I recently mentioned that different games have very different notions of offside — which was my way of obliquely hinting that soccer (association football) could be a better game with different rules, perhaps inspired by hockey.
Richard Epstein goes a step further — without addressing offsides — and says that soccer should borrow from basketball and ice hockey for scoring and penalties:
On scoring, today soccer awards a single point for a goal, indeed for any and all goals. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is scored in ordinary play or from a penalty shot taken 11 meters from goal. Often that penalty shot is awarded on a questionable call for a handball, or a marginal infraction inside the penalty box. Let the penalty shot win or tie the game, and it leaves a bad taste with the team that scored its goals the hard way.
It does not have to be that way. Soccer instantly becomes a much better game when it awards two points for a goal and one point for a penalty shot. It should take its cue from basketball, which awards one point for a free throw awarded after a foul. But it also awards two points for any field goal from inside the arc: In an inspired refinement, teams earn three points for field goals beyond the arc.
No thank you.
If penalty shots are too much reward for too little foul, we could just move the penalty-kick spot back a few more meters.
His second key reform is an idea from hockey — one it’s pretty well known for:
In hockey a minor infraction sidelines the player for two minutes for an instant short-term advantage that doesn’t come with a yellow card. If there is a second infraction by a team, part of it is served concurrently with the previous penalty until the first player returns to the ice. If the other team commits a minor penalty when it is ahead, its player goes off the ice as well.
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Note that if several players are off the field, the game opens up, thereby increasing scoring changes. Players also have to learn to confront novel tactical situations and to shift positions on the field.
“[Soccer] should take its cue from basketball, which awards one point for a free throw awarded after a foul.”
Here’s the thing: generally speaking, a basketball player is awarded two free throws after being fouled, putting it back in parity with a normal field goal. To be the same as basketball, I suppose a soccer player should get two penalty kicks then.
“Note that if several players are off the field, the game opens up, thereby increasing scoring changes.”
Probably not likely to happen. In a typical soccer game 2-3 players are carded. You see more than that in a hockey period. I would also say that if there is one thing that soccer doesn’t need, it’s further reward for the histrionics displayed by “fouled” players.
Tripping is an awkward foul, because it depends so much on the victim’s effort to stay standing — effort that curiously vanishes, because there’s such an incentive to fall down spectacularly. Basketball fouls don’t suffer from this problem, at least not to the same degree, because the offensive player can go on to shoot and score and still get the free throw for being fouled.
Soccer (as a Dutchman I prefer to call it football, of course) has a set of rules that has hardly been changed since 1870. In Europe debate has been going on for a long time about changing some of its rules. But FIFA is not about to change anything, mainly because of their bosses being from 1870 also.
A clear example: in a majority of the cases it is physically impossible for the referee or linesman to ascertain if a player is off side or not. That is because the referee or linesman has to see two separate things at exactly the same moment:
The problem being that these two incidents occur on different areas of the field. Video recording could help out here, of course, but FIFA don’t wanna know. They’re too busy arresting Dutch girls for wearing orange dresses. In the end it doesn’t really matter. Like Gary Lineker said: “football is a game for 22 players — and in the end the Germans win”.
I suppose soccer (association football) has a meta-problem of too complete control from a centralized authority, with no room for experimentation. I’d love to see some minor leagues experiment with hockey-style offside rules or sending players off for a limited time for (mildly) dangerous play.