So, the U.S. is out. Not terribly surprising. Anyone familiar with sports is familiar with the maxim that you have to play the whole game; usually, this is a monition to a team that is winning in the waning minutes. With us, it’s a reminder to the defense that they have to show up before minute nineteen.
In any event, forward we go in our discussion of reasons Americans don’t like soccer.
The explanation: “Soccer is boring.”
The attraction: This one appeals to both fans and detractors of soccer. To the detractor, it’s a claim that Americans don’t like sports where 95% of the time is spent kicking the ball back and forth, 4% of the time is spent faking career-ending injuries, and 1% of the time goals are scored on set pieces, penalty kicks, and then taken away by the the ref because his rheumatism acted up. Real sports are ones with high scores and manly men being manly. To the fan, it’s a claim that Americans, unenlightened brutes that they are, are unable to see the beauty of a game unless it comes with lots of scoring and instant replays and space monkeys, and football is simply too subtle and complicated. Everyone gets to feel smug and superior.
The problem: There’s actually a jigger of truth mixed up in all this. It’s not that the game is low-scoring; fans of baseball were raving this month or last that a bad call cost a pitcher a perfect game, which is one in which quite literally nothing happens. People watch golf, and apparently have been known to be entertained by it. It’s also not that the game is terribly complicated or taxing for American brains. There are basically three rules, and one of them is that you can’t use your hands. We got this. Moreover, it’s not as though Americans have never heard of soccer. Among other things, it’s the middle class suburban pastime for children, largely because you don’t need much equipment, there are basically three rules, and anything that wears out the little rugrats so they sleep is welcomed.
What we don’t have in the U.S. is a large tradition of watching good soccer. And this hurts soccer’s popularity during the World Cup, and I suspect more generally, because soccer is a game that is mostly about flow. A game that is about flow is a game where elegant control of the ball-like object leads to the creation of chances to achieve the goal in the game; the opposing team stops them by interrupting them, and taking over. Soccer, basketball, hockey, and were I in the mood for a challenge I’d argue NASCAR (um, minus the ball bit), are games like this. Games of flow can be contrasted with games of plays, where one team tries to do something to get points, and the other team is defending. Football and baseball are games like this.
One of the advantages of games of plays for the casual spectator is that the action in the game is very easy to follow. Even if the spectator doesn’t know all of the details of the strategy or tactics, it’s relatively easy to describe what the teams are doing. They’re trying to make it ten yards in three or four tries; they’re trying to thwart them. He’s trying to hit the ball; he’s trying to throw it so he can’t hit it. There’s an aggressor, and a defender, and it’s relatively clear what everyone’s up to.
Soccer is in a tough position. It’s a low scoring game of flow, unlike basketball where flow usually leads to baskets; where fighting isn’t allowed, unlike low-scoring hockey; and for the casual spectator, figuring out flow is very difficult. Take the Brazil-North Korea matchup. Brazil! Joga bonito! Five World Cups! North Korea! May actually be permitted to have a soccer ball now! Final score: 2-1. That’s an awful lot of “what makes the team good?” occurring in things that aren’t obvious unless one already understands the flow of the game as played at a high level.
To understand the flow of any game, one has to watch a lot of it, and it’s hard to decide to do that in the case of soccer given that top-level games are not generally shown on the main networks, and it’s a rare person who buys premium cable to watch a sport they don’t understand.
So, who are your favorites of the remaining teams?
The Edge of the American West 
42 comments
July 3, 2010 at 5:30 am
zunguzungu
I find the remaining cup roster quite uncompelling now that Brazil and Ghana are out. The best I can come up with is Paraguay, whose participation in the War of the Triple Alliance was so bad-awful-gnarly as to give the possibility of a game against Argentina a certain piquancy. But they’re likely to get knocked out, too.
Re: soccer is boring, a big part of the problem for Americans, I think, is that watching soccer requires you to care for teams before the suspense of waiting for a goal takes over. Even when the flow isn’t pretty — which is often — you only feel the suspense if you care about the characters. And americans don’t come into it caring (except for US games).
July 3, 2010 at 5:59 am
kevin
I picked Spain to win it all, but Germany is looking fierce.
(He said confidently, just before the start of the match.)
July 3, 2010 at 7:32 am
Prof Burgos
I suspect the “Americans don’t like soccer” thing is wrong.
In general — as opposed to when it’s wielded for partisan purposes — I think it conflates “like” in the emotional sense (do you like me or like me-like me?) with “like” in the consumer sense (four out of 5 dentists like to recommend Gum for the patients who chew gum).
