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> A possible solution could be to expand the goalie-only area around the net. That would, in theory, force opponents to focus more on shooting and not on piling

> A possible solution could be to expand the goalie-only area around the net. That would, in theory, force opponents to focus more on shooting and not on piling around the goalie. The point of the article is that the goalies are too big and therefore you have to crowd the net to even get a chance of scoring. Banning the crowding does not solve the root cause. The result (if the article is correct) would be a game with much fewer goals, probably boring.

eru 6y ago
> The result (if the article is correct) would be a game with much fewer goals, probably boring. Maybe boring, but maybe not. Football does really well at attracting attention globally, and they only have a handful of goals in a match at most. Sometimes even zero. (Germany scoring seven goals against Brazil in the World Cup a while ago was big news.)
- me_me_me 6y ago
  > (Germany scoring seven goals against Brazil in the World Cup a while ago was big news.) Those type of events are outliers and not worth using > Football does really well at attracting attention globally That's only because everyone else is watching it. I got tired of following football around 14, its inherently repetitive and boring (unless you play it yourself) not to mention the extent of match fixing.
  - 101008 6y ago
    > I got tired of following football around 14, its inherently repetitive and boring (unless you play it yourself). > Those type of events are outliers and not worth using.
  - eru 6y ago
    > Those type of events are outliers and not worth using Yes, that was exactly my point. A score of 7 is considered an extreme outlier. That tells you that normal scores are much lower. > That's only because everyone else is watching it. I got tired of following football around 14, its inherently repetitive and boring (unless you play it yourself) not to mention the extent of match fixing. I don't watch any sports myself, but I don't think the people who do so are all deluded. Yes, there's a social aspect to it, but that's not the only thing.
- vmladenov 6y ago
  That match was legitimately unsportsmanlike play from Germany. To thoroughly annihilate the host team like that when it’s elimination and point differential no longer matters; they should have eased off at 4-0 and played a defensive game.
  - neurostimulant 6y ago
    I think it's more unsportsmanlike to not play to the best of one's ability, especially in an international event like this.
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    Interesting. I feel completely the opposite. Pulling your punches in a competition that matters is one of the greatest insults I can think of.
    - eru 6y ago
      According to Wikipedia, aversion to 'running up the score' might be an American thing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_up_the_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_up_the_score > Running up the score occurs when a competitor continues to play in such a way as to score additional points after the outcome of the game is no longer in significant question and the team is all but assured of winning. In the United States and Canada, it is considered poor sportsmanship to run up the score in most circumstances > The term and the concept are not common elsewhere in the world. > In professional soccer, the concept of "running up the score" is mostly unheard of; Pulling your punches in the football world cup would indeed have been seen as the ultimate insult.
      - bscphil 6y ago
        I wonder if this could have something to do with the popularity (well, the existence) of American Football. It's a very physical contact sport. Obviously, when a team is losing badly and the other is continuing to run up the score, emotions can run wild, and so there's a stronger possibility of unnecessary injuries. Maybe it's felt to be better to just "take a knee and run out the clock", where possible. If you compare with baseball, I don't know that I've ever heard of a strong aversion to running up the score. Maybe you're not exactly sending out your substitute batter in the top of the ninth when you're up 10, but I've never seen a team give up and not put in a reasonable effort. Wildly disparate scores seem pretty common in basketball as well. Even in college (American) football, scores of like 70-0 are not that uncommon. You only really quit trying in football when you can run out the clock, or you pull your starting players to prevent injuries.
- Retric 6y ago
  Sometimes 0-0 is fine, but what if say 1/2 or more games where 0-0. That’s hardly fun. You need to design a sport so scoring is expected every game even if it’s rare within each game. A slightly larger net say 1 foot wider and 6 inches taller with an expanded goalie only area say extra 2 foot radius is a reasonable option. Tweak thing so the most common score it’s say 1-2 or 2-3 and you’re fine.
  - tzs 6y ago
    Someone once claimed that the reason soccer is not big in the US is that we can't get excited about any sport where a team can legitimately be said to have built an insurmountable 1-0 lead. There's a simple change that I'd like to see tried in soccer that might up the action a bit in the second half enough to get more people in the US interested, without changing it so much that the rest of the world would lose interest. Simply move the penalty shootout tie-break from after the second period to the break between periods. The penalty shootout would still only count if the game is tied at the end of the second period, but now the teams would go into the second period knowing who wins if it comes to tie-breaks. In the second period there will always be one team in a "must score" situation, which should cause that team to play more aggressively. That might boost the action enough to get people in the US to watch.
    - ajmurmann 6y ago
