A Modest Proposal For The Improvement of the FIFA World Cup

After watching portions of many of the matches in this year's FIFA World Cup, I can think of many ways to improve the game.

Even though I'm not actually a fan of the sport, and even thoughI'm not particularly knowledgeable about what separates good play from fantastic play, I still think I'm knowledgeable enough to discern a pattern of behavior that creates a less than thrilling conclusion to many important games.

Brian Micklethwait, posting at Samizdata.net, spells out many of the problems he perceives with the World Cup by way of analogizing it with squash.

I think he makes some good points, but doesn't offer any solutions to changing things.

Here's my modest proposal for fixing the situation, as I see it.

In the knock-out rounds, teams play 'not to lose' and hold out for the penalty kick phase, especially if they've been riding in on an excellent goalie. Rather than any big fundamental changes like altering the offside penalty, or enlarging the goals, I propose changing when the penalty kicks are attempted.

Each game in the knock-out round will begin with the penalty kicks. That way, the players are fresh, and the team that loses the penalty kick knows from the outset that they must play aggressively or lose. Therefore in every match, even in the knock-out round, at least one of the teams will be playing to win (the side that wins the PK will still play for a tie, like usual, but at least the PK loser will press the attack), rather than both teams playing not to lose as seems to be the case now.

It's a simple suggestion, a sensible suggestion, and one that would encourage better play when it counts most.

As anyone who observed this past World Cup the opposite has been true, the early games were exciting, the later games decided by PK or referee decisions, I think by moving the penalty kick to the beginning of the game it will completely change how coaches coach, players play, and those changes will be a vast improvement and make the final games of World Cup 2010 things of beauty rather than crashing bores.

Also this will probably be the last soccer post on this website, ever.