Touching a soccer ball will give you warts.
At least that’s what my high school football coach used to tell us.
Should one so much as brush up against one of those accursed orbs, it was said, warts were sure to follow. And not the good kind of warts, either.
As I far as I know, my high school did not own a single soccer ball while I was in attendance about 100 years ago. Soccer was somehow associated with communism (or worse) and our elders didn’t want us long-haired, freaky, troublemaking teens getting any fancy ideas about sports from those pinkos in Europe.
The rumor at the time held that our football coach used the razor he kept in his shoe to julienne and discard any soccer ball he could lay his hands on, which certainly made him no friends at the local sporting goods store. The last thing he wanted was for us teenagers to realize that soccer actually was fun to play, a nuanced, competitive game that doesn’t allow for huge advantages to be given to players who are blessed to be 6’8” tall or weigh 280 pounds. Soccer, so we were told, smacks of International Workers Day celebrations and marching around with huge posters of Chairman Mao. America wasn’t having it.
It certainly worked on me. Televised MLS matches failed to capture my interest and I’ve attended any number of high school soccer games over the years, but I just never quite got into it.
This changed about a decade ago when a network in the United States began broadcasting live EPL soccer matches from England. I discovered this when I was working nights and getting home around breakfast time on Saturdays, where I was subjected to the general early morning dreck that dominated the TV airwaves on any given weekend morning.
But England being five hours ahead of our local time, EPL matches that started at 1 p.m. in London (or Liverpool or Manchester) started at 8 a.m. on this side of the Atlantic. Having very little else to choose from, I started watching the EPL.
Been hooked ever since.
For your provincials, EPL stands for English Premier League, which, if you take into account the overall numbers of fans and followers, is kind of the NFL, NBA, and MLB all rolled into one. The EPL is where proper “football” (known as “soccer” to us backward Americans) is played by some of the most talented, gifted, brilliant, and well-paid athletes on the planet.
And this doesn’t count the scores of other professional, semi-pro, and amateur soccer leagues widely scattered to the four corners of the Earth. World Cup matches have drawn viewers in the billions – that’s right, billions with a “b” – in the farthest reaches of the globe.
As for current worldwide television viewership, American football, when lumped in with rugby, barely makes the Top 10, just ahead a golf and well behind cricket, hockey (both field and ice), tennis, volleyball, basketball and (wait for it) ping-pong. This is not a joke. Table tennis has hundreds of millions fans in many parts of Asia and they tune in when the big boys are playing on TV.
While soccer in one form or another is likely to be one of the world’s oldest games, the modern model for the game was developed in England in the 19th century, an excellent account of which was given by Ted Lasso’s Coach Beard. Those intrepid slave traders and drug slingers from the British Isles took soccer with them during that roughly 200 year period where they built an empire which, for a while, reigned over and exploited about three-quarters of the world’s population.
When the British Empire crumbled following the end of WWII and the Brits themselves were kicked back to those unremarkable islands somewhere off the fog-caked coast of northwestern Europe, they left behind a love of the game of soccer on which the sun never sets.
The incredible worldwide popularity enjoyed by the sport is easily explained. The premise of the game is easy to grasp, soccer needs no special equipment other than a ball and a flat piece of ground, and brains and wile are as important as speed and brawn.
Baseball was the first sport embraced by large numbers of Americans, and with the rise of American football in the early 20th century, soccer never really caught on here.
In its early years, American football was almost legislated out of existence following a number of deaths on the gridiron, given that the game was little short of a Pier 6 brawl over an oddly shaped leather ball. After hearing about the violence in the game, none other than Theodore Roosevelt stepped in, berated the American football big-wigs, and forced them to codify of the rules for the game. Having TR breathing down your neck was excellent incentive, so early coaches tightened up the rulebook, making football more of a game and less of an out-and-out melee. As the safety and popularity of the sport grew, American-style football pushed any thoughts of soccer out of the mainstream, indeed out of the picture almost entirely.
But soccer back and making inroads in the U.S. TV viewership for the European clubs is rising, the EPL (and other professional clubs) routinely book stadiums in the States during their off-seasons for well-attended exhibition matches, and the 2026 World Cup, which is played once every four years, is to be hosted right here in North America starting in June. It is estimated that TV coverage of the World Cup has the potential to reach over four billion viewers.
But in trying to talk my friends into watching a match or two, the one thing that trips up Americans most when it comes to soccer is the offside rule.
Every professional, college, high school and Pop Warner American football team has a page in their playbook which calls for the fastest guy on the team to bolt downfield and get past the defense so the quarterback can throw him the ball. Think of Joe Burrow telling Tee Higgins “Run a post, get behind the D, and I’ll hit you.”
Not so in soccer. A player – using his feet, knees, hips and head – may not make a pass to a teammate who is the only player on the field between the last man on defense and the goalkeeper. Instead, the pass must be made – this is important – before his teammate crosses an imaginary transverse line marking the position of last defenseman.
As long as the kick is made while the teammate is still short of that imaginary line – by even millimeters – the passer is in business. Should your teammate have so much as an eyelash over that imaginary line when the pass was made, the receiver is considered offside and the ball is awarded to the defending team. In basketball, this is called cherry picking. In soccer, it’s called a turnover.
