Tag: Football

Drawing a Foul vs. Flopping

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Playing the ref just makes sport less fun. 

Soccer sucks. It mainly sucks because of its relationship to fouls: too many key moments of the game feel like a child overreacting in front of their parent so the parent will punish their sibling.

It could be my American sensibilities, but I don’t respect a game where so much is influenced by the authority figures. Yes, American football stops the clock. But we stop the clock in accordance with a very specific set of rules, and we review every touchdown to ensure the rules were followed. Over the three soccer games I watched this World Cup, however, I recall four or five spots where the announcers noted that a call was incorrect. (Most often these were questions of who touched the ball last before it went out of bounds — an easily answerable question via video review.)

So, back to flopping vs drawing a foul:

  • Flopping is pretending that someone else did something that they did not actually do (and from which you are mortally wounded).
  • Drawing a foul is behaving in such a way that the opponent actually does something to violate the rules of the game.

Flopping is, at least to my American ethics, anathema to sport. Sport is about strength, determination, and courage. It is a battlefield where iron sharpens iron, where the best of my group challenges the best of your group for honor and glory. It is, as Orwell said, “war minus the shooting.” (Orwell meant that as an indictment. I mean it as a compliment.)

We look up to athletes as the epitome of physical prowess. And athletic performance, as separated from theatrical performance, is real. Physical. Not subject to judgment calls — or as nearly not as humans can manage.

The difference between flopping and drawing a foul is the difference between truth and lies. In a flop, nothing happened. In a drawn foul, a rule really was violated.

While watching a soccer game with Partner’s sister last weekend, I asked how long it would be until all soccer plays are reviewed by video. She scoffed and said she was against using AI in this case.

Two thoughts:

  1. I hadn’t mentioned AI; I had mentioned video review (lol)
  2. When it comes to sport, shouldn’t we be in favor of every activity that makes the rules more accurately enforced? If a sport is merely the implementation of those rules accurately and universally, shouldn’t we all support their accurate and universal implementation?

If the rules truly are the rules, any hesitancy toward enforcing them is either 1) an argument against those rules actually being the rules, or 2) corruption. (I’ve argued before that the rules of a game are never quite the rules. FIFA is not making that argument.)

FIFA takes upwards of three minutes to video-review its plays. American football’s reviews stop the game too — but they’ve structured the game to make this experience dramatic and fair (every touchdown automatically reviewed, a fixed list of reviewable calls, coaches with a limited budget of challenges). The rules for reviewing the rules are themselves rules.

From the president of FIFA celebrating Argentina’s victory (I assume because Messi is the biggest economic draw for the tournament) to the FIFA draws happening in a notoriously riggable way, it should perhaps come as no surprise that this sport in which players appeal so frequently and vigorously to the authority figures is also the sport where the authority figures use their power so corruptly.

Americans don’t like government. We rebel against authority. Maybe that’s why a game of cowering and groveling and performing in front of the king will never quite sit right with us. The last time we petitioned a king for fairer enforcement of the rules, it ended in war plus the shooting.

The Secret Soccer Structure

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To keep 90 minutes interesting, you need an arc. To get an arc without structure, you need a conductor.

Maybe soccer has a secret rhythm.

In today’s Argentina/England World Cup Semifinal, the players came out swinging. Only three minutes into the game, an Argentine player whacked an Englishman in the back of the head. I immediately shouted, “Red card!”, much to Partner’s dismay as her ear was near my mouth.

And then, the refs… just… didn’t?

They awarded a free kick to England. At any previous point in the tournament, merely stepping on a guy’s foot has been enough to receive a card. But an unprovoked whack to the back of the head?

Just after the hydration break, one of the announcers said something like, “That’s probably the last foul they’re going to get away with like that before the ref starts handing out yellow cards.”

He was right. Shortly after, the first yellow card came out.

Wait… What?

A player can do the exact same thing in the beginning of a match and it’s a mere free kick, but later in the match it receives a card?