As a lot of comments have pointed out, soccer’s been around for a while in the USA, and nowadays my kids — like a zillion others — played soccer in AYSO.
But it never cracked the professional market, so to speak, which suggests that it’s a market problem, not a “liking” problem. There were/are barriers-to-entry to the market for sports fanaticism in the USA.
Baseball and football have a lock on the sports-consumption market, with NASCAR perhaps third, and basketball and hockey trailing behind. It’s a matter of the baseball-football cowpath having been paved a long time ago by generations of fathers coercing their sons into sitting on the sofa of a Sunday afternoon.
If you wanted to make a kind of American Studies-esque story out of it, you might talk about how identity formed in — often — immigrant cities like New York by coalescing around a sports team. Irish or German or Italian or whatever — you could project your newfound Americanness by shaking your head about “dose bums” from the stadium.
In general, it would be like saying Americans don’t like tennis or Tour de France follower-dom, or other boutique sports.
It’s just that at World Cup time soccer looms larger in the global imaginary, and so our American exceptionalism — term deliberately misappropriated in accordance with current political dogma — stands in sharper relief and gives sports writers an opportunity to do op-eds on why Americans don’t like soccer.
July 3, 2010 at 8:07 am
jim
Germany is looking fiercer (he said, after the match).
July 3, 2010 at 8:18 am
ari
Germany is looking fierce
Isn’t this always already true? (Asks the Jew.)
July 3, 2010 at 8:28 am
bbstudent
I feel Yglesias made a very strong point mentioning it’s not the WORLD that likes soccer, but EUROPE and LATIN AMERICA. Forget why Americans dislike soccer- why do the Chinese dislike it?
I’m aghast that games of flow are harder to follow since the rules are much easier to follow. Saying they want to optimize their chances by controlling the ball the most isn’t very counter-intuitive. Their is flow in any sport, even baseball which breaks up its action in exact periods with the same starting position (empty bases and zero outs). I don’t think you’re disagreeing with this position but that leads to the problem: if all a sport offers is good flow, why would anyone pick to watch it over a sport that offers good flow and something else?
July 3, 2010 at 8:48 am
NM
Nothing happens in a perfect game, quite literally?
July 3, 2010 at 10:01 am
mario
bbstudent–And India too. On the other hand soccer is huge in Africa as well.
Indeed, you might look at the 7 most populous nations (China, India, the USA, Brazil, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan) and find that only Brazil is fanatical about soccer. Those 6 countries are well over half the planet’s population. There’s an interesting rhetorical strategy going on in terms of the way that a European-dominated sport is making claims about who the world is, who counts as the world, and how the imagined communities of nation-states clearly count more than the populations of those states.
July 3, 2010 at 10:04 am
Neddy Merrill
Indeed. This outlines a crucial rhetorical strategy against soccer: its enthusiasts are silencing the subaltern. I already feel better about being bored.
July 3, 2010 at 10:38 am
bbstudent
mario- I feel rather silly about forgetting Africa.
I wonder if China and India face the same questions about their indifference to the sport. Maybe the question of “why America hates soccer?” is more informative about America’s continued Eurocentrism than anything else.
July 3, 2010 at 11:02 am
Jeffrey
“What we don’t have in the U.S. is a large tradition of watching good soccer.”
Exactly. And the US were not flowing, probably the worst matches of the tournament. Not a great advertisement. With the exception of splendid looking Germany, most of the matches have been forgettable. And this is not a surprise, club football is far superior to thrown together national sides.
“soccer is boring, a big part of the problem for Americans, I think, is that watching soccer requires you to care for teams before the suspense of waiting for a goal takes over. Even when the flow isn’t pretty — which is often — you only feel the suspense if you care about the characters. And americans don’t come into it caring (except for US games).”
This is wrong. Neutrals enjoy a good match because it is played well, not because of the teams, though this may influence whether you turn on the television. For example, though one may not “like” Real Madrid or Barcelona, you watch el superclasico because of the quality of the players and sides.
July 3, 2010 at 11:08 am
Jeffrey
check that- el clasico. Though boca v river would be the best of the AAA ball players.
July 3, 2010 at 12:22 pm
dana
Nothing happens in a perfect game, quite literally?
Cf. “nothing happens in soccer.” In a perfect game, there’s not even scoring opportunities. If we’re to blame the lack of popularity in soccer on the lack of scoring, we have a lot of counterexamples from popular sports.