      > Someone once claimed that the reason soccer is not big in the US is that we can't get excited about any sport where a team can legitimately be said to have built an insurmountable 1-0 lead. This doesn't apply to soccer at all though. Even a 2-0 lead is often list in a few minutes. What makes soccer exciting isn't the scoring, but that you are always just second away from a goal that could change the game. That's why you'll hardly ever see in soccer that the audience leaves the stadium before the end of the game like you are in baseball all the time.
- bartread 6y ago
  > Maybe boring, but maybe not. A lot of this is about audience perception, and considerations of what makes a good spectator sport in different cultures. More than perhaps anywhere else, sport in North America often tends to be about the spectators. Think NASCAR where you can generally see the whole track and there is a lot of overtaking, and a lot of crashes, or basketball which is a high speed, high scoring game played on a smallish court that, again, maximises action. There's a noticeable emphasis on creating the most exciting and intense spectacle for the audience. I think the same is true of contemporary ice hockey, which is like a ludicrously amped up version of regular hockey: the high scores are all part of that. I'm not an avid follower of any of these sports but, as a casual viewer, I find I'm much happier to sit down and watch them than some of the original sports on which they're based because they're very accessible and high on action and entertainment value. The one sport where this really comes unstuck for me is American football: the stop/start structure built into the game just drives me up the wall, and I find myself significantly preferring the (by comparison) rarely interrupted action and flow of rugby. That's not a critique of American Football at all - it's obviously a deeply tactical and nuanced sport: this is just my personal preference for a longer arc of play, on average. And, by the way, I'm talking specifically about rugby union: I've never followed rugby league.
  - littlestymaar 6y ago
    > There's a noticeable emphasis on creating the most exciting and intense spectacle for the audience. Honestly, and I say that as someone who loves basket ball and often stays up during the night to see the NBA playoffs, basketball is often far from the level of tension and excitement you can get in (European) football. In football, most of the time a single goal is a game changer even when you have some margin (let say 2-0 and the opponent team is now 2-1,they have regained the momentum now and the match is totally different). In terms of adrenaline, the entire football game is like the fourth quarter of the seventh game and every single goal feels like a buzzer beater! The scarcity of goals is invaluable.
    - Retric 6y ago
      I think it depends on how invested you are to the game. When you don’t care about the teams, low scoring games lack the tension you’re talking about Tennis is at the extreme end of high scoring and even watching matches you don’t care about between average players can be entertaining though not memorable. Longer term it’s only the truly exceptional games of any sport you’re going to remember anyway.
- JustSomeNobody 6y ago
  Funny you say that. My SO grew up playing and still does. I never really thought much of it until we'd watch some games together. I find myself enjoying the play in the field more than I do when either team scores.
frobozz 6y ago
In most sports, when a goal is scored, the game stops for some kind of reset. Surely a game with more goals is therefore more boring, because it has more time with everyone dawdling back to the centre line and the referee holding the ball/puck/whatever.
- mysterydip 6y ago
  In hockey, play also stops when the goalie catches the puck.
- Macha 6y ago
  In many games when a goal is not scored in certain ways (saves, balls going out of play, some sports even have time limits), play also stops.
pcl 6y ago
> a game with much fewer goals, probably boring. Also, 0-0 ties and 1-0 wins don't really provide much information. These sports are typically played in the contexts of seasons, where teams are trying to win a championship. Very low scores don't really meaningfully establish which teams are better than others. 0-0 and 1-1 ties are obviously not really disclosing much, but winning 1-0 is really too low-granularity to mean all that much also. Basketball is a bit ridiculous in the other direction, of course, but I assume that scores in the high single digits to low double digits should be the target, if we are to actually use them to figure out how to rank teams. Hurling (teams typically score 10-30 points in a game) and baseball (5-20) seem like they're in the right range. Soccer / football (0-10, but often on the bottom end of that) seems way too low.
- LudwigNagasena 6y ago
  Low single digits make scoring memorable and tension high.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    Disagree. I've tried to watch soccer, but the pace kills it for me. <3 goals (total, not per side) in 90 minutes?[1] No thanks. High single digit would be a noticeable improvement, IMO. US NCAA basketball is, IMO, one of the most exciting sports for viewing. Scores in the 70 point range[2] (per side, 30-35 baskets at 2 or 3 per) in about 2 hours (40 min clock ends up close to 120 min actual game length). 1 - FIFA World Cup matches haven't averaged more than 3 goals per match since 1958. https://www.statista.com/statistics/269031/goals-scored-per-game-at-the-fifa-world-cup-since-1930/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/269031/goals-scored-per-... 2 - https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2013/01/14/college-basketball-scoring-on-pace-to-be-lowest-in-60-years/1834109/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2013/01/14/colle...
    - AshleyGrant 6y ago

eru 6y ago

> The result (if the article is correct) would be a game with much fewer goals, probably boring. Maybe boring, but maybe not. Football does really well at attracting attention globally, and they only have a handful of goals in a match at most. Sometimes even zero. (Germany scoring seven goals against Brazil in the World Cup a while ago was big news.)