Do soccer fans like a specific emotional arc? It wouldn’t surprise me if all enjoyable sports share a common one (I’m looking at you, Freytag’s pyramid). But soccer is a relatively random-tension game. Tennis has tension management built into its structure: “game points” and side switches that increase and release tension. Soccer has no such machinery. So the refs supply the dramaturgy by hand — swallow the whistle in the first act, tighten as the plot demands, save the cards for the climax. The announcer wasn’t guessing. He’d read the script.

One of my biggest gripes about soccer during this World Cup has been the importance of the referees. But the game may actually need them. Soccer is the simplest major sport. (Its history can be traced back to the first time a child said, “Look, ma: no hands!”) That simplicity leads to games of unpredictable quality. The England/Mexico game was one of the greatest sporting events I’ve watched. Today’s Argentina/England was decently enjoyable. The remaining 6 games I’ve watched were terrible disappointments.

To fit an appropriate emotional arc, the game may require better structure. Update fouls and substitutions. Change the rules around contact. Start the game with 3 penalty kicks per side. Award corner kicks or penalty kicks at various times throughout. Something to make this game less universally flat.

Perhaps most of all: tell us how much time remains. (Yes, I know about the fourth official’s board. A minimum is not a clock; the actual end still arrives at the referee’s whim.) I’ll grant that the ambiguity creates drama — for the initiated. For the newbie, it creates only confusion. And a real clock needn’t kill your “play until an appropriately calm stopping point”: Rugby 7s has a clock, but the game only ends after it goes off and the ball next goes dead.

It might be true that avid soccer fans can feel the right energy of a game and thereby determine when a foul is a yellow card rather than a mere free kick. But the rules of a game should be comprehensible to a newbie, lest you end up with arbitrary authoritarian rulings.

You know, like ending the Argentina/England game when you did — ball still in play, within range of the Argentine goal.

Pickford’s Getting Jumpy

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A high-quality game is one in which arbitrary referee decisions do not determine the outcome. Therefore, FIFA soccer is not a high-quality game. 

Today, in the England versus Norway World Cup game, about 20 minutes before the end of regular time, I said to Partner: “Pickford’s getting jumpy. It’s time to take advantage of him.”

Pickford is the English goalie, and it’s understandable that he’s jumpy: in his regular occupation, he does not play for a particularly high-level team. But his jumpiness is still notable: to win in a sporting competition, it is often advantageous to note one’s opponents’ weaknesses. And Pickford being jumpy is very good for the Norwegian team.

The game was tied at the end of regulation time, so: extra time. In extra time with only a few minutes left, England led by 2-1 when Norway succeeded in bringing the ball all the way toward the English goal. Pickford punched it away… and ran into his own teammate. He fell to the ground, doubled over. The refs stopped the game. 

The Norwegian players were irate. The announcers had to justify this decision. They said: it’s not very sporting to play the game with a goalie who’s doubled over on the ground.

That’s insane, and it’s what’s wrong with soccer. What is sporting is to follow the rules — not to make arbitrary referee decisions which have vast, overwhelming influences on the game. What’s not sporting is stopping the game when one team has made a giant mistake. 

WHAT SPORTING ACTUALLY MEANS

Sporting as in “be a good sport” and “play with sportsmanship”: what does it mean? The clearest example that comes to my mind is one of an image associated with hunting animals “for sport”. It is not very “sporting” to tie up an animal and then just shoot it when it can’t get away. There’s a famous story about Teddy Roosevelt choosing not to do just this, in part owing to his belief in the morals and ethics of being a sportsman. Sportsmen have honor, fight fairly, and accept their defeats. A sportsman is not a cheat, nor are they a wimp. 

In that definition, you might say it’s not very sporting to shoot the ball at the goal while the opposing goalie is down. And that’s perhaps a fair point… if the game of soccer were at all a sporting game… 

FLOPPING, THE ANTITHESIS

But soccer is a game in which players fall on the ground, clutching themselves, pretending to be terribly injured, upwards of a dozen times per game. These are fully-grown, professional athletes who receive massive paychecks. And we want them flopping on the ground pretending injury? 

