DavidGee24 wrote: ↑Mon Jun 08, 2026 7:53 pm
And hockey is a great advert of how soccer should be. The way the game is designed, your average World Cup game is going to feature a total of two goals being scored with a good number of 1-0 and even 0-0 games. That's just beyond stupid. If they widened the goal so that soccer scores were like hockey scores, you'd have a lot of games in the 4-3 range and actual come-from-behind victories where a team can actually overcome an early 2- or 3-goal deficit.
Further, in the regular season hockey has a brief OT and then a shootout, but in the playoffs it's 5-on-5 sudden death, whereas in the championship game of the World Cup they actually can go to penalty kicks, which is about the stupidest thing ever. Just play sudden death OT, first goal wins. Why would ANYONE be against that? "Because that's how we've always done it". Gosh, GREAT logic there.
you don't like football then?
You have to remember the whole purpose of the game originally: it was created to give mill workers, miners, and railway laborers something cheap, accessible, and physical to do on a Saturday afternoon. It was, first and foremost, just about the pure act of playing. All you needed was a ball and some goalposts—or, more often than not, just a couple of coats or hoodies thrown on the ground. Go to the poorest parts of Africa or South America and you’ll see kids playing the exact same way—they don’t even need an actual ball, they create a makeshift one from rolled-up plastic bags or rags and a patch of dirt. No sticks, bats, helmets, or pads required.
There's a school of thought that those gritty 1-0 and 0-0 results are just a historic reflection of how hard life was for the working-class people who built the sport—you had to fight like hell just to get a single goal. Typical Brits, instead of creating something high-scoring, we reveled in the dullness and tediousness of stalemates and tight games.
And yeah, I suppose keeping it that way is "the way we've always done it," but when it clicks, there's nothing like it. The last World Cup final was a 3-3 absolute thriller and one of the greatest sporting events ever played. And yes, they had to settle it by pens of course. The irony is, FIFA actually tried sudden-death "Golden Goal" idea back in the 90s and early 2000s, and it failed miserably. Instead of encouraging teams to attack, the sheer terror of instant elimination meant both teams just completely shut up shop. It actually created even more tedious stalemates that *still* had to be settled by pens anyway. Unfortunately, trying "not to lose" is a massive psychological force in soccer that almost always outweighs the desire to win.
Game 3 of the Stanley Cup was another thriller by the way - I'm ALMOST hooked......