I feel Yglesias made a very strong point mentioning it’s not the WORLD that likes soccer, but EUROPE and LATIN AMERICA.
I thought the point was only moderately insightful. It’s true, as mario notes, that there is something wrong with saying “everyone in the world loves soccer except the U.S.” But the U.S. has much closer historical and cultural ties with Europe and Latin America, so it is somewhat surprising that a nation composed of immigrants largely from those two regions hasn’t developed a similar level of interest in soccer.
(This is why I think it’s a bad argument to say “Oh, with all the [implied Mexican] immigrants, soccer will be popular in a generation!!”)
Saying they want to optimize their chances by controlling the ball the most isn’t very counter-intuitive.
Not at all. It’s just that for the novice watcher, it’s much easier to tell that, e.g., that Team X really controlled the ball well during this half when Team X actually scored.
July 3, 2010 at 3:56 pm
CharleyCarp
JFC, do none of you pointy heads ever go to the ballpark? A ‘perfect game’ is not a game where nothing happens. It is a game where one side completely dominates the other on defense and, because there are no ties in baseball, has at least some offense of its own.
I happened to be at the Yards when Hideo Nomo pitched the first no-hitter in the history of the park. (Not perfect: he walked three, and Ripken got on base through error). As it became clear in the 8th that it was really going to happen, Oriole fans switched over, cheering Oriole outs. By the ninth, locals were on their feet for the visiting pitcher.
July 3, 2010 at 4:37 pm
dana
There really is an implied “with respect to scoring” following “nothing happens.” I’m sorry that there was confusion. following Neddy’s thoroughly helpful comment.
As we can see by how worked up CharleyCarp is getting, it is indeed possible for Americans to get excited about sporting events that don’t feature lots of scoring. Shutouts and defensive battles can be intense. Thus, I conclude that the low scoring nature of soccer is not itself a reason for its lack of popularity.
July 3, 2010 at 5:49 pm
ben
In a perfect game, there’s not even scoring opportunities.
How do you mean? There are batters, aren’t they, and they swing at the ball (at least sometimes), don’t they?
There’s an interesting rhetorical strategy going on in terms of the way that a European-dominated sport is making claims about who the world is, who counts as the world, and how the imagined communities of nation-states clearly count more than the populations of those states.
It’s interesting?
July 3, 2010 at 6:48 pm
Erik Lund
I’ve heard it argued, perhaps in an ancient Britannica, that it is all quite simple, really. There are games where you can only kick the bladder, and games where you can handle it.
The former are urban games, because they keep the action low, reducing the chance of someone falling and splitting their heads on the cobblestones. The latter are rural games because, really, why wouldn’t you want to catch and throw and tackle when there is only soft turf below? North America, the land of wide open spaces, is the land of gridiron, while Europe naturally settled for soccer.
That doesn’t really explain rugby, Africa or South America, but it’s sports writing, so logic is mainly decorative.
July 3, 2010 at 7:25 pm
dana
It also doesn’t explain basketball. But it’s a lovely explanation.
July 3, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Josh
As a lot of comments have pointed out, soccer’s been around for a while in the USA, and nowadays my kids — like a zillion others — played soccer in AYSO.
But it never cracked the professional market, so to speak, which suggests that it’s a market problem, not a “liking” problem. There were/are barriers-to-entry to the market for sports fanaticism in the USA.
It’s not quite fair to say that it never cracked the professional market. There was nothing preordained about the NBA becoming one of the US’s major sports leagues rather than the ASL.
July 3, 2010 at 11:08 pm
Ben Alpers
Everyone gets to feel smug and superior.
That sounds like that could be a good thing!
Maybe the question of “why America hates soccer?” is more informative about America’s continued Eurocentrism than anything else.
I’ve always wondered why nobody asks why Europe hates baseball, a game played throughout the Americas and East Asia. Brits in particular seem wedded to a “Yanks only love sports that only Yanks love” narrative that really only fits American football. All the other major U.S. team sports (baseball, basketball, ice hockey) are truly international….it’s just that they’re not so big in the UK.
I’m writing this from Leipzig, Germany, where I’m spending much of the summer. I just had dinner last night at a friend’s house. We were talking sports and baseball came up. My friend’s grandfather literally had no idea what baseball was (to the point that he couldn’t have told you that it involved hitting a ball).
What’s unusual about German sports culture is that soccer is pretty much the only team spectator sport that has a huge national following.
