Reuters Soccer Blog

from Left field:

Can European soccer learn from NFL on team parity?

The NFL prides itself on ‘parity’, on the competitive balance between different clubs being close, ensuring that games are tightly-fought contests and that as many teams as possible start the season with some sort of chance of making the Super Bowl.

Looking at the start to this season, with surprise results and with unfancied teams such as Houston and Tampa making bright starts, the balance is very healthy.

There are a number of mechanisms in place in the NFL to ensure that an elite group of winners and a desperate group of losers do not form. The salary cap which makes sure that cash doesn’t talk too much and the draft, which gives the lowest ranked team the first pick of the best college talent, are the two most obvious means by which the NFL ensures that things stay interesting.

On the surface at least, it seems a remarkably socialist system for a profit-orientated American sports league to have in place. Money and talent is spread around equally to ensure that there is a healthy equality. It hardly seems appropriate for a society that prides itself, in theory at least, on being a free-market capitalist system, with choice and opportunity prioritized above fairness and equality.

Not only does the NFL limit the ability of owners to spend their way to success, it also saves teams from failure. Unlike in most sports leagues in the world, there is no relegation for weak teams --- no punishment for being bad. Indeed the draft system is almost a little welfare-state style form of assistance.

In contrast, Premier League soccer in England (or Serie A in Italy or La Liga in Spain for that matter) operates the most laissez-faire style of capitalism you could imagine. If you are a young Russian billionaire or a Saudi businessman with cash to spare (or an American NFL owner for that matter) you can buy a team and assemble the best players and coaches that your money can buy. No-one will tell you how much you can pay your staff or how much you can blow on transfer fees.

The result of allowing that disparity has been that since Blackburn Rovers won the English title in 1995 only three clubs – Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United have finished champions. In that same period 12 teams, over a third of the NFL, have won the Lombardi Trophy.

Did the punishment fit the Suarez crime?

When Uruguay’s Luis Suarez handled the ball in the final seconds of extra-time in the World Cup quarter-final against Ghana, the ball was heading across the line for a dramatic winning goal.

The officials did well to spot the offence in a crowded area at the end of what must have been a tiring encounter to be in charge of. But did the punishment of a penalty and a red card for Suarez really fit the crime?

Of course, if, instead of ballooning the spot kick high, Asamoah Gyan had tucked away the penalty and Ghana had gone through, we probably wouldn’t be debating this.

But it is hard not to be left with the feeling that Suarez and Uruguay have benefited from foul play.

Suarez cannot be blamed for what was an instinctive action — within the current rules. Had the ball crossed the line his team were out and by handling the ball, he gave his goalkeeper a chance to save the situation. Ghana gained no advantage at all. Instead of a certain goal — they got a shot at the keeper from 11 metres.

Tougher action needed on soccer ‘simulation’

Chile’s Group H game against Switzerland was wrecked as a spectacle by the dismissal of Swiss midfielder Valon Behrami for what the referee saw as a serious foul on Chile’s Arturo Vidal — to the disbelief of Swiss coach Ottmar Hitzfeld and his players.

It was an incident that changed the game from a nicely balanced encounter into one where Switzerland were forced to defend with 10 men for the best part of an hour eventually losing 1-0.

It would be interesting to see what FIFA make of the incident if they take a look at the TV pictures, which appear to show Vidal making a couple of hand swipes to the side of his opponent and then dropping to the floor, hands over face, as if he had been struck hard in the face – when it looked like he had barely been brushed.

“Vidal fell down with a lot of drama. It was quite a performance,” Hitzfeld said after the game. “It clearly wasn’t a red card — it wasn’t even a yellow card. It was unfair of Vidal to roll around on the floor and simply ask for a red card.”

I have some sympathy with Mitch Phillip’s point below that we should blame the players not the referees for rule-breaking but if there are cases when refs are confusing serious fouls with playacting then perhaps they need some help.

Soccer has a large infrastructure set up to deal with testing for performance enhancing drugs, a clear case of cheating, but has next to nothing in place to deal with what FIFA refers to as “simulation”.

Any player guilty of “simulating” a foul or an assault is not just conning the referee and cheating an opponent – he is cheating the spectators at the stadium and the watching millions around the world. It is apparently easy to trick a referee by a sudden movement in a fast-paced game but the rest of us watching slow motion replays aren’t so easily hoodwinked. And who wants to be taken for a ride like that?

The U.S. and soccer – that joke isn’t funny anymore

Even though the results of the United States team in international competition indicate the country has become a respectable force in the game, in the past 12 months beating European champions Spain and drawing with presumed World Cup contenders England for example, there remain many who doubt whether soccer can ever capture the imagination of the sporting public in the United States.

The main problem Europeans, in particular English fans, appear to have with the status of soccer in the U.S. is that it is not the number one sport in the country. Not even number two or three in fact. And the fact is that there is no-one in the soccer business in the U.S. who would pretend they are in a position to overtake, on a day-to-day basis, the NFL, the NBA or Major League Baseball.

