The Beautiful (Broken) Game

I have been fascinated by the sport of football since I was a small boy, in spite of the fact that I never played when I was younger. My mom would come home from work when I was around 6 years old and find me contentedly sitting in front of the TV, watching non-English language football broadcasts, though I'd never actually kicked a ball myself and never could figure out the damned offsides rule when no one was around to explain it en ingles. This says a lot about how I was hooked by the game right from the start or it might also have been the result of me sticking a false plug into a light socket and nearly electrocuting myself when I was three - the eternal conundrum about licks and centers of Tootsie Roll Pops is easier to figure out. Regardless, I've just spent the last month of my life writing daily about the game for free when I not only have plenty of other (paid) writing options but also other entertainment options, so I guess you could say I care.

After watching some untold number of hours of football during said period of time, I have come to the following conclusion:

Football is fundamentally broken.

Maybe you like this about the game. Maybe the impact of overly fallible human referees who are regularly duped by highly paid athletes and actors is an element of the sport that you appreciate. Perhaps you are of the opinion that while it sometimes ruins the game, it is also one of football's true idiosyncrasies that can no more be fixed without ruining the game than the fact that field players can't touch the ball with their hands. If that's the case, then so be it - you aren't my target audience. But maybe you don't feel that way. Maybe you hate the fact that referees seem to have at least as much impact on the game as any one player, particularly at the international level. Maybe you abhor the divers, the thugs, and the cheats that are nearly ubiquitous these days, and would like to see a lot of the grabbing, tugging, pulling, and general rugby-like elements removed from the game. Maybe you want to see football move closer to the beautiful, flowing ideal everyone talks about and not even the Brazilians truly obtain.

Maybe you just want jogo bonito.

If you are one of those people, then perhaps we've got some things to discuss.

Problems of Manpower
In no other sport does so much responsibility for how the game plays out rest on one individual: the referee. Fans pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a season to see players (and in some cases, hundreds or thousands of dollars a ticket at the World Cup), and yet the guy who consistently has the greatest effect on a game is the one with a whistle in his hands. Football stars get paid up to $250,000 a week. A referee is lucky if he gets paid $250 a game. This World Cup has shown, often in dramatic fashion, that even if the referees are good at their jobs (and many of them clearly are not), the tasks they are asked to perform are Herculean in nature.

In professional baseball there are 4 umpires on the field during the regular season and 6 during the post-season charged with officiating 18 players. In NFL football, you have 7 officials tracking 22 players. In basketball you get 3 guys following 10, and in hockey you have 4 guys following 12. However, in football, you have 1 referee and 2 linesman calling the game for 22 players on the largest field of any major sport. Asking a ref to properly officiate a free-flowing game with that many players acting on a field that large might as well be the same as asking him to divert an entire river to cleanse some shit-filled stables. In fact, in some games during this Cup, that might just be the most apt description possible of what the referee is supposed to do.

However, that particular problem doesn't signal anything "broken." Poor staffing is easily fixed, provided you aren't completely locked into the idea that there can be only one ref on the field. You can add more bodies to the pitch at any time and bring the average official-to-player ratio closer in line with other major sports.

No, where football is broken is in the discipline system.

Referees and the Discipline System
Referees essentially have two priorities on the pitch. The first is to keep the players safe from other players who are behaving violently. As evidenced by Italy vs. USA and Portugal vs. The Netherlands, the ability of a referee to maintain order when things turn nasty is tenuous at best. The referee's second priority is to maintain the integrity of the game, which includes calling all the other fouls that are not violent. This is where the major failing has occurred in World Cup 2006.

The record number of yellow and red cards by the end of the Group stage didn't simply materialize out of thin air - referees were clearly told by FIFA that they needed to call the game in a particular fashion before the Cup, and they tried to stick to that. Once again, in principal, cracking down on all the things FIFA wanted stopped, which includes tackles from behind and fouls that interfere with scoring chances, is a good thing. What's shocking is that FIFA instituted new guidelines at the World Freaking Cup, and have then backpedaled in the middle because they realized they screwed up. Where was the test bed for this system and the referees who were trained in match conditions to implement them? Putting something new like this into place at the game's showcase, which only occurs once every four years and which approximately 3 billion people watch is idiocy in the extreme.

