I had the joy of watching a World Cup elimination game in a London pub two weeks ago. London crowds have a greater appreciation for soccer (or “association football”) than American crowds do. My friend Michelle and I drank local beers and rooted for the U.S. against Ghana. The game progressed into overtime. Since this was the “second stage” of World Cup play, the game couldn’t end in a tie (as soccer often does). Michelle and I had to quiz the locals on what the rules were for overtime during an elimination match. This opened a lot of speculation on the rules for overtime, in-game review and sports as a whole.
As the World Cup enters its semi-final rounds, now’s the time to compare soccer to other professional sports. It’s always been something of a mystery why soccer hasn’t caught on as big in the U.S. as it has in the rest of the world. Part of that may have to do with the unique quirks in the rules of soccer. And since soccer, like every sport, is a metaphor for life, we have to consider what the metaphor of soccer tells us.
A game is a human’s attempt to make sense of life. It breaks down activities we recognize – competition, cooperation, success, setback – into a set of known rules. Every game has to have rules. A game without rules could not be distinguished from regular life, and it’s understood that there’s a point where the game stops and life begins again. In fact, bringing in elements from outside of a game to the interior of a game is considered “unsporting.” You don’t call your opponents names; people within the game-set abandon their identities. You don’t pay them to throw the game; people within the game all have equal wealth. The game exists for a set duration, then stops. Life goes on afterward.
(There are of course games without such clearly defined boundaries, like Calvinball or Nomic. But these can be more properly defined as thought experiments than true games)
(Also, Richard Sharp, in his treatise on the board game Diplomacy, recounts an apocryphal anecdote in which Germany knew France was sleeping with England’s wife, the result being a German victory in record time. Since the point of Diplomacy is to be “unsporting,” this might merit a post of its own)
What defines a game’s duration, though? Sports do not share the same period of time. Some sports take hours; some are over in time for dinner. But every sport can be defined by having a set period. This is another way in which sports are different from life. Everyone knows when a basketball game is going to end; if not the exact minute, at least the conditions that will need to be fulfilled for it to happen. But nobody knows when a life is going to end. The “threescore years and ten” benchmark from the Old Testament has gone by the wayside.
Different sports use different clocks. This makes sense, since different sports use different paces. Basketball is a game of sudden shifts: sprints up and down the court, quick hustles beneath the basket, then sprinting out again. Hockey and soccer are games of constant motion: fewer hectic scrambles but a more continuous revolution around the field. American football has moments of intense violence followed by equally long periods of rest. And baseball has the slowest pace of all. Excepting perhaps golf.
What does each sport’s clock say about the game? And, if each game is a microcosm of life, what does each game’s clock say about its metaphysical outlook?
The Arrow of Time
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the entropy present in a closed system tends to increase over time. Fuse hydrogen and oxygen together and you get water. Dissolve water and you get hydrogen and oxygen again. However, the total “useful” energy present will not be the same now as it was before you started. You cannot take the blocks apart and put them back together again with equal ease.
In macroscopic phenomena, this is referred to as the arrow of time. It means that time is not an illusion of the consciousness. Time has real physical properties. The universe knows how old it is (even if we don’t). Time goes in one direction.
If a china cup falls off a table, it shatters into a thousand pieces. We can glue it back together again, but the effort of gluing it means the “closed system” of the table, the kitchen floor and the utility drawer with the Krazy Glue in it has lost some useful energy. We can never restore the universe to exactly the way it was. Something has been lost.
Consider the England vs. Germany elimination match in the World Cup, two weeks ago. Frank Lampard lobbed a shot on the German goal just before halftime, which would have tied the score at 2-2. It struck the crossbar and landed well inside the goal. Yet the referee never called it. The goalie fielded the ball before anyone else could react. Despite persistent arguments by all the English players and coaching staff, the game continued on.
