How to make soccer more exciting?

The primary thing that bothers me about soccer is the red card. When a team gets a red card early the game stops being competitive. Why not just make them play a man down for five minutes or until the other team scores and have it cost them a substitution to replace the guy?

 

I may be a bit biased, but I just love "Tanzt den Andre Wiedener":

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-OXzi5SG2M[/yt]

(starting around 0:50m)

 

Yeah, nobody is really saying that they should change the rules for Americans, but they could at least modify them again for the MLS.... and get decent TV coverage. It would be worth a shot

 

Oh, the "other unmentionable club from Vienna", against "the other unmentionable team from the other side of the country"
(too bad the stadium didn't blew up)

 

I don't remember, to be honest. I didn't start to get really interested in soccer until the 1998 World Cup.

 

Then maybe we should stop calling it a sport and start calling it dance.

 

Want 'Mericans to like it? Make each goal worth six. So you get a 12-6 game.

See? That's better than 2-1.

 

It is about the score over here because that is what determines the winner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgXvaRUP4l4
Now that's some football excitement.

Blame my childhood soccer coach who only let me play for about 5 minutes in the entire season. Since then I have not been able to sit through a whole game. It was fun to play, not so much to watch from the sidelines.

I cannot see how more attempts to score would not make the game more exciting.

 

PLAYERS would hate that. A red card is supposed to be a hardassed punishment. That's its point.

Some states' high school rules have "hard reds" and "soft reds". All that does is create confusion among HS players, coaches, spectators and referees.

 

I think that American Football might reflect our cultural differences in the US more than Soccer (or maybe it's just what we know...). Now this is George Carlin's great routine of Baseball vs Football but I think the same sort of ideas might apply.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om_yq4L3M_I[/yt]

 

There is no reason to change soccer to make it more appealing to Americans. It's getting plenty popular as it is in it's current form

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/sports/soccer/29sandomir.html

The only change I think the sport needs is a fifth official viewing replays, but that is for the sake of the sport as a whole, not to appeal to Americans.

 

^^ Wow, that's not bad. You gotta figure with all the kids playing it these days that eventually that'd trickle up.

 

I'm very happy to see those ratings. I'm sure they'll be even higher in 2014, too, especially since Brazil is only one or two hours ahead of the Eastern Seaboard, allowing for games to be seen a little later in the day. And if the US get the 2022 World Cup like I'm hoping (I think England should have it in 2018), I think by then soccer would have become popular enough here that viewership and attendance would dwarf what it was in 1994.

As for making changes to the officials, I like the idea of adding a second referee, one to cover each half of the pitch and to back up the other referee when play moves to the opposite half, and adding two more linesmen so they can better keep up with the players and make more accurate offside calls.

 

I don't feel a rules change is needed so much as a tactics change.

 

That sounds like an immense load of bullshit to me.

 

Thanks for sharing. Any other word of wisdom you feel the need to communicate?

 

You're welcome.

Feel free to let me know when I'm supposed to take her comment seriously.

 

When you are willing to think outside of your narrow point of view, instead of just taking the piss trying to be "badass".

 

Hmmmm. Nope. Still sounds like bullshit to me. Even worse, pretentious bullshit.

So do we keep this up or will you just accept that it sounds like a line of bullshit to me?