I can think of no less-sporting (dishonorable, wimpy) activity than pretending injury in this deplorably weak way. What is sporting is to give the opportunity for success. 

So when the opposing team makes a mistake, the only reasonable response is 1) assume he is faking (because more than 90% of the time, soccer players are faking), and 2) kick the ball in the goal. 

YOU CAN’T FOUL YOUR OWN TEAM

When I was six or seven years old, my soccer coach stopped the scrimmage we were playing because one player had fouled another. He called the first player over and demanded that he apologize. Then, after demanding the apology, the coach said something like: Wait — you guys are on the same team. Never mind. He called off the apology and continued the scrimmage.

In a very real, fundamental way, it is impossible for a player to foul a member of their own team. The reasons behind this should be obvious. Most simply, a foul is a violation of the rules wherein one team harms another. 

For over 20 minutes, I had been telling Partner that the English goalie was acting jumpy. This was the moment I had been predicting. Sure, I had expected him to make a mistake against his opponents, but running into your own teammate definitely qualifies as an outcome of someone’s jumpiness. He made his bed: now is his time to lie in it. 

EVERY SIGNIFICANT EVENT MATTERS

Soccer games contain very few goals, and most moments of soccer do not lead to goals. Near the end of regulation time, an overlay appeared on the screen: each team had taken ten shots, of which four had been shots on goal. Eight shots on goal in a total of 90 minutes equates to fewer than one every 11 minutes. 

The goalie being down for the count while the ball is near the goal matters. Stopping the game at the point where Pickford is on the ground — by his own doing, having made his own mistake, colliding with his own teammate — is unfair, both to the Norwegian team and any unaligned fans (such as myself) who simply want to watch a good match. 

BAD INCENTIVES MADE WORSE 

Flopping is already a scourge: when one player touches an opponent, you’ll often see both players fall to the floor, clutching their bodies in anguish disproportionate to the actual injury. And now you’re going to encourage players to do it in response to interactions with their own team? Not only will you encourage more flopping; you’ll also give even more power to the referees to make judgment calls based on theatrical performance. 

Further, what about the concept of psychological warfare? In sport in general, it is a completely legitimate strategy to play in such a manner that causes one’s player to make mistakes. In soccer, if a player develops the skill of causing his opponents to run into each other, are you really suggesting we outlaw that skill? 

SOCCER STILL SUCKS

Would Norway have scored? Probably not – most soccer shots miss, which is part of why it’s such a terribly boring game best seen in four-minute post-game highlight videos – but that doesn’t matter. This question is one of fairness, and stopping the game was unacceptably unfair. 

“Who won?” you may be asking. Does it even matter, if the game is a sham? 

P.S. My problem is not with soccer itself:  the game “put the ball into the opponent’s net without using your hands” is a beautiful game. My gripe is with the current implementation as run by FIFA, including the poor power structure and abysmal incentives. 

Win by heart attack 

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To win, let the goalie fail. To let him fail, kick the ball at the damn goal. 

If you play professional soccer and you miss a shootout penalty kick high or wide, you deserve to be shot.

Penalty kicks are important. In a tied game in the World Cup elimination stage, they determine the fate of your entire nation. 

If you miss wide or high, you lose. Over. No opportunity to win. No ability for the goalie to make a mistake.

If you roll the ball toward the goal, one foot per second, as slow as a 4-year-old kicking with maximum power, you could win! The goalie could have a heart attack! Isn’t that great?

When I played middle school soccer, I played goalie. A remarkably low-skilled goalie, I might add. I still remember one moment from a game two decades ago. My team’s best player fouled the opposing team’s best player in the box, prompting a penalty kick. My coach caught my attention and gestured to me with his finger on his lip, pointing left. I immediately thought “I understand what you’re implying: I should go left. But our soccer skills are much worse than you think. Professional goalies choose a side and pray. Middle schoolers kick slow enough that we can choose after the kick.”