Also: Hup Holland!
July 4, 2010 at 8:11 am
wu ming
china is actually *very* into soccer, it’s one of their biggest competitive sports along with basketball (although for sheer number of participants, netless park badminton is probably tops). they just don’t produce national men’s teams of any quality. the chinese national women’s team is consistently one of the best in the world. until recently, the rest of east asia was more into baseball, but that has been changing pretty quickly in the past decade or so. even taiwan’s starting to wonder aloud if it ought to have a professional soccer league just to keep up with the times.
July 4, 2010 at 10:15 am
Spiny Norman
The problem is shot noise. In low scoring games, the score is statistically meaningless. It is static on — to use William Gibson’s evocative phrase — a TV tuned to an empty channel. There’s no point to even keeping the damned score. You may as well subsume the game within rhythmic gymnastics. At least, as you said, hockey has good fights.
July 4, 2010 at 7:57 pm
Keir
Indeed, you might look at the 7 most populous nations (China, India, the USA, Brazil, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan) and find that only Brazil is fanatical about soccer. Those 6 countries are well over half the planet’s population. There’s an interesting rhetorical strategy going on in terms of the way that a European-dominated sport is making claims about who the world is, who counts as the world, and how the imagined communities of nation-states clearly count more than the populations of those states.
Er, Bangladesh asked factory owners to stop production during World Cup games, because if the supply of electricity to people’s televisions was interrupted there would be -riots-. China is keen on football, as Wu Ming says, and in India football’s not as big as cricket, but it’s big. Lost of south east Asia loves football, to a ridiculous extent (it just isn’t south east Asian football.)
July 4, 2010 at 9:38 pm
CharleyCarp
There can be lots of scoring in a perfect game. Just by one side.
I usually watch quite a bit of the world cup — a relative term since I don’t much care for television, especially in the summer. It seems to me that soccer is very poorly suited to the needs of advertisers to get their jingles out there. Probably a factor.
July 5, 2010 at 12:56 am
andrew
Baseball is so utterly boring that I feel compelled to defend those who are interested in a perfect game. Have you noticed that there have been very few of them (well, until this year)? They’re not interesting because they’re low-scoring – as CharleyCarp says, someone always scores and they might not even be close games – they’re interesting because they are the result of a total defensive effort: pitchers and fielders are involved at every level. It’s not like it’s all-pitching, 27 strikeouts, but then 27 strikeouts would be interesting too. A perfect game isn’t a game where nothing happens; it’s a game where a lot of things happen that almost never happen in sequence for the length of a game.
Meanwhile, imperfect, some-hit shutouts are quite common. If all that matters is the “runs” part of the score, there’s really no difference between a regular shutout and a perfect game. Which is why it’s just plain wrong to talk about a perfect game as if the lack of runs (on one side) is its distinguishing feature.
A much better analogy would be a low-scoring close game that goes down to the 9th inning or even to extra-innings. Many people find those kinds of games compelling despite the low scores. As someone who watches baseball, if ever, only in the playoffs, I can say that they might even be my favorite kind of game. But then maybe soccer has warped my idea of what’s interesting.
July 5, 2010 at 12:07 pm
Tirdentata
Soccer will never make it in the U.S. because there are no stoppages of play, which means no opportunities for advertising. Think about the godawful slowness of an American football game where every timeout, PAT, kickoff, etc. is a revenue stream. Likewise, baseball with pitching changes and guaranteed stoppages between innings. Or basketball when the final two minutes of play are dragged into an eternity of ad dollars. The beauty of soccer is that it happens in real time. I just don’t see how it could compete with sports that have TV timeouts built in.
July 5, 2010 at 12:46 pm
jim
What does “popular” mean?
Some of the commenters (take Tirdendata above) have taken it to mean “having a sizable television contract.” I’m not sure that’s an appropriate meaning.
Some possibilities:
– Paid attendance at professional events (those where the participants are paid). Probably the most popular sport by this definition is horse-racing, but baseball scores high.
– Paid attendance at events which would be professional if the participants were paid (whether they are or not). American football, followed by basketball, on the basis of college games.
– Participation. Soccer and baseball (particularly if softball is regarded as baseball). Lots of youth leagues and other amateur groups.
If “Americans don’t like soccer” becomes “Soccer can’t get a television contract,” then Tirdendata gives some reasons why television networks might be wary of televising soccer games on a routine basis. I’d add that television networks might feel the need to have their suggested rule revisions seriously considered. That’s easier if the sport’s ruling body is American and even easier if the sport’s ruling body is the entity that you’re negotiating the television contract with.
