World Soccer: How to Get Rid Of Defensive Anti-Football

FIFA president Sepp Blatter is at it again. In his review of this year's World Cup, Blatter observed that the biggest drawback of the tournament was the lack of free-flowing soccer.

Teams, according to Blatter, were too concerned about losing and therefore set themselves up ultra-defensively in hope of at least getting a point from a draw.

Blatter is right in observing the problem. Particularly in the group stages, there were a lot of buses proverbially parked in front of the small nations' goals and there wasn't a lot of wide-open, exciting soccer being played.

Unfortunately, Blatter's proposed solutions are way off the mark. Blatter is discussing either reviving the "golden goal" or eliminating extra time and having games go straight to penalties.

One has to wonder if Blatter has ever actually watched a soccer match if he thinks these solutions will fix the anti-football problem.

THE REASONS FOR ANTI-FOOTBALL

It's all about motivation. If you're a manager of a team that has no realistic hope of beating your opponent, what do you do? Do you play attacking football, and take a one-in-a-hundred chance of getting a shocking result? Or do you park the bus, play anti-football, and take a one-in-ten chance of getting a point out of the game?

Of course you park the bus. Managers aren't paid to entertain. They're paid to get results and that's what they will do.

Reintroducing the "golden goal" will just make the problem worse. For those of you unfamiliar with the rule, a "golden goal" rule is like sudden death overtime in American football—the first team to score in overtime wins. It creates great drama, but it also creates the opportunity for a smaller team to steal a result from a bigger one by getting the "golden goal" early in extra time.

So if you're managing FC Minnow against FC Giant in a "golden goal" situation, your best strategy is to play for a draw and hope you get lucky in extra time. Your chances of getting a win actually increase by getting the game to extra time, so you probably have even more incentive to play anti-football for the nil-nil regulation and take your puncher's chance in extra time.

It's the same analysis for going straight to penalties without extra time. While some players are better than others, a penalty shootout is basically a lottery. If you're managing FC Minnow, again, you like your chances at a lottery much better than your chances over the course of a full match. So, once again, such a rule would encourage FC Minnow managers to park the bus and pray for penalties.

THE SOLUTION

So how do we encourage teams to play more attacking soccer? The only way to do it is to change the motivations by altering a very simple rule. Minnows park the bus praying for a nil-nil draw, because ultimately they get the point from it.

Then the solution is to remove the one point awarded for a scoreless draw.

If a scoreless draw is rewarded the same as a loss then all teams would have no incentive to play for nil-nil. Every team would start the game out knowing they needed to score at least once. While smaller teams may still be defensive and try to score on a counter, at least they will know they need to score. If a team hasn't scored as the game moves on, they will be forced to come out of their defensive shell and play a more open game.

And a more open, free-flowing game is ultimately what we all want to see. Hopefully Blatter and the other poo-bahs in FIFA will take a look at this simple rule change rather than return us to the failed nonsense of the past.