me_me_me 6y ago
> (Germany scoring seven goals against Brazil in the World Cup a while ago was big news.) Those type of events are outliers and not worth using > Football does really well at attracting attention globally That's only because everyone else is watching it. I got tired of following football around 14, its inherently repetitive and boring (unless you play it yourself) not to mention the extent of match fixing.
- 101008 6y ago
  > I got tired of following football around 14, its inherently repetitive and boring (unless you play it yourself). > Those type of events are outliers and not worth using.
- eru 6y ago
  > Those type of events are outliers and not worth using Yes, that was exactly my point. A score of 7 is considered an extreme outlier. That tells you that normal scores are much lower. > That's only because everyone else is watching it. I got tired of following football around 14, its inherently repetitive and boring (unless you play it yourself) not to mention the extent of match fixing. I don't watch any sports myself, but I don't think the people who do so are all deluded. Yes, there's a social aspect to it, but that's not the only thing.
vmladenov 6y ago
That match was legitimately unsportsmanlike play from Germany. To thoroughly annihilate the host team like that when it’s elimination and point differential no longer matters; they should have eased off at 4-0 and played a defensive game.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  I think it's more unsportsmanlike to not play to the best of one's ability, especially in an international event like this.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  Interesting. I feel completely the opposite. Pulling your punches in a competition that matters is one of the greatest insults I can think of.
  - eru 6y ago
    According to Wikipedia, aversion to 'running up the score' might be an American thing. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_up_the_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_up_the_score > Running up the score occurs when a competitor continues to play in such a way as to score additional points after the outcome of the game is no longer in significant question and the team is all but assured of winning. In the United States and Canada, it is considered poor sportsmanship to run up the score in most circumstances > The term and the concept are not common elsewhere in the world. > In professional soccer, the concept of "running up the score" is mostly unheard of; Pulling your punches in the football world cup would indeed have been seen as the ultimate insult.
    - bscphil 6y ago
      I wonder if this could have something to do with the popularity (well, the existence) of American Football. It's a very physical contact sport. Obviously, when a team is losing badly and the other is continuing to run up the score, emotions can run wild, and so there's a stronger possibility of unnecessary injuries. Maybe it's felt to be better to just "take a knee and run out the clock", where possible. If you compare with baseball, I don't know that I've ever heard of a strong aversion to running up the score. Maybe you're not exactly sending out your substitute batter in the top of the ninth when you're up 10, but I've never seen a team give up and not put in a reasonable effort. Wildly disparate scores seem pretty common in basketball as well. Even in college (American) football, scores of like 70-0 are not that uncommon. You only really quit trying in football when you can run out the clock, or you pull your starting players to prevent injuries.
Retric 6y ago
Sometimes 0-0 is fine, but what if say 1/2 or more games where 0-0. That’s hardly fun. You need to design a sport so scoring is expected every game even if it’s rare within each game. A slightly larger net say 1 foot wider and 6 inches taller with an expanded goalie only area say extra 2 foot radius is a reasonable option. Tweak thing so the most common score it’s say 1-2 or 2-3 and you’re fine.
- tzs 6y ago
  Someone once claimed that the reason soccer is not big in the US is that we can't get excited about any sport where a team can legitimately be said to have built an insurmountable 1-0 lead. There's a simple change that I'd like to see tried in soccer that might up the action a bit in the second half enough to get more people in the US interested, without changing it so much that the rest of the world would lose interest. Simply move the penalty shootout tie-break from after the second period to the break between periods. The penalty shootout would still only count if the game is tied at the end of the second period, but now the teams would go into the second period knowing who wins if it comes to tie-breaks. In the second period there will always be one team in a "must score" situation, which should cause that team to play more aggressively. That might boost the action enough to get people in the US to watch.
  - ajmurmann 6y ago
    > Someone once claimed that the reason soccer is not big in the US is that we can't get excited about any sport where a team can legitimately be said to have built an insurmountable 1-0 lead. This doesn't apply to soccer at all though. Even a 2-0 lead is often list in a few minutes. What makes soccer exciting isn't the scoring, but that you are always just second away from a goal that could change the game. That's why you'll hardly ever see in soccer that the audience leaves the stadium before the end of the game like you are in baseball all the time.
bartread 6y ago
> Maybe boring, but maybe not. A lot of this is about audience perception, and considerations of what makes a good spectator sport in different cultures. More than perhaps anywhere else, sport in North America often tends to be about the spectators. Think NASCAR where you can generally see the whole track and there is a lot of overtaking, and a lot of crashes, or basketball which is a high speed, high scoring game played on a smallish court that, again, maximises action. There's a noticeable emphasis on creating the most exciting and intense spectacle for the audience. I think the same is true of contemporary ice hockey, which is like a ludicrously amped up version of regular hockey: the high scores are all part of that. I'm not an avid follower of any of these sports but, as a casual viewer, I find I'm much happier to sit down and watch them than some of the original sports on which they're based because they're very accessible and high on action and entertainment value. The one sport where this really comes unstuck for me is American football: the stop/start structure built into the game just drives me up the wall, and I find myself significantly preferring the (by comparison) rarely interrupted action and flow of rugby. That's not a critique of American Football at all - it's obviously a deeply tactical and nuanced sport: this is just my personal preference for a longer arc of play, on average. And, by the way, I'm talking specifically about rugby union: I've never followed rugby league.
- littlestymaar 6y ago
  > There's a noticeable emphasis on creating the most exciting and intense spectacle for the audience. Honestly, and I say that as someone who loves basket ball and often stays up during the night to see the NBA playoffs, basketball is often far from the level of tension and excitement you can get in (European) football. In football, most of the time a single goal is a game changer even when you have some margin (let say 2-0 and the opponent team is now 2-1,they have regained the momentum now and the match is totally different). In terms of adrenaline, the entire football game is like the fourth quarter of the seventh game and every single goal feels like a buzzer beater! The scarcity of goals is invaluable.
  - Retric 6y ago
    I think it depends on how invested you are to the game. When you don’t care about the teams, low scoring games lack the tension you’re talking about Tennis is at the extreme end of high scoring and even watching matches you don’t care about between average players can be entertaining though not memorable. Longer term it’s only the truly exceptional games of any sport you’re going to remember anyway.
JustSomeNobody 6y ago
Funny you say that. My SO grew up playing and still does. I never really thought much of it until we'd watch some games together. I find myself enjoying the play in the field more than I do when either team scores.

