How to make football more exciting: readers’ best ideas

Our leader on how to make football more exciting (“The even more beautiful game”, June 6th) drew a big response from readers, who shared their own goals for the world’s favourite sport. Here is a selection of the letters we think scored best, edited for brevity.

Shrink the keeper’s area and limit defenders

As someone who grew up with American sports, but who was dragooned into being a soccer referee when my children played, here are my suggestions based on other sports.

Make the goal area in soccer like the crease in ice hockey. Today the penalty area, where goalkeepers are allowed to use their hands, is too large. Limit it to the smaller goal area. But do not allow attackers in the area unless they have or are following the ball.

Then limit the number of defenders allowed in the penalty area. Only five defenders plus the goalie should be allowed in the penalty area. This would be similar to the “goaltending” rules in basketball.

Make the offside rule more liberal, and equal for the teams on the attack and on the defence. As it is, the attacking team is limited in its ability to make what would be called a “fast break” in basketball. But the defending team could boot the ball all the way down the field to get out of an attack. Instead make soccer offside like the ice-hockey rules, both ways. No passes over two lines, anywhere on the field.

Allow more substitutions, though not like American football, with players coming in and out at every play. But there could be three times during the game, half time and a play stoppage around the quarter points, where players could be replaced and return later.

Larry Littlefield
New York

Stop the clock to cut time-wasting

Have the match time wind down from 45 minutes, stop the clock at any stoppage in play and restart it when play resumes. FIFA, football’s governing body, has sensibly introduced measures to reduce time-wasting regarding throw-ins and goalkeepers putting the ball in play, which will come into effect at this World Cup.

Other ways to eliminate time-wasting include not allowing players to stay on the pitch as a result of a foul, when they wait for the trainer as if mortally wounded from a glancing touch by an opposing player. And not allowing players to lay paralysed in a crumpled heap with cramps when they are clinging to a one-goal lead with a few minutes left on the clock. Ditto, players should not be allowed to take a minute to set up free kicks and take leisurely strolls to the corner flag to take corner kicks.

Arsenal fans would be aghast but the game and its legions of fans would benefit from a more exciting product.

Saro Agnerian
Montreal

Widen the goal to get more reliable results

As long as we’re awash in the World Cup, why not recognise that for all its many merits, football’s one big design defect is that there isn’t enough scoring to know which team was really best. Every team sport has its quirks. In American football, 44 players run on and off the field and in a timed hour actually play for about seven minutes. In football, 22 athletes, who really play for 90 minutes, run down to one end of the field and don’t score, except for maybe once or twice in a game. After 1-0 we don’t know if Brazil really played better than Uruguay, or just got lucky.

Sports were not delivered immutably or divinely to Adam and Eve. Football was invented by British schoolboys. Baseball has changed rules to encourage more hits and scoring and move things along. American football introduced the forward pass when players were getting killed on the field. Football just needs about a metre wider and somewhat higher goal so that scoring generates enough data to reliably infer actual performance.

The game will be no less beautiful, but it will be a lot more clear who really wins a match.

Michael O’Hare
Professor of the Graduate School, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

Shorten matches and settle extra time with fewer players

Noting that most top flight matches remain scoreless or drawn for the first 80 or so minutes, just play two halves of ten minutes (think 20/20 cricket). Instead of a World Cup tournament taking months, it could be done and dusted in a week, with two or three matches held in the same stadium over one evening.

A penalty shoot-out is the most stupid way to decide the winner of a team game. Instead, in extra time each side would remove two players every two minutes until you are left with five a side. The first team to score a goal in extra time wins.

To clamp down on professional fouls, non-sportsmanlike behaviour, diving and rolling around on the ground like a toddler having a tantrum, each team can cite two opposition players after the match. A panel reviews the video evidence and can suspend miscreants for a match or two or impose fines, depending on the infraction (this is used in Australian rules football to reduce violence on the field).

John McLaughlin
Cheltenham

Make the game smaller and faster for North America

Soccer, also known as football in countries with no other organised sports, is indeed boring, especially compared with fast-paced hockey, basketball, baseball and the North American football leagues.

My suggestion for the fifth-best beautiful game is to reduce the field size by half, so there are fewer players, and reduce the goal net by 60% (ever seen the huge goalies and tiny nets in hockey?) No head balls with their concussion risks, but elbow balls. Crack down on fake injuries too.

Then North Americans might tune in to soccer games.

Neil Alexander
Ottawa

Give strikers a slightly larger target

To make football less boring use bigger goals. Goalkeepers are now taller, stronger and more athletic. Make the target a little larger, and the beautiful game might need fewer technocratic arguments and forensic redrafting of offside or handball rules, and produce a few more beautiful goals.

Dr Tony Ballance
Appleby Magna, Leicestershire

Hold the shoot-out before kick-off

There is one very simple rule change that would delight fans, sponsors and broadcasters alike. Hold a penalty shoot-out just before the start of each match and award the winner a half-goal advantage. The opening whistle would therefore find one side already trailing, encouraging attacking play from the outset and reducing the incentive for cautious football. One side would always be in the lead and after 90 minutes of time there would be a clear winner.

Such a system would also remove the absurdity of enduring extra time only often to settle matches with a penalty shoot-out at the end. Instead, the drama of the shoot-out would come before the game rather than after it.

When my wife and I first discussed the idea, we regarded it as a joke. However, the more I have considered it, the more convinced I have become that it could increase both the excitement and the enjoyment of the beautiful game for a much wider audience and sponsors.

Peter Schultheiss
Northampton

Let VAR decide and restrict offside to the final third

Allow Video Assistant Referee (VAR) to rule or overrule officials on the pitch on offsides calls and penalties without waiting for the referee’s involvement. Watching a referee peering at a TV screen for minutes at a time is beyond boring. Another change would be to replace the halfway-line with lines one-third and two-thirds of the way from the touchlines and call offsides only within the attacking third of the pitch.

David Book
Monterey, California

Use rugby’s clock, sin-bins and respect for referees

Stop the clock, as in rugby, whenever there is an injury, VAR or a substitution. That way there is no discussion about how many minutes of extra-time are needed, the game finishes bang on the 90th minute and stops time-wasting.

Yellow cards: players should have to go to the sin bin for ten minutes as in many other sports, this would stop the oxymoron of professional fouls (apparently they tried this out in youth football in a county in England I believe, and bookings were down by 40%).

Only the captain should be allowed to talk to the referee.

Stop the Greco-Roman wrestling at corners.

Gordon Lawson
London

Drop the goalkeeper altogether

As a fellow afootballist, may I suggest a solution to the boredom problem: drop the goalkeeper. That would allow for more goals, quicker pace, less time-wasting passes, and the development of the mighty shooting kick to rival the long American football pass and so on.

Douglas Finney
Uzès, France

Blame the data, not just the rules

James Tozer’s data-led diagnostic of why football has become boring was hopefully consciously ironic, given that one of the primary root causes driving a loss of spontaneity in football is an excessive reliance on data (By Invitation, June 6th).

John Ashworth
Aston Clinton, Buckinghamshire

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