The opposing team’s star shot… 

And he missed! He shanked it wide! I won! Purely by being there! Did I go left? Did I wait-and-see? Doesn’t matter! I won! 

I was not a good soccer player. Don’t let people like me win. Today in the Australia vs Egypt World Cup game shootout, one of the Egyptian players kicked the ball straight down the middle… directly at the goalie… and it still went in! The goalie had chosen a side, and the ball came straight down the pipe! The guy who shot it – Egypt’s captain – even said afterwards, “If anyone was going to Panenka [chip a shot down the middle], it was going to be me!” Egypt won because Australia shot two penalty kicks high. 

Shoot. Your. Penalty. Kicks. On. Goal! 

Also, an unrelated suggestion: start every soccer game with 3 penalty kicks per side. Makes the game more interesting for one team to be up 2-1 when it starts. 

And a non-serious suggestion: if the game ends tied, add a new ball every 10 minutes. Eventually, someone will score. 

Rugby 7s: Two Halves, No Whole

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To win, attract fans. To attract fans, form a cohesive game. 

Rugby 7s needs to choose a side.

After three days at the HSBC SVNS World Championship in Bordeaux (and 8 years following the sport as a casual fan), I think it’s standing at a crossroads. It can lean into being the 14-minute party it already is, or it can grow into a full, standalone sport. Right now it’s trying to be both, and that’s untenable. 

(For anyone who’s never watched: sevens is rugby boiled down to 7 players a side and two 7-minute halves. A full day runs more than a dozen games, back to back. It’s the tasting flight of athletic events.)

I argued last week that a sport’s heir wins by cutting the boring parts. Sevens already did the cutting (15 players down to 7, 80 minutes down to 14). It just never decided what it was cutting toward. 

If You Lean Into the Shortness

The short version is already good. It just wastes its own format. Two fixes:

1. Use the downtime. The games are too short for fans to bond with the teams, so spend the breaks building investment. Share stats on the players. Run through how important this game is. Each team is only on the field for under 20 minutes. That tightness is good. Use this time to reinvigorate the fans about the metagame. 

2. Vary the downtime. How many times can a crowd sing “Sweet Caroline” and watch the “sleepy cam” (the one that finds someone napping in the stands)? Once a day, the organizers seem to believe. These approaches are repetitive. Put a team on interstitial fun: t-shirt cannons, quick water-balloon fights, fan footraces for prizes, a costume contest for cash. You already have a fanbase that turns up in costume. Lean in.

If You Make It A Full-Length Sport

A 14-minute sport is not full-length. The organizers pack three days of tournaments together because each game is only 14 minutes long. What if they made it 2 hours instead? The ledger: 

What it has going for it

  • Fast play. Almost no setup or positioning. All action.
  • It’s a highlight reel. Lots of intensity, no dull moments, and a huge amount of drama. Most of basketball happens in the last 2 minutes. Rugby 7s has a new exciting event happening at least every minute. 

What it’s up against

  1. No obvious fanbase. Rugby fans already have two codes to follow: union (15 a side) and league (13 a side). Sevens is a third, and a stripped-down union at that. Why would a rugby fan adopt a third version? And a newcomer has no particular reason to start with the niche one. (Except that sevens is the Olympic version. And that’s a big leg up.) 
  2. Injuries. In 3 days I watched 9+ players get carried or helped off, 2 of them on stretchers. The playing base is growing fast (it looks like a blast to play, if you’re not attached to your future cognition). For a sport chasing families and casual fans, that body count is a bad look on camera. 
  3. A touring format that fights fandom. There’s no home-and-away. A small set of core teams (8 this season) tours a circuit (Dubai, Cape Town, Singapore, Perth, Vancouver, LA), then 12 teams contest a 3-city World Championship (Hong Kong, Valladolid, Bordeaux). That’s a time-trial structure (Formula 1, tennis, the surfing tour), not a league. Great for a traveling roadshow, lousy for “my team versus your team”. 
  4. Yearly churn. Each season the bottom of the top tier is relegated (down to “SVNS 2”) and new teams come up. So the division’s membership changes every year. Just as a new market learns its team, the team can drop out of the top flight. Hard to grow roots that way.

