World Cup Blues

World Cup Blues
by David Benjamin

“Of course it went to penalties. It always goes to penalties.”
— Andrew Das, New York Times

MADISON, Wis. — We all agree that FIFA is La Cosa Nostra of fun and games, the most corrupt sports organization ever conceived.

At the moment, FIFA’s big show, the World Cup, is being staged in Russia, a police state that ought to be ostracized from the civilized world ’til it clears out of Crimea, leaves Ukraine alone, ceases to dope its athletes and poison its expats, and stops murdering journalists. Russia shouldn’t be allowed to attend, much less host any international sporting event. But Putin ponied up the biggest bribes to the geriatric grifters of FIFA. So, Russia it is. Next? Qatar!

FIFA’s rottenness, however, goes beyond its decades-long record of graft and venality. Because the hucksters atop FIFA are, literally, only in it for the money, they pay no discernible heed to the quality of performance on the pitch or the “integrity of the game.”

This is important. For, example, like FIFA, the leadership of the NFL is full of racists and amoral money-grubbers. But they compensate for these human frailties with the keen awareness that they are — all of them — in show biz. They know their job is to entertain the millions of rubes who fill the seats, buy the merchandise and pay the freight. They struggle diligently against the accusation that “NFL” stands for “No Fun League.”

In the NFL (and the NBA, the NHL, Major League Baseball — every bigtime sports outfit except FIFA), the guys in charge understand that the most entertaining aspect of any sport is scoring. Points, runs, touchdowns, go-o-o-o-o-o-oals! The more scoring, the more fun — for everyone. On this point, I did a little research. I discovered that, in the last 30 Super Bowls, the total points scored in each game averages about 50 points. This has stayed consistent despite vast changes in football strategy over this period. While devious coaches have been gaming the game, football’s overseers in both the NFL and NCAA have tweaked the rules in ways that keep fans amused, loyal and — unlike soccer — non-violent.

For comparison, I then added up the scores in World Cup finals dating back to 1930, when Uruguay beat Argentina, 4-2. From then ’til the 1986 World Cup (Argentina 3, West Germany 2), the final game averaged 4.38 goals.

But then, something happened. In seven World Cup title games since ’86, the goals-per-game average plummeted to 1.43. That’s a two-thirds drop in offense. The Super Bowl equivalent would be a 30-year stretch of 9-6 football games.

Soccer has never been a high-scoring game — although it can be. Watch a few pickup games in Mexico or Portugal, Nigeria or Brazil. Soccer is the best street/sandlot game in the world. All you need is a ball and a stretch of open dirt.

How dull has big-time soccer gotten?

In one of this year’s quarterfinals, Spain settled into a 1-1 deadlock with Russia and played two hours of mean-kid keepaway. The Spaniards passed the ball 1,029 times without seriously trying to score. Two desultory overtimes then ushered in FIFA’s idiotic solution to a tie. They held a kicking contest — the athletic equivalent to shooting fish in a barrel. They call these kicks “penalties,” but I’m not sure why. The only folks penalized were the fans who sat through two hours of pantomime sport. Ironically, Spain blew its gamble and lost the kicking contest, 4-3.

Two other quarterfinals this year also ended at 1-1 with kicking contests. There are probably more such travesties in store this summer, as the stakes get higher and the coaches get more and more chicken.

Until 1994, no World Cup final was ever decided by a kicking contest. Since then, the several billion people watching soccer’s quadrennial Big Game have twice sat through 120 minutes of constipated offense and defensive stalemate, culminating in the moral equivalent of a kids’s kickball game on Elm Street.

(But kickball is more fun.)

There are three villains in soccer’s stagnation. The biggie is FIFA. But just as culpable is a fraternity of premier coaches whose job security is enhanced by low scores and lots of ties. In a major soccer league, it’s possible to tie every game, earn one point each time and make the playoffs without a one outright victory.

Perhaps guiltiest of all is the crowd. Out of raw tribalism, soccer fans support their teams rabidly and sing the praises of “the beautiful sport” while never acknowledging how maddening it is to sit through these endlessly scoreless exercises in coaching calculus. The fans never seem tempted to rise up and vent their frustrations to the gods of soccer about how little joy they get from every game and how much disappointment. Instead, they get drunk and then take out their rage on the other team’s fans.

I could fix this.

Every four years, I offer suggestions — the moral equivalent of pissing into a hurricane — for ending soccer’s dead-ball era and giving its pathologically loyal fans, for a change, a little relief. Here we go:

First shrink the field. Players have way too much space to noodle around. Less room means more pressure. Think of ice hockey.

Next, ban the tie. I keep hearing that soccer players are the best-conditioned athletes in history. Fine, let ‘em prove it. If basketball players can sprint through three or four overtimes, certainly the supermen of soccer can lope and dribble up and down the lawn ‘til somebody scores. And if the game stays stubbornly tied after, say, three extra periods, start benching players, one for each OT. Picture a 12-overtime epic, with only two strikers and a couple of goalies left on the pitch. Talk about “sudden death.”

Third, make the goal mouth taller. Right now, it’s eight feet, which means your average goalie’s reach can block the highest possible shot. A ten-foot goalmouth would vastly improve the odds either for a long-distance goal or for a high-flying, truly heroic LeBron James block. Either way, the fans would go wild.

Fourth, dump the offsides rule. “Offsides” is simply a way to protect defensive players from their own mistakes. A breakaway — or, in basketball, the fast break — is the most explosive, fan-pleasing play in any sport. Why forbid it? Besides, in a sport in which the outcome is too often decided by a one-on-one kicking contest, why not fit this dramatic striker vs. goalie confrontation into the game itself, at full speed, with defenders nipping at the kicker’s heels?

Fifth, let’s get rid of this ridiculous green card-red card crap. Why punish a player in the future for a foul he committed ten seconds ago? Send him off the field — right now! — for five minutes and make his team play shorthanded. The power play is to hockey what the fast break is to basketball. It’s tense, it’s gripping, it’s fun. If FIFA ever got its collective head out of its overweight ass, soccer could have both power plays and fast breaks.

The opposing argument I’ve already heard — often — is that rule changes this big would sully the “purity” of the game, in the pursuit of mere entertainment. This is why these five reforms make sense. Every sport is — precisely — mere entertainment. If you’re not amusing the fans, there’s no reason to rent the field and sell tickets.

Besides, I seem to remember that the same defense of “purity” popped up in the sports pages just before they allowed the forward pass and the jump shot.