This is because FIFA soccer has no rules for official review of instant replay.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cc0CCQI7AQ
Compare this to American football. Let’s use a comparably close game: the AFC Divisional Playoffs on Jan 19, 2002. New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady is hit just before passing the football. The ball comes loose and the Oakland Raiders recover it. Under the rules of the NFL, this looks like a fumble by the possessing team, which means possession changes hands. However, the officials review the play and determine that Brady was in the midst of a pass and had tucked the ball before throwing. This meant that Brady had thrown an incomplete pass, not a fumble, and the Raiders could not have taken possession. The ball remains in the Patriots’ hands. They tie the game and eventually win in overtime, going on to the Super Bowl.
In American football, a coach can challenge an official’s ruling and force them to review game footage to validate their call. It’s easy for English soccer fans to long for such technology. But note that this addition to the rules is fairly recent: it’s only been an option to coaches since 1999. Professional football in the United States survived for over eighty years without official review.
So, in fact, have most sports. NBA basketball allows official review to determine if a shot taken right as the shot clock expired was valid, but that’s only been a part of the game since 2002. Tennis allows line judges to review shots on the line, but the technology for instant replays wasn’t always available. And baseball only added an instant replay system in 2008, which is used only to determine fair or foul balls and boundary home runs.
We never know when we're about to make history.
Official review is late in coming to most sports. One could argue that the technology wasn’t there before now, but that’s just a question of preference. So long as there have been cameras with zoom lenses, the technology has been there. But what does official review mean for a game’s philosophy?
The real world does not have official review. Even if we can determine the exact causes of a misfortune, we cannot rewind time to unmake it. All we can do is grit our teeth and try harder next time. But a sport – like any game – is a fenced-off version of how we’d like the world to be. It’s the World Plus Rules for Fairness. The arrow of time has less hold in the world of sport. We have the power to wind back the clock.
Gridiron football, baseball and basketball all incorporate some form of official review. They’re also all American sports. While the rest of the world has contributed to these sports – Baltic forwards in basketball, Dominican fielders in baseball, Samoan safeties in football – they have a distinctly American character. The world looks to the States for how these games should go.
Something about the American character, then, prefers the idea that the arrow of time should not always hold sway. America has always been a nation that prides itself on being “self-made.” Their presidential myths invoke their origins in common log cabins. Their heroes are pioneers, explorers in space and captains of industry who were born poor. Even today, their national rhetoric on divesting from petroleum hinges on “energy independence” – the idea that America should not need the rest of the world. America can master an entire continent, incorporate multitudes of ethnicities into one nation and command armed forces that can scour the globe. Of course American sports can turn back the arrow of time.
America can turn it back as far as it damn well pleases!
But soccer is a distinctly non-American sport. FIFA reigns strongest in South America, Europe and Africa. And soccer does not allow official review. When a play is called by a referee on the field, that call stands. Nothing takes it back. In fact, consider this comment by FIFA general secretary Urs Lanzi in 2005:
Video evidence is useful for disciplinary sanctions, but that’s all. As we’ve always emphasised at FIFA, football’s human element must be retained. It mirrors life itself and we have to protect it.
Are Europeans and South Americans more fatalist than the U.S.? Do they have less desire to master the world? Or do they not get the point of a game – that it’s supposed to reflect life as we would wish it to be, not life as it is? Debate the answer if you like, but there’s one safe bet. Professional soccer will not adopt an official review system until Americans take on a more prominent role. Only then will the arrow of time turn back.
A Man’s Allotted Years
The idiosyncratic nature of professional soccer becomes more obvious when you consider timekeeping.
A game of gridiron football has four 15-minute quarters with an intermission for halftime. The clock stops after certain plays, most often to retrieve the ball or adjudicate a penalty. A game of professional basketball in the U.S. has four 12-minute quarters, again with a halftime and a stopped clock for fouls. Ice hockey periods are 20 minutes long and there are three of them. When the clock runs out, whoever has the higher score is the winner.
(Baseball is the odd duck here, as one of the few competitive team games with no clock whatsoever. A game takes as long as it takes. The current MLB record is a twenty-five inning slugfest between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Chicago White Sox in May 1984 that lasted for eight hours and six minutes. Baseball’s odd metaphysics merit their own post, which you might get once the World Series comes around. For now, we have to set baseball aside, for reasons that’ll become clear below)
Soccer hews to the same principles as the above sports, with one small exception. But this exception makes a world of difference.
