With much sadness that the 2018 World Cup came and went so quickly I thought I’d vent bit. In general, the American sports media seem to arrogantly malign soccer while clearly displaying their ignorance of it. I’ll leave that as an unsubstantiated hypothesis for the moment, but I’ll definitely come back to it in a future post.
For now, I’m going to address the most common objection I hear people voice when it comes to watching soccer.
“There’s not enough action / nothing happens / it’s not fast-paced enough.”
This one is laughable. Interestingly, the people who most often utter these phrases are enamored with baseball and American football, both games with far less continuous action than soccer.
Let’s break this thing down a bit.
The Action Factor
For brevity’s sake, I’m going to give you a one-stop shop for the numbers below, because it does a good job of aggregating the data from places like WSJ.
- Baseball – The average game is just under three hours, roughly 18 minutes of which baseball is actually being played. The rest of the time the pitcher is trying to choose a pitch, the batter is trying to choose a bat, and the umpire is trying to choose the ball, all interspersed among an unhealthy dose of advertising.
- American football – With the longest game time but shortest in play, football games run in excess of three hours with football happening for about 11 minutes. That’s six percent. Let me drive that home: 6%. Out of 100%. Wow.
- Soccer – It’s 90 minutes of nearly continuous play, stopped only for injuries, free kicks, or penalty kicks. On average, the ball is “in play” for between 56 minutes and 65 minutes, roughly, depending on your source. Looking pretty continuous by comparison, eh? Here’s a little table.
If the above isn’t compelling enough, consider this: the majority of play stoppages in soccer generally consist of corner kicks and free kicks which happen during the “run of play,” as there are no commercial breaks until halftime.
In other words, when you’re waiting for the action to restart in soccer, you’re watching the ensuing action being set up – players getting set up on a corner kick, for example. There’s still anticipation of play, and the restarts are generally very fast.
Contrast this with baseball and football, in which the stoppages of play generally result in Doritos and Geico trying to sell you something. On the occasions that a break is too short for commercials (a huddle or batting change, for instance), you’re watching the short stop spit or a 300 pound linemen adjust his Yoga pants. Yikes.
A Caveat
The diving is abysmal. I hate it.
Does Any of This Matter?
Probably not. People like what they like. My opinion is that if people would take the time to learn the game, they’d enjoy it more. But, you know what they say about opinions.
abhor mediocrity 