Thursday, June 28, 2018

How to Save Soccer and the World Cup

I'm not really a soccer fan.  Really, I'm not much of a sports fan at all.  But I'm married to a Central American, so every now and then soccer comes up.

Right now the World Cup is going on in Russia.  And from what I understand, there's some problems going on.  I admit I don't know much about it, really, but a friend of mine recently told me his proposal to fix the rules of the game to make things more fair for all the countries involved in this globally important sport.

I think my friend's proposal is pretty brilliant, and thought I'd share it.

Firstly, you break each game into two distinct segments.  I know, the game time is already split in half.  I mean that now, there will be two distinct parts of each game.

In the first half, you play the game commonly known as football or soccer, and try to score as many points as possible by kicking the ball into your opponents' goal.  The only real change during this segment is that there are no penalty kicks.

In the second half, the field is cleared and a stage is dragged out.  Each team picks their three best actors, who will go on the stage and give their most dramatic performance of a person who has been injured in a sports game.  Just really ham up the anguish and imaginary pain on stage for all the world to see.  A panel of 5 judges will score the performances, and the top three performances will be awarded three points to their teams.

Your total score is a combination of how you did at playing the game known as soccer or football, plus how well you can do at pretending to have boo-boos.

I think this will help in some real ways.  Right now, the rules are written to already award points to players for giving their best performance of injuries on the field.  But the rules aren't explicitly written this way.  This hurts teams that think they're supposed to be playing soccer, and don't know that they're supposed to be rolling on the ground screaming because the mean man touched them.

However, certain teams obviously greatly rely on the acting talents of their thespian players.  They have such talent at rolling around, grabbing limbs, and contorting their faces into perfect masks of torment, and it would be a shame to not continue awarding this exceptional ability.

Acknowledging this very important part of soccer with official recognition will go along way to helping both kinds of players.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You have my vote