The record number further illustrates what a failure the discipline system is. In football you have fouls, yellow cards, and red cards. That's it. A foul is just a foul until it's a yellow card or a red card. Yellow cards and red cards mean suspensions. Suspensions mean stars are not on the field, which is bad for the game unless there is a good reason for it (like violent behavior). In principle, the system is fine. It's highly flexible and gives the referee the maximum amount of leeway in a game filled with grey areas. In practice, however, it is a massive failure, especially when it comes to actually enforcing the rules.

Professional players are going exploit the rules to the absolute maximum that they are allowed. In fact, one could say that it is in their job description. Unfortunately, this desire is generally contrary to that of the fan, who would prefer to see good football, and referees are ill-equipped to make sure players follow the rules. Say, for example, a player keeps walking up the back of the other players in the middle of the field. This is an obvious foul and gets whistled constantly in every single game. How exactly does one penalize a player for this behavior? Now, the ref can eventually give this player a yellow card for persistent infringement, but say the player still does it, but this time only on important plays. Do you red card someone for it? Technically the answer is yes, but few referees I know of have the huevos required to do such things. Additionally, if they did hand out a red for such a thing, you could expect the ref to be ripped apart in the media and possibly by FIFA itself.

If you think that sort of foul is a pain in the ass to correct, don't even get me started on grabbing and shirt-pulling. Those are fouls, plain and simple. In fact, they are fouls that ruin that game. Sadly, they are so rampant that people just say, "Oh, that's normal." They may be commonplace, but they are still against the rules, yet referees are essentially powerless to stop this behavior because they only wield big sticks. Imagine what the game would be like if players weren't constantly slowing attacking players down by grabbing their shirts, shorts, or wang.

Now imagine the outcry if a ref were to give Sergio Ramos a red card for only his fourth instance of shirt-tugging (which would likely still occur in the first half), and you'll see why actually enforcing these rules are impractical. Persistent infringement, while useful in certain instances, is actually a joke.

Fix the Obvious
Football matches are decided by fewer points/goals/runs than any other sport. In fact, it is likely this absence of scoring that gives the sport its charm, since every scoring chance carries a tension and excitement that might not exist otherwise if scores ended 10-9 or even 4-3 with frequency. That said, people watch the game to see players score. So wouldn't it be nice if we made certain that goals that were actual goals (like France's vs. South Korea) actually get counted? That particular call (or not-a-call, if you like) dramatically changed the outcome in the group, which in turn affected seedings going into the knock-out stage, and gave us the France vs. Spain matchup in the round of 16 instead of France vs. Ukraine and Switzerland vs. Spain. France v. Spain was a great game, but a botched, yet obvious and easily reparable ref call in the second game of the group stage illustrates the fact that one goal can make all the difference in the world, especially at the World Cup.

The solution here is clear: you institute instant replay or some sensor in the balls that tell you whether or not a goal has occurred. Scoring in football is rare enough that you absolutely must give a team credit when it actually occurs, even if the referee and his linesman are blocked/not in position/fail to see it. This one is so important and so obvious that no further explanation should be needed.

Additionally, when the referee does something to actively change the scoring, like award a penalty kick, wouldn't it be nice if someone were there to review it immediately? Forget simple games, entire tournaments hinge on these decisions. It only makes sense to get a second pair of trained eyes to at least take a look and see if they agree. Humans are fallible, especially when attempting to observe events occurring at an extremely fast pace - events that are often intentionally disguised or falsified by the participants themselves. Create an instant replay official to review goals, penalties, and red card offenses with a 60 or 90 second review period, and you will dramatically change the game for the better. If the replay official doesn't see conclusive evidence of a change, then the referee's call stands.

Ch-ch-ch-changes...
Something has to be done about all the grabbing and tripping that goes on during the game. It's certainly illegal and by penalizing it in some meaningful fashion, you move the game back towards a more ideal, free flowing contest. Therefore, the next change I would implement would be to borrow a system from indoor soccer and institute the use of blue cards and a penalty box for minor infractions. This World Cup has proven to me that you have to have some sort of mechanism in place to actually penalize persistent infringement in a way that matters, and yellow cards aren't it. Therefore, a subsystem needs to be created to deal with the problem more effectively.

