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I think that soccer has a problem where the goalies are so effective that the game often comes down to attempting to shoot on the goal as many times as possible

I think that soccer has a problem where the goalies are so effective that the game often comes down to attempting to shoot on the goal as many times as possible in the hope that eventually the goalie makes a mistake. Things are made worse by the fact that when the goalie gets the ball they generally throw it most of the way down the field; effectively resetting the state of the gameplay. As a result, any given segment of the game is not particularly relevant to the outcome; what's relevant is basically the overall time of possession/goal attempts across the various segments of the game. Compare that to something like football where the outcome of a given play depends much more overtly on the play the QB decides to run, the skills of the players, how the strengths & weaknesses of the two teams match up, etc. In addition, there's a greater degree to which the plays in a possession build upon each other in order to contribute or take away from a team's ability to score during that possession.

cool_dude85 3y ago
I dont have stats on hand but I promise you a relatively small proportion of goals are scored on keeper errors, even if you expand the category to "shouldn't be beaten from that angle" type stuff instead of an explicit error. I suspect you do not watch much soccer.
- harimau777 3y ago
  The point that I'm trying to get at is that, I agree with you that there's a sense in which different people are going to prefer different things, that people who are more invested in a given sport are going to be able to see more of the nuance in it, and that as someone who's not invested in soccer there's certainly a lot that I'm missing. However, I don't think that it completely comes down to personal taste. There can still be areas where the flow of a soccer match can be more samey or less intrinsically exciting than in certain other sports. For example, soccer doesn't have the same moment to moment, head to head, back and forth of something like tennis or boxing. That's not to say that it completely lacks those moments of conflict; say when a defender is staring down an oncoming striker. However, as far as I am able to tell, they are less dense compared to something like a tennis match where they take up the whole of the playtime.

cool_dude85 3y ago

I dont have stats on hand but I promise you a relatively small proportion of goals are scored on keeper errors, even if you expand the category to "shouldn't be beaten from that angle" type stuff instead of an explicit error. I suspect you do not watch much soccer.

harimau777 3y ago
The point that I'm trying to get at is that, I agree with you that there's a sense in which different people are going to prefer different things, that people who are more invested in a given sport are going to be able to see more of the nuance in it, and that as someone who's not invested in soccer there's certainly a lot that I'm missing. However, I don't think that it completely comes down to personal taste. There can still be areas where the flow of a soccer match can be more samey or less intrinsically exciting than in certain other sports. For example, soccer doesn't have the same moment to moment, head to head, back and forth of something like tennis or boxing. That's not to say that it completely lacks those moments of conflict; say when a defender is staring down an oncoming striker. However, as far as I am able to tell, they are less dense compared to something like a tennis match where they take up the whole of the playtime.