First, a handball doesn’t just refer to a ball touching a hand, but the arm and shoulder as well. It is not illegal for a ball to hit a player on the hand, arm or shoulder. It is illegal for a player to deliberately use their hand, arm or shoulder. Further, a player must use reasonable effort to avoid touching a ball with a hand, arm or shoulder. So if a ball is kicked and immediately hits an opponent’s arm before he has time to react, it is not a handball, as long as that player’s arm wasn’t in an unnatural position at the time. One player on each team is allowed an exception to this rule, and that player can use his hands and arms only while within his own 18 yard box, often called the penalty area.
9. “That goalie’s clothes are crazy!”
The player allowed to handle the ball within his penalty area is referred to as the “goalkeeper.” Every sport has its own jargon, and football jargon is often unique. It is best to avoid calling the goalkeeper a goalie, and he's definitely not a goaltender. Why does it matter? Maybe it doesn't. Throughout most of the world, even calling the sport "soccer" is considered an insult, but in America, that's what we call it, even while realizing it is properly called "football." Since I'm in America, I tend to call it soccer just so other Americans know what sport I'm talking about, but would never call it soccer when speaking with someone from another country.
Second, and back to the point, footballers do not wear clothes, they wear a kit. The goalkeeper is required to wear a distinctive kit in order to be easily identifiable by the referee, and so wearing loud colors is encouraged. (Other jargon words to know: the field is called the “pitch;” a game is called a “match.”)
8. “That wasn’t a tackle- he didn’t even fall!”
A “challenge” refers to two players simultaneously vying for the ball, and tackling is one way a player can attempt to win a challenge. In soccer, this is what an attempted tackle looks like:
This is what a successful tackle looks like:
This is what a type of tackle called a slide tackle looks like:
The previous tackles are legal even if incidental contact with an opponent is made. Here are some examples of tackles that are illegal if contact with an opponent is made:
(Cleats facing opponent)
(Two-legged)
(From behind or through opponent, making contact with opponent first)
(Too late)
You also can’t adjust your body position in order to get in the way of or trip an opposing player after a successful tackle.
Here is an actual example of a world-class tackle:
This is an excellent slide tackle:
7. “Offsides!”
It’s “offside;” there is no “s!” I once yelled this at a person rooting for the opposing team during a particularly intense match. I sort of feel bad about it, but unlike with some previously-mentioned jargon, this one is unforgivable. Look it up: it’s Law 11. A player on the opponent’s half of the pitch is ineligible to receive a forward pass from a teammate if there are not two defenders nearer to the opponent’s goal line than any part of his body that can receive the pass at the time of the pass. There is no offside during a throw-in, goal kick or corner kick, although that last one should be obvious. Note the goal line is the entire line that connects the side lines, not only the section between the crossbars. That’s all there is to it, but it effects every dimension of the sport.
In short, the offside rule means you have to outwit and not just outrun at least one opponent other than the goalkeeper.
6. “This sport is so slow!”
On the contrary, one of the best things about soccer is its extremely fast pace. Only the referee can stop the action, and keeps track of when he does in order to add that down time to the end of each period. The players must strategize, act and react on the fly, simultaneously playing offense and defense while covering an area slightly longer and significantly wider than an American football field. Right now, Real Madrid from Spain is the fastest and most athletically fit team in the world. There is no group of players in any sport short of auto racing that could keep up with their pace for a full 90 minutes. Matches in which a winner must be decided sometimes go into extra time, conceptually the same as overtime, and these are often brutal affairs in which players fight fatigue and cramping muscles after having already given their all in the first two halves.
Because the only time most Americans even know soccer is being played is during the World Cup, many Americans don’t realize that players spend very little time training and playing with their national team. In every country, including America, national teams are made up of a sort of “all-star” collection of players from various teams, properly called “clubs.” Club matches are what most of the rest of the world follows for nine months of every year, and the athletes dedicate the vast majority of their time and attention to playing with their club in a style reflecting the strategic philosophy of that club, which may be very different than the style of their national team. Consequently, some World Cup teams will inevitably be slow, sloppy and error-ridden. The amazing thing about World Cup is that the overwhelming fan support and national pride will drive some players and teams to rise above all limitations and excel beyond all expectations.
To some degree, watching soccer is like watching a chess match where every move is immediately made with no time to think. If that doesn’t sound exciting, I'd recommend watching inner-city sidewalk chess matches. Every moment of the uninterrupted action could become crucial, and the discipline required, especially of the players but also the fans, to maintain focus for 45 minutes is not something a lot of Americans possess. I honestly believe Americans perceive soccer as slow because there are no commercials to entertain them.
5. “They should allow more substitutes.”
Soccer is a test of both speed and endurance. In competitive matches, only three player substitutions are allowed for any reason, including injury. Substituting for healthy players is a calculated risk willingly made by the manager. If all three subs have been made and a player gets injured, the thing to be questioned isn’t whether the rules should be changed, but whether the manager goofed.