frobozz 6y ago

In most sports, when a goal is scored, the game stops for some kind of reset. Surely a game with more goals is therefore more boring, because it has more time with everyone dawdling back to the centre line and the referee holding the ball/puck/whatever.

mysterydip 6y ago
In hockey, play also stops when the goalie catches the puck.
Macha 6y ago
In many games when a goal is not scored in certain ways (saves, balls going out of play, some sports even have time limits), play also stops.

pcl 6y ago

> a game with much fewer goals, probably boring. Also, 0-0 ties and 1-0 wins don't really provide much information. These sports are typically played in the contexts of seasons, where teams are trying to win a championship. Very low scores don't really meaningfully establish which teams are better than others. 0-0 and 1-1 ties are obviously not really disclosing much, but winning 1-0 is really too low-granularity to mean all that much also. Basketball is a bit ridiculous in the other direction, of course, but I assume that scores in the high single digits to low double digits should be the target, if we are to actually use them to figure out how to rank teams. Hurling (teams typically score 10-30 points in a game) and baseball (5-20) seem like they're in the right range. Soccer / football (0-10, but often on the bottom end of that) seems way too low.

LudwigNagasena 6y ago
Low single digits make scoring memorable and tension high.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- alistairSH 6y ago
  Disagree. I've tried to watch soccer, but the pace kills it for me. <3 goals (total, not per side) in 90 minutes?[1] No thanks. High single digit would be a noticeable improvement, IMO. US NCAA basketball is, IMO, one of the most exciting sports for viewing. Scores in the 70 point range[2] (per side, 30-35 baskets at 2 or 3 per) in about 2 hours (40 min clock ends up close to 120 min actual game length). 1 - FIFA World Cup matches haven't averaged more than 3 goals per match since 1958. https://www.statista.com/statistics/269031/goals-scored-per-game-at-the-fifa-world-cup-since-1930/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/269031/goals-scored-per-... 2 - https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2013/01/14/college-basketball-scoring-on-pace-to-be-lowest-in-60-years/1834109/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/2013/01/14/colle...
  - AshleyGrant 6y ago