"Why Soccer is so Boring" article

quote:

---

It’s “the beautiful game,” and for most of my adult life I’ve been patiently informed, usually by someone who calls it fútbol, that I simply lack the sophistication to appreciate it. But they’re wrong. Soccer isn’t beautiful. It’s boring—and it has nothing to do with sophistication.

The Better Team Loses Almost Half the Time

One of the best ways to determine how much luck is involved in a sport is to measure how often the worse team beats the better one. If the favorite wins 80 percent of the time, that’s a high-skill sport: the better side reliably prevails, and the remaining 20 percent is luck. If the favorite wins 55 percent of the time, you’re watching something closer to a coin flip.

By this measure soccer is the most random major sport there is. The favorite fails to win 45 percent of the time—higher than baseball (44.1%), hockey (41.4%), basketball (36.5%), and football (36.4%). Compare that to tennis, where over five sets the favorite loses only about 21 percent of the time. In other words, play long enough and skill wins out. In an average ninety-minute soccer match, the better team is only slightly more likely to win than the better player is in a single hand of poker. Both are basically coin flips.

The main thing that drives the randomness is low event count. A basketball game, for example, has around a hundred possessions per team. A tennis match has hundreds of points. But a soccer match can turn on a single shot hitting the crossbar, one bad call, or a ball bouncing off someone’s shin. There’s simply not enough scoring for skill to drown out luck.

It Bans the One Thing Humans Are Good At

The most basic problem with soccer is even simpler than the fact that it’s mostly luck. The sport’s founding rule is that you can use every part of your body except the one humans are best at. Homo sapiens are tool users. Using our hands is one of the basic traits that separate us from the other apes—we’re extraordinarily good at it, and our entire hunting strategy once depended on it. Our primary evolutionary edge is throwing things. No other animal can hurl a rock or spear with anything like our speed and accuracy. Our legs and feet evolved mainly for running. Soccer takes away the single greatest advantage of an ape that stood up on two legs partly to free its hands. It would be a great sport for a species that hunted by kicking rocks at its prey.

It’s not that dribbling, passing, and shooting with your feet is unimpressive. It’s that it’s impressive the way a dog walking on its hind legs is impressive: the miracle is that it can be done at all, not that this is the highest use of the organism. It would be like a version of basketball where you’re only allowed to dribble with your head. The best players would be some of the best athletes on earth—and they’d be demonstrating nothing except how much human talent can be squandered by arbitrarily banning the one thing we’re good at, provided you force enough children to practice.

Soccer Is All Middle

All good sports are stories. They’re built out of discrete units—at-bats, downs, points, possessions—each with a beginning and an end: something is attempted, something is resolved, and then you get another. The historian Michael Oriard, an NFL lineman before he was an academic, put it simply: American sports have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Soccer just drones on—pass it back, pass it sideways, pass it back, pass it sideways, lose it, win it back, pass it back again—for ninety minutes, and almost nothing ever finishes. It’s all middle.

It’s not that nothing happens; it’s that the same thing almost happens, over and over, for two hours. A promising run, broken up. A cross to no one. A shot into the third row. Soccer isn’t really about scoring. It’s about the threat of scoring, endlessly deferred. It’s all foreplay, no sex.

---

quote:

---

I could recite all the tedious, oft-repeated ways to make soccer less boring—widen the goals, shrink the field, add hockey-style power plays, lose the goalkeepers, and give one player per side (the Reaper) a metal pole he may use to strike an opponent in the face no more than five times per game, provided he isn’t offside. But I don’t have time to solve all of soccer’s problems.

Soccer’s greatest trick is convincing a billion people that frustration is suspense, that scarcity is beauty, and that being bored stiff means you’ve finally become sophisticated.

---