I attended a soccer game

Happy 4th of July. My wife genuinely wanted me to attend a Crew game despite knowing that soccer is squarely on the bottom of my bucket list.[1] I agreed to go to the game and promised not to complain (and I didn’t) as long as I was allowed to answer questions honestly, which led to extremely judicious questions. The MLS’s[2] Columbus Crew play in a beautiful new soccer-specific stadium, which is about a ten-minute walk from our condo. The walk was pleasant with the crowd flowing smoothly, joyously, enthusiastically anticipating the game.

Once the game started, my confirmation bias engine was running full tilt. It took 30 seconds to reach fruition, maybe 32 seconds. I’m not kidding, within the first half minute, a Philadelphia Union player went to the ground and starting flopping like a proverbial fish out of water. I have seen baseball players get hit the face with a 90+ mile an hour fastballs.  They don’t flop.  I have seen football players get hit so hard they had to leave the game never to return. They don’t flop. I have seen boxers get knocked into concussion protocol.  They don’t flop.  But man o man can soccer players flop. This guy flopped so beautifully, so artistically that the ref decided to give a yellow card even as the replay showed that there had been essentially no contact. The player who flopped so outrageously did not leave the match, they rarely do.

Then they played soccer as they often do, without any sense of urgency. The ball is as likely to be passed backwards as forwards. It rarely leads to progress, but the sense of control is (apparently) a reward unto itself. We watched all 90 minutes and saw seven shots on goal. For those without a calculator, that’s a shot on goal every 12.8 minutes. There were an additional 13 shots not on goal. My estimate-o-meter suggests that the average miss was 10 feet. Ten feet!!! A single air-ball in a basketball game (where the goal is 18 inches in diameter) and a visiting player will be mocked for the rest of the game. Missing a shot in soccer by 10 or 20 feet (where the goal is 24 feet wide and 8 feet high) = whatever, just another missed shot.

There was one penalty kick, which I had just been reading about in Think Like a Freak.[3] Statistics reveal that a penalty kick is successful 75% of the time. To have a legitimate chance to make a save, the goalie must guess and jump to one side or the other. They jump to the kicker’s strong side[4] 57% of the time and to the weak side almost 41% of the time. But – you say – those numbers don’t add up to 100. That’s because 2% of the time, the goalie doesn’t move at all and that’s because 17% of shots are aimed right at the center of the goal. (Those shots are 7% more likely to succeed than shots to the corners. Dubner and Levitt did the math, not me.) In the event, the shooter went to his weak side, the goalie guessed right, and the kick was shunted aside. He should have shot up the middle.

Before the game I was asked and predicted that the final score would be 1-0 Crew, the home team. Alas, I was wildly optimistic about how many goals would be scored. But I made the correct guess. According to bettingoffers.org.uk, which I didn’t look at until today, “the most common scoreline is 1-0 for either side,” 17.6% of all games, with the home team winning roughly 60% of the 1-0 games.

The game ended in a nil-nil draw, which purists probably love. Over 7% of English Premier League (the highest ranked league in the world) games end 0-0. Almost 49% of EPL games end with 2 or fewer total goals.

I’m never going to be a soccer fan. The last game I attended was my son’s final game during his senior year of high school in 2013. That nine plus year gap between games feels about right to for me. Nevertheless, I have a few positive takeaways from last night – other than the most obvious, spending quality time with my wife:

1. Fountain drinks come with free refills (though ice was hard to come by),

2. The post-game fireworks were a Fourth of July treat, and

3. It’s going to be another ten years or so before I can reasonably be expected to attend a soccer game.

For the record, please don’t try to convert me. It’s a lost cause. (Soccer doesn’t need me, it’s the most popular sport in the world.) I love baseball and know lots of people who don’t. That’s their prerogative and I never try to convince them otherwise. Because for them, they are not wrong. Equally, I am not wrong about soccer. And after last night, I have proven conclusively that I love my wife more than I dislike soccer. I did the math on that one myself.

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[1] See 6.4.19 post of the blog for my version of a bucket list, spoiler alert: it’s a reverse bucket list.  I once met a friend at a pub to watch a world cup game and famously (no), notoriously (nope), petulantly (yea, that’s it) sat with my back to the game the entire time. The beer was good nice and cold.

[2] Major League Soccer is the 16th ranked league in the world according to https://www.globalfootballrankings.com/, slightly worse than the Swiss league (population 8.6 million) and slightly better than the Danish league (population 5.8 million).

[3] The book is by Stephen D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. They are outstanding writers and thinkers and I highly recommend two other books they wrote together: Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics.

[4] The strong side is the side away from the kicking foot. So – if you are right-footed, generally you will have more power and accuracy kicking to the left.