But those who doubt that soccer has a long term future in North America need to ask themselves one question when it comes to the game’s status alongside gridiron and basketball – who cares?

Ranking in relation to other sports really doesn’t matter. In the era of niche television, niche websites, niche entertainment and niche marketing , soccer clearly has an important and growing niche in the sporting life of the United States.

In the past few weeks there have been cover stories on soccer all over the US media — in TIME magazine and Vanity Fair as well as Sports Illustrated. The mammoth sports network ESPN has been all over the World Cup, broadcasting every game on television, the internet (in a choice of six languages) and streaming to mobile devices. When I left Miami for South Africa at the start of the month, my local restaurants and bars were already advertising ‘World Cup specials’ and promising giant screens and all sorts of competitions and prizes. Saturday’s England v USA Group C opener drew huge numbers to sports bars across the States — in one case, a pub in Columbus which had prepared itself for a massive 1,000 fans, had to deal with three times that amount turning up.

The fact is that the past couple of weeks have seen unprecedented Stateside media coverage of Bob Bradley’s team and the World Cup. The Sun’s mocking headline about the ‘soccerball world series’ was a lame attempt at humour that seems at least 20 years out of date — belonging to an era when those English who are afraid of the United States ‘catching on’ to the game could feel comfortable in the knowledge that it was probably never going to happen.

Here’s a few numbers that the site EPL Talk put together from various sources on the tv audience that the England v USA game drew:

Could you just talk us through the goal, Bob….

After little more than four hours’ sleep, plenty of driving and the inevitable drop in adrenalin following a big game such as Saturday’s U.S. v England match, there were a few weary souls among the reporters following the United States when we headed to team HQ at Irene Farm on Sunday morning for a press conference with coach Bob Bradley and defender Steve Cherundolo.

There was no sign of jadedness from Bradley, though, who when touching upon Steven Gerrard’s fourth minute opener for England, described it in the following terms:

“When the ball came into Lampard, Michael stepped up to close him down, Rooney came into the hole, now Gooch has to decide how tight he is going to go. Michael put enough pressure on that the initial pass that Lampard made was intended for Rooney but it skipped by him and went to Heskey, so in that moment, that space, with Gooch out of there, between Jay and Carlos and now Ricardo is caught in a tough spot because he has to decide if he can recover and track Gerrard. So all it takes in these kind of games is a couple of seconds where the reactions aren’t as good as they need to be and you’ve left a hole and you pay. This is what happens when the games are up there at the highest level.”

A bit more than “the boy done well” or “lapse in concentration”, that, isn’t it?

In the light of that remarkably detailed description, I asked Bradley if, like some NFL coaches, he spends the night after a game watching the video of the match at his hotel?

“I am pretty fortunate that I have a good recollection. Immediately after the game, the way you test it is that you watch and see if what you think you saw is what happened. By the time we rolled in here last night, I had watched that goal a few times.”

And I bet he watched it again over breakfast, don’t you?

Nothing ‘meaningless’ about U.S. defeat

USA 2 Czech Republic 4 was hardly a morale boosting result for American fans as their team prepares for the World Cup finals, which begin for the U.S against England on June 12.

Of course, as the ESPN commentators were at pains to point out, perhaps worried about viewers turning off from the team before the tournament has even begun, the squad on the field last night was missing key starters such as Landon Donovan, Carlos Bocanegra (who instead was spotted chomping chicken wings in the stands) and Clint Dempsey. And as the ESPN crew also repeatedly reminded us, the result of games like these are “meaningless”.

But there is nothing meaningless about 90 minutes of football just over two weeks before the start of the World Cup. Sure, the result is secondary, but a lot of meaningful things can come out of games such as these. For starters, we learnt how good the U.S. back-up players are.

As an aside, I’ve never been a fan of friendly games of this nature, primarily because I think they cheat supporters who buy tickets expecting to see the national team play and end up forking out good money for a glorified training session. But I was surprised that U.S coach Bob Bradley fielded such a second string side given that, as I noted previously, he really needs to settle quickly on a starting line-up and get that team to gel. Does he really have time for experimentation?

Bradley cuts seven players from his 30 man squad today (13.20 ET on ESPN) and then he has a friendly against Turkey in Philadelphia on Saturday where he will surely field a first choice line-up. After that there is only the June 5 friendly against Australia in South Africa before the real business begins. In other words, 180 minutes before his defence comes up against Wayne Rooney, Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard.

And what defence will it be? The heart of the U.S back-line throughout qualification was Oguchi Onyewu but after his performance on Tuesday, Bradley will surely be working on a formula that doesn’t feature the AC Milan centre-half. Onyewu was making his first appearance after seven months out recovering from a knee operation and frankly it showed. He was tentative and there are big questions arising from the way he didn’t jump when Tomas Sivok headed in to make it 1-1. When Onyewu left the field in the 65th minute he had a huge icepack swiftly attached to his knee. Everyone involved with the U.S team will be hoping the popular “Gooch” will be fit to face England but the evidence indicates he is a long way short of that target.