The numbers speak for themselves: No sport has as much global reach, participation, or viewership as soccer. As a result, it’s relatively easy to think that the soccer is doing everything right and there’s no reason to change the game. But what if there were things that could be easily improved about soccer?
Here are eight ways to improve the World Cup:
1. There needs to be some equivalent of goaltending: In the Croatia-Denmark game, Croatian forward Luka Modsic had successfully swerved around the goal tender on a breakaway and was all clear to deposit the ball into the net when he was tripped from behind. The offending player was given a red card and Modsic was awarded a penalty kick, but that’s not enough. If there’s a scenario where the ball is 100 percent en route to go into the goal, awarding them with a scenario where the ball will go in 75 percent of the time (21 of 28 penalties have been converted through the first and second rounds this year) gives the other team incentive to flat-out cheat. In 2010, Luis Suarez of Uruguay got his team through to the semi-finals with a blatant hand ball that led to an unconverted penalty. Similarly, in the Sweden-Switzerland elimination game this year, a Swiss player grabbed a Swede from behind as he was going on a breakaway. Like Suarez, he knew he was going to get a red card but it was either that or lose the biggest game of his life, so what would he do? The penalty wasn’t awarded in the Sweden-Spain because the penalty didn’t occur in the box.
2. Reconsider what’s worth a penalty: Considering how much of a game changer a very likely goal opportunity is, there has to be some reconsideration over how often this is given out. The penalty review is a massive improvement from past World Cups, but an unintentional handball shouldn’t be enough to cost a team a game. On the other end, some crimes are so blatant, they should be awarded a penalty regardless of whether they occur in the box or not. Long story, short: Common sense dictates a penalty should be based on severity of the infraction and not where on the field it occurs.
3. Do whatever you can to avoid penalty kick shootouts: Even soccer purists admit that a penalty shoot-out is a harsh way to go. Rather than having a player take a shot from a fixed point, perhaps FIFA could allow them to move around like hockey and add a defender or consider making it a 2-on-1 scenario. Perhaps, they could subtract one defender per team in each half of extra time so that there’s more likelihood goals are scored during those extra thirty minutes. Perhaps, they could give determine the winner after 120 minutes on whomever has the most shots on goal. That means that each time a player will have to do an optimization equation in his head whenever they shoot a goal: Do I want to take a better shot with more chance of scoring or do I want to get the tie-breaker point for a shot on goal? I’m just spitballing here, but when you have four of the 12 elimination games to date being decided on penalty kicks, viewers start feeling it’s all pretty cruel and random. Use your imagination, guys.
4. Widen the net: This suggestion is the most sacrilegious, but this is a sport in desperate need of more offense. The Sun reported a downtick from between 26 and 30 shots a goal to just 24.4 shots per game in the first round as if this is a significant number to the average viewer. To the average viewer, the problem is that 24.4 resulted in approximately 2.97 actual goals going in. Imagine how less exciting a sport like basketball would be if players had a 12.2 percent field goal average.
Another thing to consider is that between 60 percent and 72.5 percent of all shots taken actually hit the goal area if you look at the performances of the four semi-finalists in 2014. Whether you like this rule will depend on what goes through your head when you see a beautiful shot hit the goal post: Do you wish that would count as a goal.
Purists of the sport don’t necessarily think a game is inherently boring if it’s low scoring, but I’d imagine they wouldn’t want to see their beloved team lose on an errant penalty kick or a goal keeper fumble. Higher scores means less chance that the team to which you’ve been patiently rooting for years won’t lose a massively important game on a fluke.
5. Give South America a sixth team: Brazil and Argentina have been in every World Cup since virtually forever, so that really only leaves three slots for many of the most talented soccer squads in the country. This year, the world’s ninth ranked team , Chile, got left out of the World cup while four out of five teams made it to the second round. In 2014, five out of six made it to the second round with the maximum number (four were drawn against each other) of three reaching the quarterfinals. In 2010, all five teams made the second round with four moving on to the quarterfinals.
6. Do not consider changing the field size: Like 42 in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 32 truly is the answer to life, the universe and everything when it comes to the World Cup. It ensures most of the major historical powers get in (sorry Italy), it allows for geographic diversity, and allows for sleeper teams without diluting the field. Watching Panama and Tunisia get schooled so badly by England and Belgium might look like there’s a talent gap, but remember that Panama faced quite a bit of competition in CONCACAF including finishing ahead of our own country. It’s true that some teams come out looking like fodder for the better teams to beat up on, but it’s just as likely that a team could overachieve like Costa Rica did in the last World Cup and magic could happen. In a 24-team field, Costa Rica would likely never make the World Cup (for most of the 24-team era, Central America and the Caribbean were often boxed out by Mexico and the U.S.), but in a 48-team field you’d get Trinidad and Tobago which would dilute the competition beyond repair.
7. Get the World Cup the hell out of Qatar: The World Cup is going to a blip of land that it’s already been widely established was obtained through bribery. It’s a country where the temperatures are 115 degrees, the soccer stadiums will all be unbelievably tough on carbon footprints, and the modern equivalent of slave labor has been used to build them. I cannot imagine the ridiculousness of setting the World Cup in Qatar won’t be making headlines in 2022.
8. Slow down!: Can we get a little time to marinate on the games. If the U.S. were to take the World Cup seriously and were to keep up with a three-game-a-day schedule, can you imagine the loss in workplace productivity? FIFA is practically begging us to skip the first round live and just go straight to the highlights. With the exception of the last pairing of the third round (secretly the best part of the tournament) that must be played simultaneously, there’s nothing gained by overloading the audience with games before we’ve properly been pumped up for the elimination rounds. The 1998 World Cup ran from June 10 to July 13 had two games a day for the first round on weekdays and three on weekends. This World Cup is running two days less and has had no less than three games a day after the first day and had one Saturday with four games.
9. Can we acknowledge that the stoppage time situation is a mess? It’s nice that each sport has their separate quirks. But timing that’s not accurate isn’t a good one. Stoppage time puts a number of minutes at the end of the game to account for stops in play from injuries, goals, substitutions and kicks. It can be thought of as a different way of expressing a duration of time with all the breaks attached at the end. But it’s not accurate. The first hint is that the stoppage time is expressed in minutes than number of seconds. The grand truth is that referees are not bound to any rules for stoppage time. They get discretion as for how much to call. What if a team is about to make a breakaway and score. Don’t you want to know exactly whether they do it in the exact amount of time permitted?