Playing with fewer players than your opponent is part of the game, and another way in which soccer resembles chess. The main three ways a team is required to be short a player for the remainder of the match are violent conduct, if a player is deemed to have committed two fouls on purpose during the course of a match or if a player's foul prevents a clear goal-scoring opportunity. A player is "sent off" by being shown a red card.
There are non-tournament matches, called “friendlies,” in which more than three substitutes are allowed. These are akin to baseball spring-training games, with less focus on team interaction and more of a try-out for individuals to impress their manager. Counter-intuitively, allowing more substitutions slows the game down.
4. “It’s so boring they rarely score.”
The difficulty of scoring a goal adds to, not detracts from, the excitement. Watching the highlights of a match simply does not do the sport justice, because it removes the context. The drama lies in the nuances involved in protecting one goal while attacking the other.
There’s an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, called “Peak Performance,” where Data frustrates a master strategist into giving up at a computerized strategy game called Strategema, much to the delight of the Enterprise crew. When asked how he did it, Data reveals that his strategy was not to win, but to stalemate. As a matter of fact, in point-based soccer matches, a winner receives three points and the loser zero, but in the case of a draw, each team gets one point. Therefore, if a team only needs one point and/or are playing a better team, they will often implement the same strategy as television’s pre-eminent sci-fi android. Trying to beat a team willing to draw is one example of the intensity within the sport that remains hidden from the novice viewer.
3. “It’s a sissy sport in which everybody is always pretending to be hurt.”
It’s telling that after expounding on ways in which the sport should be made easier, critics will declare it to be too easy. I’ve noticed a universal tendency to dismiss any sport one is unfamiliar with as being both weak and unsophisticated. For example, last year my girlfriend and I attended a single-A baseball game that included a player from Germany. This piqued my girlfriend’s interest, as she grew up in Germany and knows there is no baseball there, so she looked him up and found an article about him from a German paper. The comments after the article consisted of Germans trying to figure out what baseball was. After discovering via the German version of Wikipedia that it consisted largely of someone hitting a ball with a stick and then running around in a large circle as fast as possible, they agreed it was a sport with no strategy best suited for girls.
The only padding soccer players wear are shin guards, even though they have both skulls and cleats flying at them on a fairly regular basis. Getting kicked by a person who makes his profession by kicking cannot feel good. Because of the limited substitutions, players are sometimes obliged to play through injuries. A player with a cracked head with wrap enough gauze around it to absorb the bleeding as fast as he can- because his team will continue short a player while he is being tended to- and get right back into the action. Injury is inevitable in modern football, especially when one considers that the average footballer will play in over 50 matches each year.
One element of soccer that can get really annoying is “diving,” or “flopping.” This is a strategy employed by some, but not most, footballers, that consists of a player pretending he’s been fouled by falling to the ground and then often rolling around on the ground like a shot animal. Some footballers will make a drama out of demonstrating that they could have been injured in an attempt to protect themselves from the possibility of actually being injured on a similar play in the future. Another reason for flopping is due to the “advantage” rule. If a player is fouled, a referee will let play continue if he deems it advantageous for the fouled team to do so. A player who has been fouled will fall down in order to reduce the possibility of a referee declaring an advantage if that player would rather be awarded a free kick. Although flopping is considered dissent and should be punished with a yellow card, it rarely is, simply because it is often very difficult to determine whether they’re actually faking it.
2. “I just don’t understand it.”
Part of the beauty of soccer is its simplicity. There are only 19 rules, known as laws, the most complicated of which is probably the offside rule, which I summarized in one sentence. Another main thing to understand is that fouls are divided into two types; those awarded with a direct free kick and those awarded with an indirect free kick. The latter type requires a pass to be made. All free kicks are taken from the location of the foul (not where the ball was during the foul, except fouls of the direct free kick type drawn within the 18 yard box, whick can be awarded with a one-on-one penalty kick.
Most fouls stress the importance of not slowing the game and playing the ball and not the opponent. (Setting screens, for example is an indirect free kick foul.) If either type of foul is deemed to be intentional or shows disregard for the rules or referees (and not just the result of poor execution), the guilty player is given a warning in the form of a yellow card.
Most of the rest of it you can intuit from watching a couple matches. The complete, fully-illustrated rulebook can be found here: pdf of fifa football laws
American culture is ingrained with the concept that anything they are ignorant of is not worth knowing about. The majority of Americans are not explorers; they instead prefer to assume there is nothing greater than the things they are familiar with. Brand loyalty has proven lucrative for those selling it, but not particularly healthy for the consumers.
1. “American football is better because…”
As there are virtually no similarities between Association football, aka soccer, and American football, comparing the two is pointless. American football is a slower, tamer version of rugby, and there is only one country in the world that pays any attention to it.
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