Changes I’d make

Regardless of which path Rugby 7s takes, these are improvements to the game: 

  1. A score shouldn’t end the game. Right now, if you’re up by two scores when the clock hits zero, you’ve effectively won but everyone keeps playing until one of a number of game events happens (the ball goes out of bounds, e.g.). It’s an anticlimax. Either call it the moment it’s decided, or flip it and give the trailing team a lifeline: they keep playing as long as they keep scoring. 
  2. Let the halves run longer. Fast doesn’t have to mean 7-minute halves. Hockey is just as fast and handles the gas-tank problem with constant substitutions. Roll players on and off and you can stretch the game without melting the athletes. (Note: You can’t just make it longer. They tried. World Rugby cut their finals from two ten-minute halves down to two seven-minute halves in 2017 precisely to avoid injuries. You have to add fresh legs and deepen the bench.) 
  3. Host it in party cities. Amsterdam, Budapest, Las Vegas. The core audience wants to drink for 3 days straight in costume while watching sport. Put the event where that’s already the local economy. (Bordeaux, in fairness, understood the brief.) 
  4. Make the drop goal matter. The scoring: a try (similar to a touchdown in American football) is 5, a conversion (like the kick after a touchdown) is 2 (so a converted try is 7); a penalty or drop goal (similar to a field goal that’s not after a touchdown) is 3. Which means a team down by two unconverted tries can claw back exactly to a tie (7 + 3) but cannot win it. Bump the drop goal to 4, maybe even 5. The drop goal turns from a museum piece into a live weapon, and “up by 10” stops feeling safe. 
  5. Publish the draws earlier. Tell fans when their team actually plays. As it stands, you find out the morning of the first match, which doesn’t help fans. Currently, a bunch of fans missed the first half of the first day. If your team is playing in the morning, would you make it to the first game (early) and then have a nap? Definite possibility.  
  6. Stop the clock during dead time. The clock keeps running during penalty kick-outs, after a score but before the restart, and between a scrum call and the scrum itself (a scrum is like a hockey face-off where three teammates are tied together). That warps the game and rewards stalling. It bites hardest on a yellow card, when a team who’s playing 6 players against 7 for 2 minutes can just bleed the clock. Stop the clock and the gamesmanship dies.
  7. Trim the pool stage. You play 3 pool games to cut 12 teams to 8, and then the real tournament is also 3 games. Half the days are positioning, and the pools barely change anything. That’s too much foreplay for the payoff.
  8. Make the final feel like a final. Today the final is the same length as every other game. Give it longer halves, or make it a best-of-3 with the 3rd/4th-place match slotted in between for the breather (if you’re concerned about injuries). 
  9. Fix the scrum. Over the last 3 days, I cannot recall a time when the team rolling the ball lost possession. That makes scrums in rugby 7s basically just a restart with extra steps. This one needs a revamp, because as-is it’s just wasting time. 

If rugby 7s keeps sprinting the direction it is, it’s going to get tackled. Time to keep tinkering and pick a side. 

Today’s Games Played

The cheese standoff. A vendor slices me 200g of emmental and quotes 3 euros 50. I say card. She says 5-euro minimum on card. I say card is all I’ve got. She says no deal. I walk to the monger two stalls down who sells me 200g of emmental for 5 euros 40. Partner points out how, in the US, the vendor grumbles but eventually takes my money. I’m reminded of the time $20 was as good as 20€. 

The bottle-cap. A French security officer asks if I have bottles. He squeezes the bag. It crunches. He says, “Bottles.” He tells me to take off the cap and bin it. I take off the cap, walk towards the bin, pocket the cap, and walk past him into the stadium with the bottle. (Once inside, I reapply the bottle cap: this wasn’t mere sport, I wanted to use that bottle cap!) French security continues its purposelessness. 

