any other sport and can be played by the most unskilled and is cheaper than any other sport. If someone invents a sport that is cheaper and less skilled (and that would be a hard achievement since soccer is so easy and dirt cheap), that sport would immediately overtake soccer as the "most popular sport in the world". These foreign countries don't like soccer because there is something good about it, they simply have no other sport except soccer because they can't afford bats and plastic pads and basketballs, they just kick a bunch of plastic bags rolled up into a ball and the game takes no skill so you don't need coaches, trainers and equipment. Soccer is "the most popular sport in the world" only because the world has no choices and freedom to choose sports. Other countries have to resort to soccer but would gladly take any other sport. look at how baseball's WBC has taken over or how basketball is now going to be bigger than soccer everywhere in the world.
The other thing related to this is that there's a beauty in the sport itself. You don't need to have the instant gratification of goal scoring just to enjoy a game. Now, some people would agree with this (most every soccer fan) and some don't (most casual fans, very common in Americans). Take a game like Argentina - Nigeria. That game was fun to watch, could have easily finished 8-3, but ended up being 1-0.
Ofcourse soccer can also have bad games, bad teams and bad players. Not really different than any other sport in that regard.
And BTW, the whole 'world has no freedom to choose another sport' is such a bunch of baloney. You can catch American Football, NBA Basketball and even Baseball all around the world these days. People just happen not to like those sports as much as they like soccer...
I don't expect to get scoring up like basketball or handball but get it up where getting more than 1 goal is possible which it seems like it is not for most teams in this World Cup.
Wow...didnt even think of this one:
Soccer is not objective. There is no play clock. The game doesn”t end after the clock has run down. This adds bias, subjectivism and appeals to lower intellects, and it destroys the drama from last second victories. Contrast such clumsy timekeeping (shame on the Swiss, who should know better) and the lack of any discernable strategy with the strategic precision of the two-minute drill in football.
That went right over your head. His point is that they cant buy the stuff in third world countries.
Read this:
His point was "they have no choice but to play soccer". You cant make a sock filled with newspaper bounce.Soccer is Third World expensive. Ordinarily, this would not be a problem. Most people don”t consider buying hockey or football equipment expensive in civilized countries, but in the context of the rest of the world, it is expensive. On the other hand, soccer is dirt cheap – and by dirt cheap, I mean slum kids in Brazil rolling up balls of dirt to kick around.
Defensive play is nothing new. However, as teams hockey for position and are required to actually go out there and win games, you'll see teams taking more chances and you'll see teams scoring more.
The goal scoring average in the world cup has been a little over 3 goals per game for the past 50+ years. I don't think we'll see much change here.
@ the objective factor.
Are you really going to go there when I can name ref error in every single sport?
Why can't you just say that you don't enjoy it? I don't get you trying to some how rationalize it as fact when all you keep presenting are opinions.
Those are American sports and are not played as much around the world. Soccer has a longer tradition outside of the United states.
4 pages thread to confirm what we already know: da_suns_fan is an idiot
They put up the injury time (minutes) or time that goes over in the game well before the final whistle.
And yeah, I think the reason soccer is best in places like England and France is because they're too poor to afford baseball equipment.
The biggest disservice done to logic and reason in this thread hasn't been done by da_suns_fan over there, but by the people actually engaging him in discussion as if his point has any ing merit.
Which is probably coming from somebody that never lived in a third world country. I can't speak for Somalia, but where I lived you could buy Hockey sticks, softball bats, tennis racquets, baseball bats, there was enough basketball courts to play... People just rather play soccer. That's the sport they enjoy playing and identify with.
His point is baloney. Ginobili was raised in a third world country and he choose to play basketball. In 1st world countries like Germany or Spain soccer is king, even though 'supposedly' they could choose any other sport to play.
Soccer remains king, but only because it had a few hundred year head start.
Basketball WILL take over. You see it everywhere. From South America, to Eastern Europe, to China to the number of international players filling up NBA rosters. Europe will probably hold out the longest, but eventually they'll see the light too. It is inevitable because basketball is a far superior game and much more fun to play.
Except the USA apparently, where the US-Eng game beat all 4 of the first NBA finals games.
Fail.
As the World Cup looms, an oft-repeated question deserves re-repe ion: Why doesn't America love soccer along with the rest of the world?
Necessary disclaimer: Yes, a lot of people here play and enjoy soccer. But you don't have to visit South America, Africa or Western Europe to understand that it's just not the same. Elsewhere, it's massive. Here, it's niche, whatever incremental growth in interest might be occurring.
The reasons go beyond the common and (of course) highly subjective complaint of "it's boring to watch." There's politics involved. And history! Brace yourselves; it's time to get armchair-philosophical.
CNN addresses the question of soccer's secondary status here by looking at the sport's colonial legacy: America's reluctance to embrace the game, with its British roots, could be related to the historical relationship between the two countries. Plus, by the time soccer reached American shores in the late 19th Century, America was creating its own sports, and its own version of football.
Likewise, the Boston Globe's Andre Markovits, a few years back, suggested that while other countries built their sports cultures around soccer, America's was already too developed upon soccer's arrival to make much room for the sport.
British writer Michael Mandelbaum says soccer has no hope of competing in a society where the "big three" are so dominant:
Even in as large and wealthy a country as the United States, where the national appe e for playing, and even more so for watching, games is enormous, the cultural, economic and psychological space available for sport is limited and that space is already taken. Baseball, American football and basketball have long since put down deep roots, claimed particular seasons of the year as their own (although they now overlap) and gained the allegiance of the sports-following public...
