The Chief American Complaint About Soccer is the Best Part

There are many American complaints about soccer. The familiar are that soccer has too few goals, too many tied scores, too much theatrical collapsing, unfair penalty shootouts, and too much room for one mistake, deflection or slip to overturn 89 minutes of superiority.

Many soccer fans reflexively respond: Americans just don’t get it. But as Nick Greene’s insightful “How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius” explains, these complaints reflect an important truth. Soccer really does violate a basic expectation embedded in the American psyche that sports competition will produce a clear verdict on the merits of the teams.

Major League Baseball has its long postseason. Professional basketball and hockey have similarly extended playoffs. The NFL, too, filters out the mediocre all season long, until the postseason, when the cream of the league plays for a shot at the Super Bowl title. Of course, there are exceptions (witness the hope-for-the-underdogs NFL adage, “On any given Sunday …”), but these sports are statistics-saturated, providing a forensic understanding of what led to success or defeat.

In that sense, soccer is a “poorly designed experiment,” Greene says, citing Gerald Skinner, a scientist who studied gamma-ray astronomy before turning to soccer results. Skinner, one of the book’s many fascinating profile subjects, tells Greene that any win by less than three or four goals in soccer would not provide the confidence in results that scientists would normally want from an experiment. But such emphatic victories in the professional game are relatively rare. Every men’s World Cup since 1962 has averaged fewer than three goals in total per game. Skinner calculates the very “best” team tends to have only about a 28 percent chance of even winning the World Cup.

Quite simply, the one-off contests and sheer scarcity of goals, coupled with game-changing moments like red cards or set plays from free kicks or corner kicks, create a bounty of opportunities for upsets. For soccer skeptics, that is an indictment. For soccer fans, that’s a big part of the attraction.

Even a tie score can be regarded as a stirring triumph by the underdog and a near-humiliation for the higher-quality team, as witnessed in Atlanta on Monday when tiny Cape Verde held powerhouse Spain to a goalless draw.

Yes, over the course of a soccer season or tournament, cream tends to rise. But in any individual match, surprises are relatively common. Some of the most memorable: Senegal beating reigning world champions France in 2002 and, in the 2022 group stage in Qatar, Saudi Arabia defeating eventual champions Argentina.

And that relatively high result variance can also occasionally produce truly unexpected outcomes in tournaments. Morocco and Croatia can make World Cup semifinals, Greece might win the 2004 European Championship, or Leicester City capture the 2015–16 Premier League crown.

Such underdogs rarely go all the way. Yet match by match, underdog romance is built into soccer and has been from the start, with weaker sides employing strategies to defang the strong. Limited teams “park the bus,” clogging the defensive area in front of their goal, hoping for a successful counterattack or a goal from a corner kick to steal a tie or win. Others press man for man. Passing, time-wasting and off-ball movement can change the contours of any match. A player can break a defense by walking into a position that draws defenders away.

My experience, as a Brit in the United States, is that this exasperates many Americans. If they were paying attention at all, they thought it ludicrous this spring that Arsenal, thoroughly outplayed by Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final, could come within a penalty shootout of winning the title. Yet, for fans, recognizing your team’s limitations and scraping out a win are part of the appeal.

Soccer quality is unusually hard to quantify, and though some are trying, it resists the sort of data analysis and statistics-sifting so common in other sports. Instead, soccer is a 22-person argument with no obvious unit of measurement, outside of goals scored. In Greene’s book, Patrick Lucey, who works on machine learning in sports, likens teams to sentences and players to words whose meanings change with context. That is exactly right. A pass not made can change a game.

With the expanded 48-team World Cup now underway, dominant teams will squash certain poorer sides. See Germany’s 7–1 win over Curaçao in Houston on Sunday. Yet there will also be shocks, or at least teams that unexpectedly take superior opponents to penalty shootouts. Since 1994, half of all men’s World Cup champions have needed to survive at least one shootout. That itself introduces chance.

When I hear Americans who dislike the sport suggest making the goals bigger or even copying the NHL and subtracting the number of players on the field during an overtime period with the score tied, I grimace. Soccer’s low-scoring nature, with sustained tension or frustration that can give way to elation, is not a mistake to be corrected. The game is compelling precisely because it often gives superiority 90 minutes to survive all this uncertainty.