Tunescribe

The World Cup title game once again revealed soccer's Achilles heel: the problem with resolving ties at the end of overtime. Deciding a world title on a penalty kick competition is like deciding the NBA championship with a free-throw competition. It renders all that went on before it moot and is about as anti-climactic as it can get, when the game isn't decided along the normal course of play. How do you solve this? More shots on goal. How do you get more shots on goal? MAKE THE FREAKIN' FIELD SMALLER! This also would make the game faster and more fun to watch. Just my 2 cents. My application for president of FIFA is on its way.

gomezcat

It's called five a side and it already exists.

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Clonamery

Can we at least call it Futbol.....?

How about no offsides?

gomezcat

Ouch! We did that at school. It creates goal hanging where some idiot stands near the goal and the ball gets hoofed to him.

Let's be blunt. You lot don't like soccer and we don't care.

(Most foreigners, with obvious exceptions, don't like Football and you don't care).

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Mike the Brit

Seriously, the problem is that when there are a lot of players in a confined space it is more difficult to advance the ball under control -- the odds in favour of the defenders get better.

The abandonment of the off-side law would mean that the penalty area was always impossibly crowded (not that it isn't a lot of the time at the moment!).

One suggestion is to diminish the number of players. Socrates (a very great Brazilian player, a member of what I (unorthodoxly, because they didn't win the WC) believe was the best Brazilian side of all time) wants to reduce the game to 9-a-side.

So here's my suggestion: first 15 minutes of extra time, 9-a-side. If there's no winner after 15, 7-a-side. After that, 7-a-side, sudden death with NO GOALKEEPERS. That should do it!

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They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Well, Pats fans should be invincible by now. [Fitzy, 16 November 2009]

Still here to learn

Clonamery

Hate the name soccer.

Hey! Who's a foreigner?

I was thinking in terms of Ice Hockey. In reply to doing away with penalty kicks after overtime. The NHL actually added excitement to the game with penalty shots.

Eliminating offsides was not a well thought out idea nor do I have any practical futbol experience except for 1 year of varsity high school (yes we scored a goal that season) but I think you want the defense and the goalie to be burdened so that offense can have more opportunities to score.

Actually.....I like it the way it is just with less acting by the players.

Mike the Brit

I really enjoyed this World Cup. But it certainly revealed a couple of very important issues.

1. Really violent foul play has diminished in the last twenty years, but cheating, provocation, simulation and cynical attempts to manipulate referees certainly haven't.

Although there was a lot of simulation, the number of dodgy penalties awarded was low, it must be said. What's more, referees were prepared to accept that a ball could strike a player on the arm without giving a penalty. That was a good thing.

But the number of yellow (and red) cards and the frequently dubious reasons for giving them were a big problem.

2. The number of goals was low. That might suggest that there is more parity between teams and, to some extent, that is true (I don't think that there's as much to choose between the best teams as there once was). But very few teams went out at the group stage who had been expected to progress (Czech Republic, Croatia (arguably) and that's about it). There were very few come-back wins.

What's more, a high proportion of goals came from free kicks and corners. In a way that's a good thing: it shows that fouling an opponent within 30 yards of the goal can be very costly and acts as a deterrent. On the other hand, fine goals from open play are the high-light of football.

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They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Well, Pats fans should be invincible by now. [Fitzy, 16 November 2009]

Still here to learn

primetime

And really pissed off alot of hockey purists. I was on the fence about it at first, but then I started to like it, but not everyone does.

There's no penalty shots in the playoffs, either. Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals wouldn't be decided on a penalty shootout if it was tied after one overtime. That's the way it should be. The final of the World Cup shouldn't be decided on penalty kicks.

sdaniels7114

If you wanna improve Soccer, you need to let people pick up the ball and run with it, maybe even throw it to each other. If it was up to me, I'd make it 11 to a side and give each team a chance to score in turn. I'd start each scoring turn by spotting the ball about 1/5th to 1/3rd of the way between the attacker's end of the field and the defender's end. You'd have to think up some exciting way to decide exactly where. Then the attacking team would have maybe 3-4 set plays to advance the ball, I dunno maybe 25 or 30 feet. If they did that they'd get a new set of turns to advance until they reached the scoring line. I wouldn't allow any of those silly European 'tackles.' If you wanna stop the attacker's progress, you'd have to hit him good and hard

I think that version of Soccer really could take off in the US.

Tunescribe

Precisely. It makes a farce of the whole tournament: "We can't decide the outcome of the biggest soccer game in the world by playing soccer, so we'll do something else." Is anything more nonsensical for a major sporting event? It's like the emperor's new clothes. I don't understand how/why the game's diehard followers don't see how deeply flawed this is. Maybe they should make it like an extra-inning baseball game, or sudden-death football. Just keep playing until someone scores no matter how long it takes. It would be an incredible test of endurance for fans and athletes alike. Imagine, a six-hour soccer game ... No, I rather wouldn't.