July 6, 2010 at 10:08 am
Western Dave
NASCAR has more flow than F1 but less than Indycar. Just saying.
July 8, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Henry Baum
My problem is that players are too good. They’re continually kicking the ball ten feet above the goal (or somewhere else). It’s frustrating. Like a quarterback continually overthrowing a receiver. There’s also the feeling that sometimes they’re arbitrarily kicking the ball in a certain part of the field in the hope of hitting an opening. This kind of guesswork is much less satisfying than other American sports. Still fun to watch though.
July 8, 2010 at 5:34 pm
John Smith
I think you nailed it with the “we are not used to watching GOOD soccer” statement.
I watched a bit of the last world cup, and was amazed at the skill level (and quite a bit put off by the dives many players made on minimal hits). Then, after it ended I tried watching the professional soccer league in North America on TV. Not.Even.Close. I don’t watch minor league baseball on TV, and NA soccer was effectively minor league… Sure, there were players who would make it to the big leagues, but it was not the same.
One thing that is a major turnoff for watching soccer – the dives. I don’t mean the guys who get leveled by a slide who stay down for 10 seconds or so, but the bozos who get clipped by a guy running by, fall to the ground grabbing their knee/shin/ankle/panties and writhing for 30 seconds, only to be seen running at a full clip another minute later.
One thing I would like to see – diving penalties like the NHL instituted. But then, you’d be playing 4-on-4 soccer within 3 minutes of the start of each game…
July 8, 2010 at 7:14 pm
B. Minich
Indeed. Americans haven’t really watched much good soccer. I think one area this is improving is the access. We CAN watch it now. If I want (and I do now), I can watch EPL, La Liga, Seria A, and Bundesliga games. Any of those leagues trounce the level of play in MLS.
July 9, 2010 at 4:27 am
htownmark
MLS may not be as played at as high a level as foreign leagues, but don’t be so hard on it. It’s good entertainment. I don’t know about other cities, but here in Houston, you can go see a Dynamo game for about $15, the stands are full of families having a great time, of all colors and income brackets, cheering, chanting, drumming, singing. Afterwards kids can line up and have all the players sign their jerseys …. it’s a really fun, great experience. And once you start rooting for your team in person, and they succeed, you start to follow the team and care, even if its not Bundesliga quality. It’s still pretty decent by world standards.
Contrast that with going to an NBA or NFL game. You will pay $150 for a family of four, half the seats are sold to bored corporate drones, who either don’t show up, or show up to entertain clients and not watch the game. The game, while played at a high level, is one half sport, one half dancer/cheerleader, t-shirt launching, mascot dumping, entertainment production. It all feels forced and staged and has none of the authentic fun and joy you feel of being in a soccer crowd.
I guess I would throw that into the mix – too few Americans have ever been to a live game.
July 11, 2010 at 3:50 pm
BKO
“It’s not that the game is low-scoring; fans of baseball were raving this month or last that a bad call cost a pitcher a perfect game, which is one in which quite literally nothing happens.”
That is neither the definition of a perfect game, nor a remotely accurate description of what happens in a perfect game. A perfect game can be realized in a number of ways; it can involve a pitcher putting on a masterful performance, and it can involve often fanastic individual and team defensive plays to preserve the game. Perfect games (of which there have been less than 20) and near-perfect games (of which there have been too many to count) involve quite a lot.
More importantly, to reiterate the above point, perfect games are RARE. Out of roughly 400,000 games played in MLB history, only 18 were perfect. And even then, someone won by achieving the goal of scoring. In soccer, draws are common – even scoreless draws.
That, combined with the accurate fact that soccer is a game of flow rather than plays, is simply not attractive to many Americans, at least in terms of what they seek in a major sport. Americans not enjoying draws is no more or less right or wrong than non-Americans who don’t enjoy American football, or Americans who don’t like baseball or basketball.