In my opinion, you can leave yellow and red cards in place, but shift minor infringements to blue cards. 3 blue cards would remove a player from the pitch for a period of time (either 10 or 15 minutes, which should be long enough to make players uncomfortable about hitting the box), during which time that team would be forced to play a man down. After serving the penalty, the player is reinstated into the game and can continue as normal unless they accumulate 6 blue cards in a game, in which case they are dismissed for good. (Truthfully, I like the concept of 5 getting you the boot, but some people like symmetry.) However, instead of receiving a mandatory suspension for the next game, players dismissed for blue card fouls would be able to play in the next match.

Arguments about slowing down the game are meaningless here, since these fouls all cause a stoppage of play when they are called, and it doesn't take much time for a ref to write down a player number and infringement code. Besides, if the game is actually played how it was meant to be played, there will be fewer fouls in total because players don't want make that extra foul and hurt their teams by getting the boot.

Will it work? I don't know, but steps need to be taken to fix a game that has become degenerate far too often at the highest levels. Don't tell me these things can't be done, and done well. Both professional basketball and professional hockey dramatically changed how they enforced the rules in the past year, returning to a truer interpretation of the rulebook for their sports and cleaning up the stupid fouls that decrease scoring and worsen how the game plays. Taking these steps has unequivocally improved the product on the field for both games.

There are two more changes I would like to see in how the game is officiated, and both of these are at the administrative level. The first change I would like to see is a push for longer suspensions for players that cause injuries or commit violent conduct. Football is a tough sport, and it causes tempers to flair. However, there's no place on the pitch for people who can't control their tempers and end up attempting to injure other players. A friend of mine was commenting on the injury to Christiano Ronaldo saying, "sometimes you just need to remove a guy from the game." That's unacceptable. If you can't mark a player without cheating, you deserve to lose, as simple as that. It's ironic that Ronaldo is the example here, because no team better exemplifies the whiney, cheatey nature of sport than the Portuguese, but he was the one the Dutch set out to injure badly enough to make sure he was removed from the game.

Once again, keeping stars on the pitch is extremely important to the health of the game, and cracking down on players who try to take opposing players out of the game is an absolute necessity. Violent players need to be suspended for lengths of time that hurt. Fine not just small dollars, but actual wages (this is easier to do at the domestic level). Make it hurt, and make it so teams are interested in trying to keep their players in line as well.

The last change I would institute is sort of the opposite of the last one. I would make certain that every yellow and red card given out at the World Cup were reviewed for validity, and immediately reversed if found to have little or no merit. Refs screw up, we all understand that. Admitting it occurs should not be a difficult topic to broach, and it's understood that what happens during a game that affects the scoreline cannot be questioned during the game, but after the fact is another matter entirely. By doing this and questioning the ref involved, you would not have Michael Essien watching Ghana painfully from the sidelines for a nothing foul supposedly committed against the United States that even Bruce Arena was scratching his head about. Once again, making sure the stars are on the pitch is prioritized, it doesn't undermine a ref's authority during the game, and yet it still attempts to make sure the calls are correct in the end. Everyone can see the referees are fallible - admit when something was wrong, fix it, and move on.

Reality Bites
So with all of that now on the table, the question becomes: Do I think any of these ideas will be put into action before the World Cup in South Africa? Realistically, I think FIFA will either put the ball sensor or goal instant replay in place by 2010. I also think they'll probably take some minor administrative steps like further reviewing of cards into account, and I think they'll even start some pilot multi-referee programs, but it's extremely unlikely they go further than that unless forced in some way to do so. The governing body is a giant bureaucracy, and as such is phobic of change. I'm certainly not the first to suggest a modified version of the indoor system has a place in the outdoor game, and I likely won' t be the last. It's also unlikely that we will see such a system put into place in my lifetime.

What's clear to me after watching over 40 games since the start of the Cup, is that the referees and more specifically, the system they are supposed to enforce, are failing the fans at the World Cup level. The rules as they exist in writing are acceptable, but the way that they are enforced contributes to lower scoring, decreased star exposure and field time, and increased thuggish behavior. Unless FIFA makes some considerable changes in manpower and how fouls are enforced, we can expect more of the same four years from now.

Football is a sport and business that produces revenues in the tens of billions of dollars per year - as consumers of the product of this business, we have a right to demand better.

Unfortunately, when played in the fashion generally exhibited at the 2006 World Cup, jogo bonito is hardly beautiful.



Author's Note: If this entry strikes a chord, feel free to repost this wherever you like, but please include a link to http://footballknuts.blogspot.com/.