Talking the other football

I’m a somewhat casual soccer fan, but I do love the World Cup, which is an amazing event despite the fact that FIFA makes the IOC and the NCAA look like a meeting of teetotaling Episcopalian good government advocates in a church basement in Scarsdale in 1957.

In particular I love the agony and the ecstasy of the various fan bases, both at the games themselves, and in the watch parties in the cities where they’re held and all around the world. I also enjoy as a casual fan indulging in rather promiscuous rooting interests — Spain, Mexico, and the USA in that order — as well as always enjoying watching Brazil because you know Brazil.

This World Cup has so far been terrific, with many excellent games, generally good officiating, and a pretty much completely MAGA-free atmosphere in most places for pretty much self-explanatory reasons.

As a prelude to a general comment thread on the whole topic, I’ll mention a suggestion I saw the other day that was new to me, although for all I know it’s been around for a long time. It has to do with penalty kicks, which many people, especially marginal or once every four year watchers of soccer games love to complain about. My own view of penalty kicks is:

Yes in the abstract it’s a faintly ridiculous and somewhat unfair way to decide a game.

But:

(1) To me the unfairness is mitigated by the fact that if you couldn’t win the game after 120 minutes of open play you can’t really complain too much about the randomness of PKs. (And of course they’re not completely random).

(2) There really isn’t any good alternative here given that you can’t replay matches (which is what they used to do) in the TV age.

(3) They are fantastic high drama.

I particularly love in a perverse way how the pressure on the shooters is so crushing that they regularly flub kicks that super high level professionals would make as a matter of routine. But it turns out to be a lot harder to smash the ball into the side netting or the upper corner when you’re playing for your country and literally billions of people are watching (I have an indelible memory of the all-time great player Roberto Baggio skying his attempt ten feet over the crossbar to conclude the 1994 championship game).

However, the suggestion I saw that struck me as really excellent was this: instead of having the PK shootout at the end of extra time, have it at the end of regular time. Then play the extra 30 minutes, and if the game is still tied after that, the winner is the team that won the shootout. This would give the team that lost it every incentive to play aggressively in extra time, with plenty of opportunities for counter-attacks by the team that won it. This seems like a much better suggestion than some others, like the golden goal, aka sudden death during extra time, which historically has led to hyper-cautious play, or gradually taking players off the field until somebody scores, which seems super gimmicky to me at least.

BTW England is going to play at the Azteca on Sunday for the first time since this happened:

Have at it, futbol lovers, and haters too, this being LGM.