“Contrast that with going to an NBA or NFL game. You will pay $150 for a family of four, half the seats are sold to bored corporate drones, who either don’t show up, or show up to entertain clients and not watch the game. The game, while played at a high level, is one half sport, one half dancer/cheerleader, t-shirt launching, mascot dumping, entertainment production. It all feels forced and staged and has none of the authentic fun and joy you feel of being in a soccer crowd. ”
That’s actually not the experience I have at most NBA or NFL games I have attended. (Aside from the real fact of high-end attendees treating the event as a social and business one – which happens in major soccer outside the United States and, yes, even at the World Cup.) All major sporting events have an aspect of “staging” and “forced” to them. And, frankly, I have no idea how you could sit in most (for example) NFL stadiums among tens of thousands of screaming fans and feel like there is no actual unstaged or unforced passion. For my tastes, there is often too much passion, and on that note soccer is the world leader in boorish behavior given its popularity and the much publicized violence and other criminal behavior that has come to be associated with the fans of the game.
“The beauty of soccer is that it happens in real time. I just don’t see how it could compete with sports that have TV timeouts built in.”
Did you happen to notice that every World Cup match had the entire field ring with massive advertising billboards on the ground, ensuring views in a way no major American sport matches? It was all I could do sometimes to keep my eyes off those things, as they were in prominent view in virtually every shot, from every angle, regardless of what was taking place on the field.
/I am not a “soccer hater,” by the way. It’s not my cup of tea, but I don’t hold the opinion that it is superior or inferior to any other sport. It is what it is, and with a higher-quality product in the United States I, too, would watch it more.
July 13, 2010 at 5:38 am
jroth95
FWIW – and I know the thread is dead – I just came back from being in Germany for the knockout round and finals, and I watched more soccer than I have since I was 5 and Pele played for the Cosmos, and found it more interesting and enjoyable than I have in the past. I certainly think that dana’s “good soccer” point is apt – seeing some of the goals Germany was scoring, in which players were coordinated in near-setpieces that spanned the entire damn field, made it seem much more like a sport with in-game tactics and less like a sport with a broad strategy (e.g., control the ball or try for breakaways) and a lot of guys hoping they happen to get open for a decent shot on goal. So that was all good.
But I still think that people poking holes in the “soccer is boring” argument tend to get mixed up about what the actual complaint is. Soccer and hockey are not, in fact, both “low scoring” sports, unless you simply look at raw numbers on a scale from basketball or cricket on down (The average baseball game sees 9+ scores; completely different from soccer). Hockey games typically feature 2-4X more goals than soccer games. A decent offensive hockey team will be shutout only a handful of times in an 80 game season, and even a poor offensive team will be shutout only 1 game in 8 or 10. Whereas shutouts are common in soccer (moreso at the highest levels, I think). Individual hockey players, playing against high level competition, score 4 and 5 goals in a single game a few times a year; in Barcelona’s most recent full season, in 50-odd games, there were only 11 in which the teams combined for that many goals (and nearly all of those were 4-1 or 5-0 blowouts of obviously inferior clubs). Last season, it took the Penguins 12 games to exceed that number of 5-goal games, and only 4 were blowouts.
There was a great piece in the New Yorker during the Paris WC (I’m guessing by Nagourney, but don’t recall) about soccer’s elevation of potential scoring chances, in which a player’s valorous, but failed, effort would be talked about for days, whereas hockey features valorous efforts actually frequently succeed. There’s nothing inherently more exciting about Robben’s 2 breakaway chances against Spain or a Sidney Crosby breakaway (in which, I might add, the physical contact is generally legal, as opposed to winked-at), but the latter will probably result in a meaningful change to the game (I recognize the flipside argument that the low scoring makes missed chances more poignant – I’ll always recall Robben’s misses, albeit mostly because of the stage).
Soccer fandom relies very heavily on getting excited about events that don’t substantively change the game state*. Which is fine, but it’s very different from the 4 North American ball/puck sports.
* Indeed, note the difference between a hockey goalie smothering the puck and a soccer goalie smothering the ball. The former has only forced a reset in the ongoing offensive attack, while the latter has reset the entire game status to one slightly in favor of his team (but relatively neutral). A hockey player never intentionally sends the puck towards his own goalie, while soccer players do so on a regular basis.
July 13, 2010 at 7:01 am
dana
Soccer and hockey are not, in fact, both “low scoring” sports, unless you simply look at raw numbers on a scale from basketball or cricket on down (The average baseball game sees 9+ scores; completely different from soccer).
I was thinking more on the relationship between scoring chances to goals scored, and that might have been a better way to put it, actually. Hockey doesn’t have as many shutouts as soccer, but it does have an awful lot of offensive series/chances that end with no score.
July 13, 2010 at 7:15 am
silbey
Soccer fandom relies very heavily on getting excited about events that don’t substantively change the game state*. Which is fine, but it’s very different from the 4 North American ball/puck sports.