Why I love the kick-and-chase (and you should do)

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To win the rugby match, score the most points. To score points, move the ball forward. 

Rugby 7s is my favorite spectator sport. My favorite move: the kick-and-chase. The move is what it sounds like: kick the ball into the space behind the defense, then run it down before they can. (Context for the unfamiliar: rugby is a sport similar to American football. In rugby, you cannot throw the ball forward.) 

Here’s why it works.

1. Speed wins the chase. Some teams and players have wheels (the Kenyan men, Japan’s number 3, Mariana Talatoka for Fiji’s women). When you’re that fast, the kick is more a pass to yourself (it’s harder to run with the ball than after it), and you win the foot race more often than not.

2. Nobody’s home in the back. With only 7 per side, teams can’t afford a defensive sweeper. Drop one player from the line and you’re defending six across, and 6-on-7 gives a free space to the offense out wide. 

3. The defense is facing the wrong way. The instant the ball leaves your foot, you’re already sprinting. They have to stop, turn, and go. How many of them will make it there faster than your teammates? 

4. Even a miss pays off. Lose possession and you’ve still gained sizable yardage — and their ball-recoverer will need support to mount a reasonable offense. No second man means no ruck (pass through the legs, during which only your team can grab the ball) and no ruck means they hand the ball right back. The kick-and-chase-to-tackle-and-recover pipeline is a strong one. 

5. My favorite: the bluff. Just having a kick-and-chase in your bag forces the defense to pick a poison. Guard you tight and your kick gains more value. Sit back to cover it and the holes open up for your runs. The threat alone bends the whole defense. If a team restructured their strategy around it (instead of simply playing rugby 7s like it’s a faster rugby 15s), the metagame could easily undergo a paradigm shift. 

So if anyone’s ever complimented your speed (e.g. if Partner referred to you as “having wheels” and I made oinking noises in reference to you being a greased pig), develop your kick. Then go chase it.

— HSBC Sevens World Finals Day 1, Bordeaux, France

Clown School Break Day 50: Seeing Ahead

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In which chair-sitting is frog-boiling. 

A coworker once taught our company how to sit in a chair. The problem: humans are very adaptable. So when we sit in a chair, we adjust our bodies to fit the physical circumstance. This is bad. We should instead adjust our circumstances to fit our bodies. (The desk doesn’t care if it’s adjusted to be higher or lower. Our bodies do prefer we don’t slump.) 

The rules of the game change your play. That sounds obvious, but its effects often go unrecognized. 

Take a simple rule – like the football rule that the clock stops when a player runs out of bounds – and imagine the changes to the entire game that could result. Obviously the end of the game is faster: more hurry-up plays, less pre-defined set-ups.

Now consider how different technology was when this rule of this game was established – at some point before 1909 (citation: pg 214 here). Was this rule intended to play out the way it is? No – no way – not really – it can’t be. But it shapes how today’s entire game is played. 

We often accept the slight changes in our environment, in the rules that govern our games. But adjusting our behavior to maximize our desired outcomes is not easy. Do you think second-order effects (Since A happened, B will happen) are hard to predict? Third-order effects (A, therefore B, therefore C) are even harder!

Eg: If we changed the clock-stop rule, would Quarterbacks make more in-the-moment decisions? Become more skilled at rapid decision-making? Would we select for quarterbacks who are more tacticians and less strategists? Would that change lead to the rest of the team being more strategic (to fill the gap) or less (because their leader is less strategic)? Is this even the right pathway to follow, or would quarterbacks actually become more strategic because they would plan their whole series of plays ahead of time for those low-on-time situations? Would timeouts become so incredibly valuable in the endgame that they’d never be used otherwise? How would that impact how strategic a quarterback needs to be?

It’s really, really hard to tell. Those who can see the second-order effect in a very complicated situation are often highly-prized experts.

A chess grandmaster can sometimes see 10+ moves ahead. On the other hand, one former chess world champion is commonly crediting as saying, “I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one.” 

Which would you rather do? And in what areas? 

–(Oh, and GO BEARS!!!)