When you think about it, this rule makes great sense. Without it, football managers would simply pack as many players as they could directly in front of the opposing goal. The dude with the strongest leg could then just stand a few yards out and whip the ball into the mosh pit and let the 20-odd players in the mangle fight it out in front of the net. What fun that would be?
American football has a similar rule with the ineligible player downfield penalty. Think of what a game between the Bengals and Browns would look like if every player on offense was an eligible receiver. It would be cool to watch…for about five minutes. After that, you might likely start searching YouTube channels for table tennis matches in Thailand.
Readers will note that the offside rule applies only to passes to a teammate. Nothing in the rule prevents a player from passing a ball to himself, but as millions of dollars, pounds or euros (take your pick) are spent on defensemen to prevent exactly that from happening, breakaways are rare indeed.
A few other rules and quirks in professional soccer that newbies to the game should be aware include:
– Teams in soccer are called “sides” and there are 11 players on each side, including the goalkeepers.
– Soccer matches are conducted on a “pitch”. Soccer pitches are considerably larger than American football fields and are marked with “touchlines” down each side. Pitches can vary in length and width, but must have clearly defined 18-yard and 6-yard boxes in front of each goal. Baseball stadia can serve as an analogy here. Baseball fields have standardized measurements for the diamond (90-feet between bases, the pitcher’s rubber is 60’6” from home plate and so on), but the rules allow for variations regarding the outfield fences and designs. Hence we have the Green Monster in Boston and the 318-foot landing zone in Yankee Stadium's left field.
– Matches are broken into two 45-minute halves and time is kept on the field. The clock that is shown on the scoreboard and TV graphic at the end of the halves should be taken as more of a rough estimate of the amount time remaining in the match. Referees extend the allotted time to account for interruption in play for injuries, following goals, allowing substitutions to come into the game and the like, so halves very, very rarely end at the 45-minute mark. This is called “stoppage time” and is generally between three and seven minutes for most EPL matches. Except when it’s longer.
– Sides do not get timeouts. They put their 11 players out on the pitch for what amounts to two 45-minute-plus sessions of gasser drills, this for roughly 50 matches over a nine-month period. There are no chunky professional soccer players.
– Managers are limited to five substitutions over the course of a match. If your right fullback snaps a hammy in the 36th minute, play continues until the ref decides when you can pull him off the pitch, the catch being that this counts as one of your five substitutions. That a player might be carried off the pitch strapped to a backboard after losing a kidney carries no weight. That’s one down, four to go. (*The OHSAA rules allow for unlimited substitutions for high school soccer matches).
– Without exception, EPL managers give off the aura of one who is under indictment for wire fraud and tax evasion. You think basketball coaches for Kentucky, coaches for the Packers or managers for the Mets get a lot of static? EPL fans and the press in England take soccer minutia and second guessing to a whole new level bordering on mass hysteria.
– “Tackles” are made when a defender does a hook slide in front of ball handler in an attempt to steal or a least kick the ball away. Should the tackler make even minimum contact with the ball, even if he and the ball handler find themselves tangled into a human Tinker Toy afterwards, the tackler is golden…as long as he gets a toe on the ball. “Wonderful tackle,” the announcers will say as both players are writhing in pain on the ground.
But should that same tackler come in a split second late and make contact with the other player’s shins without getting a piece of ball, that’s a foul and the ball handler’s team is awarded a free kick from the spot. Should the tackler come in a little more than a split second late and take the legs out from under the ball handler, that can result in a “yellow card”, which is essentially a warning for what we Americans would call unnecessary roughness.
There are no second warnings. If that same player pulls a similar stunt later in that same match, the ref will present the offender with a “red card” and banish him from the pitch. Collecting enough yellow cards over the course of a season results in a suspension without pay.
Red cards can also be given after the first foul if the ref decides the offense was egregious enough, fouls which include wild kicks in the area of an opponent’s head, a well-placed cleat to the knackers, or pulling a player down on a breakaway.
The beauty of the red card is that the offender’s team is not allowed to replace him on the pitch. For the rest of the match must play a “man down”. During one EPL match earlier this year, a side lost two players to red cards, giving them a 11-9 disadvantage on the pitch, a match which that side unsurprisingly lost. To put this into perspective, imagine that your favorite football team was reduced just 10 players on defense in the second half of a playoff game against an Andy Reid-coached team. That’s gonna leave a mark.
– Ties are called “draws” and are very common in league play. There are 20 clubs in the EPL and each team plays a home-and-home against the other 19 clubs for a total of 38 league games. A club earns three points for a win, one point for a draw and no points in a loss. The team that has the most points at the end of the campaign wins the hardware. No playoffs, no postseason, no second chances.
Should two or more clubs have the same amount of points at the end of the season, the first tiebreaker is goal differential, leading to sides unabashedly running up the score when possible.
We could continue in this vein for some time, but will come back with more of the ins-and-out of the EPL (and soccer in general) at a later date, keeping the following in mind: God is a Manchester City fan. That’s why He made the sky Man City blue.