Eh. One of the advantages of a low-scoring sport is that every score is usually meaningful. By contrast, the American sports, most particularly football, baseball, and basketball, often have scores that are completely irrelevant because the score is so lopsided. Witness quite a few Super Bowls over the last 20 years. (ie Dallas over Buffalo, 52-17, Baltimore over Giants 34-7).
People tend to love the sports they’re brought up with; they also tend, I think, to see superiorities in the organizations of those sports that are not apparent to outside observers.
July 13, 2010 at 7:55 am
jroth95
I was thinking more on the relationship between scoring chances to goals scored, and that might have been a better way to put it, actually. Hockey doesn’t have as many shutouts as soccer, but it does have an awful lot of offensive series/chances that end with no score.
Actually, one of the reasons (I think) that soccer seems boring to many Americans is precisely the dearth of scoring chances. You can watch an entire half without a single serious scoring chance (defined, for this purpose, as a credible shot on goal); this leads directly to the perception that nothing happens but a lot of midfield passes and occasional downfield interceptions/smotherings. In the North American sports, a score could happen at virtually any moment: a homerun (even by a scrub against a great pitcher throwing a no-hitter – Joe Randa did it in the 8th inning to Chris Young a couple years back), a runner or receiver (or an intercepting safety) breaking free for a TD, or a breakaway in hockey or basketball. In soccer, even breakaways take a relatively long time to develop, and are quite likely to result in either no shot on goal or an offsides. Which isn’t to say that scoring never develops quickly; it’s to say that that’s not the expectation, because, especially with good and well-matched teams, the scale of the game doesn’t permit sudden and unexpected changes to the game-state.
July 13, 2010 at 8:04 am
jroth95
One of the advantages of a low-scoring sport is that every score is usually meaningful. By contrast, the American sports, most particularly football, baseball, and basketball, often have scores that are completely irrelevant because the score is so lopsided.
In two parts:
I would argue that a sport in which 1-0 and 2-1 scores are the norm is one in which the worse team probably wins quite a bit (which is fine if your sample sizes are large enough), which changes the definition of scores being meaningful. Raises the stakes, but also makes the whole thing a bit nihilistic.
First of all, I don’t see how a series of 4-1 victories for Germany could be considered anything other than lopsided (the Dallas-Buffalo game was closer), and second of all, in baseball, with its lack of clock, no score is too lopsided – we’ve seen 2 different teams recover from being down (iirc) 9 and 6 runs in the final inning come back to win in just the past 2 weeks. A baseball team down 8-4 in the 9th is probably a lot more likely to win than a soccer team down 4-2 in the 80th minute.
July 13, 2010 at 8:35 am
silbey
would argue that a sport in which 1-0 and 2-1 scores are the norm is one in which the worse team probably wins quite a bit (which is fine if your sample sizes are large enough), which changes the definition of scores being meaningful. Raises the stakes, but also makes the whole thing a bit nihilistic.
You probably need some evidence to show that that’s true (that the worse team wins more than in other sports). But, in any case, so what? I don’t know why having the “worse” team (and how do we define that anyway?) win is bad. Some of the most remembered games in American sports are ones where the “worse” team won. One of the iconic American sports films “Hoosiers” is about how a “worse” team won. We love nothing if not a scrappy underdog who triumphs anyway.
First of all, I don’t see how a series of 4-1 victories for Germany could be considered anything other than lopsided (the Dallas-Buffalo game was closer), and second of all, in baseball, with its lack of clock, no score is too lopsided – we’ve seen 2 different teams recover from being down (iirc) 9 and 6 runs in the final inning come back to win in just the past 2 weeks. A baseball team down 8-4 in the 9th is probably a lot more likely to win than a soccer team down 4-2 in the 80th minute..
I agree with you about the Germany scores, but I don’t know that it invalidates my point. If 4-1 score lines were as common as blowouts in NFL, baseball, and basketball, then I’d agree with your point. We’d have to find out how many games were essentially over before the game ended (ie win probability of 90% or more [or something like that]). I have no interest in actually doing that research, but until somebody does, I’m going to go with my gut that low-scoring sports make each score much more meaningful than do high-scoring sports.
Oh, and that team up 8-4 in the 9th has a win probability of about 98%.
http://winexp.walkoffbalk.com/expectancy/search
July 13, 2010 at 3:26 pm
jroth95
Oh, and that team up 8-4 in the 9th has a win probability of about 98%.