It's the FINAL COUNTDOWN!
If a player is substituted, a foul is called or an injury is suffered – in other words, circumstances under which the clock would stop for other sports – the clock continues running. The referee keeps track of the time lost in this way. At the end of the match’s 90 minutes, the referee indicates that play will continue in stoppage time. The referee doesn’t need to say how much more time is on. He can give a rough indication, but he remains the sole arbiter of how much time is left.
To state it plain, the players do not know when the game is going to end.
Anyone who watches professional sports knows that the caliber of play changes as the half nears its end. Gridiron football teams have their “two-minute drill” – an accelerated routine designed to get in as many plays as possible before halftime. Professional basketball slows down in its final minutes: fouls become frequent, as players would prefer to give up one point and get the ball back than risk their opponents scoring two or three points. Everyone has their eye on the clock. The pace ramps up. The tension mounts.
If we consider the players and their coaches as rational actors – homo economicus – this doesn’t make any sense. There’s no mystery to when an NBA game is going to end. It would be far more rational to pace yourselves over the entire 48 minutes of play rather than play loose in the first quarter and draw lots of fouls in the second. But humans do few things rationally, including games.
A game has a clock to distinguish it from the real world. The clock creates arbitrary boundaries around a set period of events and says These Events Will Count. It doesn’t matter how well Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett of the Boston Celtics scrimmage. If they can’t score more points than the Los Angeles Lakers during the 48 minutes that the NBA says they’re going to play, they lose. Conversely, the Lakers could have outplayed the Celtics all season. They could have defeated every team that beat Boston. But once they show up on the court, only those 48 minutes matter.
Pardon me.
Real life, obviously, has no such boundaries. We create milestones for ourselves: graduating high school, losing our virginity, graduating college, getting a job, getting married, having a child. “Once I reach this point,” we say, “I’ve made it.” But what we find, as we grow older, is that the flush of success fades. We reach the milestone, but the story refuses to end. The day after you graduate college, you still have to get up in the morning and figure out what you’re going to do with yourself. Sports have quarters and halves; life does not.
Unless you’re playing soccer.
Soccer’s interesting in that it doesn’t have a clearly defined end point. A game is supposed to take 90 minutes, but stoppage could add anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes onto the end. And referees are allowed to be vague about how much. Considering how close soccer scores often are on the professional level, this new lease on life creates a fresh outlook. Optimistic teams can look on the time added on with hope: another chance to score! Another opportunity to triumph over the pseudo-death that is defeat! Pessimistic teams, on the other hand, treat stoppage time as a curse. How much longer must we labor? When can we put down our ploughshares and receive our just rewards?
The U.S.’s fate in the 2010 World Cup rose and fell with stoppage time. Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria in the 91st minute sent the U.S. to the second round to face Ghana. But against Ghana, the U.S. gave up an early goal in the first overtime period. When two minutes and fifty seconds of stoppage time were added at the end of overtime, the U.S. played with little heart, rather than seizing the new opportunity. Destiny gave with one hand and took away with the other.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWgi6NO37Y4
Though science continues to advance, we never really know when a life – or a soccer game – is going to end. And we never really have the chance to turn back the clock – or take back a bad call in soccer. Soccer is the game most like life.
Perhaps this is why soccer has such enduring popularity around the world. It’s played on every civilized continent. It’s played between states that don’t always trade with each other. Even in the U.S., where professional soccer has none of the cachet of gridiron football or pro basketball, kids play rec league soccer in each of the fifty states. Why? Maybe because kids still live without cynicism. They don’t need an arbitrary set of rules to tell them when to stop and start play. They don’t need rigid boundaries in which they can excel, after which they shower off their sweat and resume their quotidian lives. Kids will play as long as they’re allowed to. They don’t demand do-overs or official review. They don’t care when the game’s supposed to end. They’ve got a ball, two goals and a team of whoever shows up.
That’s soccer. Or the world we live in.