One in particular of those three sports - basketball - poses a singular obstacle to the national acceptance of football. The two are too similar for them both to succeed. Each belongs to the family of games whose object is to put a ball (or similar object) in a goal.
Circa the last World Cup, in 2006, USA Today examined the question and suggested its answer was related to economics. American soccer, the story suggests, is "the casual sport of middle-class suburbanites and their elementary school offspring."
A historian told the paper class is a likely factor: "It's also worth noting that the sports that gain popularity in any culture tend to have great appeal with the lower classes. That's true with soccer in the rest of the world and with sports like basketball here."
That's certainly arguable, as are the larger geopolitical issues you can read into the soccer dichotomy, and one needn't dig too deeply before realizing soccer-bashing is a relatively common intellectual exercise.
In 2006, Steven M. Warshawsky argued in the American Thinker that the disinterest has everything to do with the relatively low scores in soccer games and what it says about American culture:
My theory is that Americans have neither the belief system nor the temperament for such a sisyphean sport as soccer. We are a society of doers, achievers, and builders. Our country is dynamic, constantly growing, and becoming ever bigger, richer, and stronger. We do not subscribe to a "zero sum" mentality. We do not labor for the sake of laboring. And we like our sports teams to score. Scoring is a tangible accomplishment that can be identified, quantified, tabulated, compared, analyzed, and, above all else, increased. This is the American way.
Go big or go home, in other words. In an essay syndicated in Slate, writer Dave Eggers acknowledges the widespread popularity soccer enjoys among American youth, suggesting it feeds into the "go home" mentality of kids who aren't athletically inclined but whose parents still sign them up for soccer:
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The beauty of soccer for very young people is that, to create a simulacrum of the game, it requires very little skill. There is no other sport that can bear such incompetence. With soccer, 22 kids can be running around, most of them aimlessly, or picking weeds by the sidelines, or crying for no apparent reason, and yet the game can have the general appearance of an actual soccer match. If there are three or four coordinated kids among the 22 flailing bodies, there will actually be dribbling, a few legal throw-ins, and a couple of times when the ball stretches the back of the net. It will be soccer, more or less.
Anecdotally, he equates soccer with communism, and that our culture's relative indifference to it is a symptom of American exceptionalism.
(A)s a nation of loony but determined inventors, we prefer things we thought of ourselves. The most popular sports in America are those we conceived and developed on our own: football, baseball, basketball. If we can claim at least part of the credit for something, as with tennis or the radio, we are willing to be passively interested. But we did not invent soccer, and so we are su ious of it.
In an essay in his book "Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs," social critic Chuck Klosterman argues that soccer's worldwide dominance is precisely why it deserves to be overlooked in America:
Soccer fanatics love to tell you that soccer is the most popular game on earth and that it's played by 500 million people every day, as if that somehow proves its value. Actually, the opposite is true. Why should I care that every single citizen of Chile and Iran and Gibraltar thoughtlessly adores "football"? Do the people making this argument also assume Coca-Cola is ambrosia? Real sports aren't for everyone. And don't accuse me of being the Ugly American for degrading soccer. That has nothing to do with it. It's not xenophobic to hate soccer; it's socially reprehensible to support it. To say you love soccer is to say you believe in enforced equality more than you believe in the value of compe ion and the capacity of the human spirit.
Writer Stephen H. Webb goes a step (or more) further by arguing that the politics of the soccer field are "ruining America" by reinforcing our therapeutic culture: "Indeed, soccer is a liberal's dream of tragedy: It creates an egalitarian playing field by rigorously enforcing a uniform disability" (by which he means not using your hands).
The links start to pile up the more you look around. The Weekly Standard wrote of the sport's inherent nihilism. The Huffington Post said the game defies America's meritocracy. The Atlantic Review dissented against the Western arrogance evident in such thinking. And so on.
None of this has been for lack of trying. The failure, for example, of David Beckham to ignite rabid interest in Major League Soccer is part of a history of unsuccessful attempts to stoke American interest in the game.
Slate offers a fascinating account of how, in the 1920s, soccer was on the verge of becoming a huge sport when the surging American Soccer League collapsed for obscure reasons. The USA Today story mentioned earlier explains how the North American Soccer League peaked during the 1970s and went out with disco.
So, soccer fans, after the e of World Cup-related enthusiasm dies down, does the game have any hope of becoming a quote-unquote major sport in the U.S.? And what does it say about America that it's never cracked the stranglehold of the big three?
Thats not surprising. USA vs. England is different from Boston vs LA. Especially when the world cup happens once every four years. It will draw our national interest from a patriotic perspective, but if USA gets eliminated I doubt anyone will care. I imagine most olympic events draw a higher rating than the the typical NBA finals game.
Are you suggesting soccer is more popular than basketball?
I doubt 95% of Americans could name a single player playing in this world cup. Not just any player on team USA. Any player for any team. That 1-1 snoozefest did little to help things.
The Third World argument for soccer is hilarious and ironic. The NBA is dominated by a lot of players who grew up living in the lowest socioeconomic bracket in America. Soccer requires a ball and two nets - so does basketball. If you've ever lived in the ghetto, you'd know can find a ball court somewhere.
Why don't we see the NBA dominated by upper-class suburban children who should've had access to all this awesome equipment you talk of?
Are you trying to contradict or reinforce my point?
Basketball is the most popular in the poorest areas of the country for the same reasons soccer is the most popular in the most poor countries in the world for the reasons YOU JUST SAID!!
Seriously?!!
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