I have had a brother-in-law from New York for more than half a century, a really nice guy, a Yankees fan. One day I asked him why Americans didn’t like soccer, if it was because there were so few. He told me no, that Americans only liked to watch sports on TV in which the viewer can get into the coach’s mind, think with him. And that didn’t happen in football.
That’s how it was then. There were no changes, the same eleven that started finished. The coach’s job ended with the opening whistle. In American sports, on the contrary, the coach never stops scheming changes and possible plays. When basketball came to us on TV, the attitude of its coaches, standing, jumping and shouting while constantly removing and inserting players, contrasted greatly with the passivity of the soccer coaches, sitting on the bench, passive subjects of victory or defeat. defeat.
It’s not like that anymore. We started in the 70th out of the pious imperative of not having lame people suffering on the field, and we are already making five changes, six if there is extra time or a blow to the head. In radio broadcasts it is now a constant for the lead singer to ask the field reporter what the coach is doing, saying, thinking or looking at. And when the substitutes begin to warm up, we all rush to speculate who will be replaced and whether or not the tactical drawing will change.
There are many more symptoms. Personal numbers, substitutes for the venerable positional scale from 2 to 11; the interruptions, very good there to buy popcorn, the changes have not been limited, they have continued with the hydration break and the sudden habit of stopping as soon as one is on the ground (Di Stéfano made fun of basketball with that: “It The big guy fell! We have to stop… And the one with the mop comes out…”); the volatility of the workforce, a consequence of the power of the agents; statistics, born in baseball, an invasive irruption with concepts such as expected goals We’ll see if they don’t end up resolving ties; the blocks in each corner, with which the referees do not know what to do. Next will be the stopped clock, which is already discussed.
I was thinking about it after the Intercontinental, when I saw a real group of eight referees, eight, going up for their medals. It wasn’t that long ago that a taxi was enough to take the refereeing team to a game, now a van is needed. Consequence of VAR, legacy of the NFL; For further identification, in FIFA matches the referee announces his ruling over the public address system.
Americans have colonized the world with almost everything, but not with sports, in which only basketball has a certain universal presence. Perhaps that is why football has decided to tune up to please the indifferent. Or perhaps the indifferent person has stopped being indifferent and is willing to make football the 51st star on his flag. They already have more Premier teams than the sheikhs and they have just raided the calendar, taking over half of June and half of July for a new club World Cup. And in 2026, the National Team World Cup will also take place there, along with its neighboring countries.
The first approach, with Kissinger (World Cup-1994), was much more respectful. This began with that International Champions Cup distributed by continents, the seed of the Super League in its initial idea, an NBA closed to anyone who did not belong to the exclusivist club of aporophobes who sought the violation. Nor do I believe that this wind from America is foreign to the carousel of tweaks to the Regulation, very much in line with that desire for novelties that defines the American way of life.
I’m not anti-American. They have helped old Europe in two world wars, among other things. But football conquered the world by doing things in a different way from sports there, so I believe I have the right to doubt that distorting it to get closer to them will produce any benefits.
