The Face-Lifted Game

Earlier in the World Cup, Bill Nye The Science Guy got into trouble on Twitter for suggesting some changes to soccer.  These fell into the stereotypical criticisms of the sport from non-fans, like calls to create more offence.  So soccer fans weren't convinced. 

I'm far from an expert, but I do have some experience with the game, so I think I'm in a better position to critique it.  And I claim that I'm enough of an outsider to see the sport with objectivity that the vast majority of the world's fans won't have. So, as the perfect person to judge, here are the things I'd like to see changed:

Get a blue line

Okay, it probably shouldn't actually be blue, but I mean a hockey-style blue line. The fact is, the current soccer offside rule is just about the worst-called rule in any sport. I don't think the linesmen even do much better than chance. It's not hard to see why: for one thing, they have to keep track of the relative positioning of moving objects, whole a hockey linesman can just look along the blue line. And worse, the assistant referee has to judge the relative position of players, at the time the ball is passed from another position altogether. While sports officiating is impossible to get perfect, this is one rule where it's not even humanly possible to be good at it.

It's an example of a rule that was laid-out primarily to be fair to the players, with no consideration for whether it could be enforced, they'd be better off having a rule that is imperfect but enforceable.

Change penalties

For the most part, soccer's free-kick system is fair: because a foul in an important part of the field results in a kick from the same important part of the field, it seems just. But with penalties, not so much. Other than certain English players we could name, a penalty is a de facto automatic goal. But most things that penalties are awarded for are not worth that much. To put it another way, is hard to blame players for diving in the box, when the reward for trying to draw a penalty is much greater than the reward of a scoring chance by staying on their feet.

So I say:

• Narrow the area. Fouling someone halfway to the corner flag isn't worth a penalty.
• Move the spot back. Far enough that the goalie can react to the shot instead of having to guess. 

The one amendment to this rule: there should be an allowance for the referee to call an automatic goal for ridiculous fouls (say, a defender grabbing the ball out of mid-air to prevent a goal.)

Get a clock

The "referee's watch" approach to time keeping adds nothing to the game, but does open itself up to epidemic exploitation. So figure out how long, on average, the actual play of a soccer game lasts, and set the clock to that, stopping it whenever play stops, as in basketball or hockey.

Redefine handballs

The sport's most famous and most basic rule is also one of its most poorly defined. Handballs aren't supposed to be called if they are unintentional. Yet you still see it called against players who clearly didn't have time to move their arms.

Again, this is a rule that's fair, but too hard to enforce. We need a simpler-to-interpret concept. I've heard the suggestion that it should be a foul for any arm-ball contact, intentional or not; essentially putting the onus on players to not let the ball touch their arms. That seems to swing too far in the easy-to-enforce direction. And no one wants to see defenders running around the penalty area with their arms behind their backs.

A couple of possibilities:

• Say that players have a right to keep their arms by their sides, and no handballs are called if their arms are in that position, regardless of intent. On the other hand, it's automatically handball if their arms are in any other position.
• Base it on movement. Sort of like blocking/charging fouls in basketball, as long as the player's arm had come to a complete stop, there's no handball if the arm contacts the ball. But any case of a moving arm touching the ball is handball.

A new way to break ties

One of the most common and universal complaints is the use of penalties to break ties. How many problems are there with that?

• It's mostly random
• Lesser teams know it's not skill-based, so they play for ties
• It's an individual skill in a profoundly team-oriented support.

A simple alternative would be unlimited (presumably sudden-death) overtime. That would be exhausting, but the exhaustion would lead to mistakes and lead to goals. You could augment the overtime solution by taking players off the field occasionally.

Two referees

Hockey - a similar sport-religion - made the decision to add a second ref a few years ago. In that case, it was mainly a concession to higher-speeds and the greater body-contact that comes of bigger players. Soccer hasn't really been through such a change, but the epidemic of fakery and missed calls has demonstrated that one person simply can't competently officiate the game. Since professional and international games already have a fourth official, it wouldn't be difficult to do.

Get tough on diving

Speaking of hockey, people from outside Canada are always asking about why it has fighting in it. But the real question is, why is fighting tolerated? After all, all sports have fighting occasionally; but most of them have consequences that prevent it from happening often. I don't know how it happened, but in most of the world's sports someone, sometime, decided fighting was not acceptable, while hockey said, ah why not?

What's interesting is how attitudes have diverged. In hockey, most fans love the fighting, and couldn't imagine the sport without it, while in other sports - even similarly violent sports - hockey's acceptance of fighting is seen as strange and inexplicable.

It seems to me that diving in soccer is on the cusp of such acceptability. Diving happens in all sports, but in most it's seen as unacceptable, and something - whether rules or just referees' scepticism - stops it from getting too commonplace.

In soccer too, diving is generally considered a bad thing, but I've noticed a creeping acceptance of it. Players practice it at the behest of coaches. Fans defending the sport to non-fans have started implying that it is a sort of skill. And don't even get me started about how big a part of the sport it's become in Central America.

Something needs to be done now before some charismatic Italian soccer analyst stays convincing fans that it's an integral part of the game. I would hope that adding the second ref (see above) would help. But I think the best change that could be made would be retroactive justice. So many dives are obvious on replay; I'm not asking for gridiron-football-style replays during the game - that would slow things down far too much in a sport that had no natural breaks. But throw the book at people after the game.