June 14, 2010, 8:52 a.m. EDT What ever happened to quality soccer? Commentary: Only a change of rules can save this victim of globalization
By Amotz Asa-El JERUSALEM (MarketWatch) -- Four years on, millions are once again crowding pubs, taverns, sports bars, living rooms, storefronts and hotel lobbies around the globe, losing sleep, risking jobs and destabilizing marriages in the brave hope of seeing the world's most expensive athletes perform what their huge contracts are meant to deliver: great soccer. [image: Ghana's Asamoah Gyan scores a decisive penalty kick against Serbia in World Cup action on Sunday.] Reuters Ghana's Asamoah Gyan scores a decisive penalty kick against Serbia in World Cup action Sunday. Alas, judging by the World Cup's opening games, the fans' wish will be denied -- again. The first seven games saw a mere eight goals, including one scoreless match and another that was decided by a lone penalty. The eighth game finally yielded goals -- but that was Germany's lopsided 4-0 rout of Australia, the kind of outcome that has become common since commercial interests doubled the tournament to 32 teams, putting cannon fodder on the pitch instead of quality soccer. Visit MarketWatch's World Cup section. <http://www.marketwatch.com/world-cup> The cup's diminishing quality is already 26 years old. The five tourneys since 1986 have yielded on average hardly half the previous 14 tournaments' goals. Memorable spectacles -- like England's 4-2 defeat of Germany in the 1966 final or Brazil's 5-2 over Sweden in 1952, not to mention Hungary's 8-3 trouncing of West Germany early in the '54 cup -- are today unthinkable. Heck, in the entire 2006 tournament, champion Italy scored a measly 12 goals and won the final only thanks to a penalty shootout following a stale draw. It was the second such anticlimactic aftermath in 12 years. For a quarter-century, ever since West Germany erased a 2-0 deficit only to lose to Argentina 3-2 in the final, the World Cup has been a continuum of mostly boring, eventless, unimaginative and nearly scoreless games. Ultimately, if the game's fertility crisis is not treated, team owners will find that TV-broadcast rights, which currently earn even mediocre European clubs an annual $50 million, will dwindle. So will sponsorship and ad revenue and stadium attendances that currently yield ticket sales of $5 million and more per game. What, then, is the cause of soccer's emerging decline, and how can it be offset? The cause boils down to one word: globalization. For soccer, the otherwise blessed phenomenon of diminishing borders, regulations and nationalism has been devastating. For now, the big money that soccer involves makes owners, advertisers and officials assume business can proceed as usual. It can't. Fans are already asking what they are getting in return for players earning $1 million a month and being traded at $100 million, while investors from Abu Dhabi buy Manchester City from a former prime minister of Thailand for $380 million, and other newly arrived foreign owners lead English Premiership clubs as venerable as Liverpool, Portsmouth and West Ham into financial pits. Not only the owners, but the players, too, have become foreign legions. Before globalization, most players played in their home countries, and national squads came mostly from a handful of local clubs. Thus, for instance, the brilliant Dutch team that reached the final game in '74 and again in '78 was mostly from Ajax and Feyenoord; the Brazilians who took three cups between '58 and '70 were mostly from Santos, Sao Paolo, Cruzeiro and Corinthians; and all players from both sides in Portugal's cataclysmic 5-3 defeat of North Korea in 1966, after trailing 3-0, had hardly been abroad until that month. Fans react to England-U.S. draw The 1-1 draw between England and the U.S. World Cup teams surprises fans of both sides in South Africa and beyond. Video courtesy of Reuters. The goals scored in soccer's golden age were not only numerous but also beautiful because teammates knew each other as closely as spouses and read each other as naturally as musicians in philharmonic orchestras. Such players were well-acquainted because they played together regularly, and even when they were on opposing teams they still were parts of the same sporting ecosystem. That is why they produced truly harmonious, organic and distinctive conglomerates. Under such circumstances, international football was politically charged, but also nationally inspiring, and athletically entertaining. True, pre-globalized soccer was so nationalistic that it sometimes became a geopolitical circus, resulting, for instance, in the refusals of Greece and Spain at one point to play Albania and the Soviet Union, respectively, in the European Nations' Championship. Yet tribalism gave soccer in those days the familial and inventive flavor it now so glaringly lacks. Thus, the spirit of freedom and originality that gave rise to the Beatles also produced the great English championship of '66, and the Hungarian wonder team that won 46 international games in '51 through '56 heralded the spirit of defiance and heroism that fueled that nation's anti-Soviet uprising in the autumn of 1956. True, there was also a dark side to yesteryear's soccer. The Argentinean world champs of '78 served a horrible junta, the Spaniards who took the European Nations' Cup in '64 did wonders for Generalissimo Franco's public relations, and the war that broke out between Honduras and El Salvador following their qualifying match for the 1970 World Cup was worth not one of the 3,000 lives it took. However, there must be something in between that era's raw nationalism and today's bland, unimaginative and unbearably repetitive soccer. Today, all the World Cup teams except North Korea are led by collections of exorbitantly expensive stars playing for myriad Western European clubs. Even as club sides, these conglomerates seldom become real orchestras, as many players get sold and resold three, four and five times during a 15-year career. So instability is also built into the league system. But on national squads, players sometimes don't even know each other socially, let alone athletically. In fact, the World Cup's players frequently know the opponents' players better than they know their own teammates because they play with them in the top English, Italian, French or Spanish leagues. Consequently, the tourney produces poor offensive games and good defensive games, as the former require knowledge of one's teammates while the latter require knowledge of the rival. Added up, this is a death verdict for entertaining soccer. Potential solutions One practical remedy for this would be localization. FIFA, soccer's ultraconservative ruling body, may not be able to ban foreign ownership, but it can limit the number of foreign players allowed to play on a football club, and it can cap salaries and limit trades the way American professional sports leagues do. The problem with such regulatory reforms is that they would provoke a multibillion-dollar industry whose captains the mandarins of FIFA are not likely to challenge. That is why they will have to follow the Americans' example in changing something else: the rules. The NBA, for instance, was not ashamed to concede that the three-point shot, despite having been invented by a short-lived competing league, was actually a good idea. Its adoption in 1979 changed the game radically and only for the better. The same went for the NFL's two-point-conversion rule, which originated in college football and now enables a team that has scored a touchdown to choose between attempting a one-point kick or a two-point play from scrimmage. International soccer now begs for an even more drastic change of rule or it will soon begin losing its following. Proposals include enlarging the goal, reducing the number of players on the pitch, and limiting the number of defenders allowed in the area in front of their own goal. The most radical idea is to abolish the offside rule, which makes sense considering that its original rationale was to burden the offense back when it was productive, while the game's current crisis demands a new burden for the overly efficient defense. Something, in any event, had better be done. If soccer's rules are not changed soon, private enterprise will eventually set up new-rules leagues, and those will begin to steal players, fans, advertisers and broadcasts from the once bewitching game whose ossification increasingly resembles its ruling body's.
