Last year around this time, I started contributing to The Peak, and one of my first articles was covering a men’s soccer game. Growing up playing and watching soccer from a very young age, I was very excited. I felt that I could write an excellent article and tell a great story.
As I got there and set up, I looked up at the scoreboard and noticed that it was set at 45 minutes. At first I thought it was a mistake. But no, the game started with the clockgame counting down from the 45 minute mark. This caused all sorts of problems for me marking chances and goals. I was used to just looking at the time and writing down the minute, but now I had to do math (and who likes that?). Later on in the half, the team substituted three players at once. The coach used all three substitutions in the first half, which I thought it was quite odd; it turned out, though, teams are allowed to make 11(!) substitutions per game.
While the game was quite exciting, the rules made it hard to watch. SFU took a 3–1 lead into the second half, but surrendered two goals and the game ended 3–3. Or so I thought. As I got up to go home and write the article, I heard over the speakers “We will now start overtime!”
I panicked. Did I miss something? Was this some sort of playoff game? As the overtime came to a close and the game finally ended in a 3–3 draw, I half-expected it to go to a penalty shoot-out to decide it.
The NCAA’s soccer rules are idiotic. They are offensive to anyone who enjoys the beautiful game, and are an affront to God. They are also incredibly confusing, weird, and foreign to fans who are watching their first NCAA soccer match. The rules are, quite simply, a terrible attempt to ‘Americanize’ soccer.
This attempt to Americanize soccer was ventured by Major League Soccer in its early days, and it failed miserably. The rules in the early days of MLS were similar to the ones now used in the NCAA. They used a countdown clock starting from 45:00 and ending the half at 00:00. They also used a shootout to decide tied games, with the winner only getting one point instead of the customary three.
What the MLS realized is by using these rules, they were alienating not only traditional, European soccer fans, but were also failing to draw out new soccer fans. Suffering from poor attendance, the league scraped the rules following the fourth season, and MLS learned a valuable lesson. People want to see the soccer they see on TV from Europe, not a weird variation.
The NCAA could learn a valuable lesson from this. Americanizing soccer does not work; it has been tried before and it failed. If they simply used rules that are intuitive to the average soccer fan, they could improve what is already a pretty good product on the pitch into an even better one.