In a sport that plays 2430 regular season games per year, meaning that it (or an equally unlikely outcome) happens about 49 times per season, or twice a week. The odds that a specific game you’re watching will end up being in the 2% are (definitionally) quite small, but for even a casual fan, you’re seeing remarkable results like that all the time.
Now, obviously, a lot of that is the function of the lengthy baseball schedule and large number of MLB teams. But it’s also a function of rules that make lots of late scoring possible. The other day the Rockies scored 9 runs after recording 25 outs; that’s the equivalent of scoring 4 (or more; I’m guessing on equivalency between runs and goals based on an MLB average of 9 runs/game and a guessed-at average of 4-5 goals/match for high level soccer leagues) goals in the final 5:40 of a soccer game, which I’d be willing to bet has happened basically never*.
Now all of this is cheating since baseball is the only game we’re discussing without the clock. Hockey is probably the other sport with the greatest comeback potential (it’s common to have 2 goals scored within, literally, 10 or 15 seconds of each other, which represents about 35% of the scoring in an average game). In basketball you see big number comebacks, but they don’t necessarily represent big percentages of total scoring – if a team is up 100-75 with 2 minutes to go, it’s over, even though that’s just a 4-3 lead in the other non-American football sports. a comeback from 100-90 comeback doesn’t even register in the other sports (which gets back to your contention about low-scoring games having more meaningful scoring).
* I checked, and it appears I was right – the most I could find was 3 goals in 6 minutes, equivalent to ~6 runs in 2 outs, which happens every 10 years or so.
July 13, 2010 at 3:37 pm
jroth95
I’m going to go with my gut that low-scoring sports make each score much more meaningful than do high-scoring sports.
I think we were at cross-purposes earlier; I was taking your use of “meaningful” as indicating increased significance, as in signifying which team is better, which is why I brought up the idea of the better team being more or less likely to win. It’s absolutely true that, in virtually any soccer match, every goal is important, because it represents a huge percentage of the likely final total, higher than in any other sport I can name.
But my feeling about that – and the reason I used the word “nihilistic” – is that you’re approaching the point where the quality of play is almost incidental to the outcome. In every sport the less-skilled team wins at least some of the time, but it’s generally because the less-skilled team actually played better in the game in question (a good pitcher or hot goalie or a defense that unexpectedly shuts down the opposing QB). But – setting aside mismatches like Barcelona against some provincial side – when the most likely final (non-draw) score is 1-0 or 2-1, quality of play is almost incidental to the outcome. If the team that’s playing better is still only getting 0 or 1 or 2 goals, then it takes very little for the team that’s playing worse to score more through sheer luck (or bad officiating).
One thing that sabermetrics has taught is that all teams regress to .500 in 1-run games. Doesn’t matter if you’re the Yankees or the Pirates, you’ll win about half of the close games, because close games are determined by luck, not by skill. And practically every non-mismatch soccer game is a close game. So is soccer a game of skill or luck?
July 13, 2010 at 4:11 pm
silbey
Now, obviously, a lot of that is the function of the lengthy baseball schedule and large number of MLB teams. But it’s also a function of rules that make lots of late scoring possible. The other day the Rockies scored 9 runs after recording 25 outs; that’s the equivalent of scoring 4 (or more; I’m guessing on equivalency between runs and goals based on an MLB average of 9 runs/game and a guessed-at average of 4-5 goals/match for high level soccer leagues) goals in the final 5:40 of a soccer game, which I’d be willing to bet has happened basically never*.
Look, I’m quite willing to have an argument where we get to make up our evidence according to our preconceptions, but let’s at least admit that it’s quite meaningless, shall we?
One thing that sabermetrics has taught is that all teams regress to .500 in 1-run games. Doesn’t matter if you’re the Yankees or the Pirates, you’ll win about half of the close games, because close games are determined by luck, not by skill. And practically every non-mismatch soccer game is a close game. So is soccer a game of skill or luck
If it was luck, then the teams that won their respective leagues would vary randomly, and that has not happened: in every league there’s a number of teams that have dominated for decades. If they were determined by luck, then you would, in fact, expect that most teams would hover close to .500 play. They don’t. If it was luck, you would expect the World Cup to be won by a range of different teams. Instead, Brazil, Germany, and Italy have dominated.
Given that and the quite convincing argument in Soccernomics that success in soccer correlates with 1) money spent on players, 2) that population size correlates with soccer success (more complicated than that; read the book), I’m quite comfortable in saying skill.