Nobody is saying that soccer players have incestuous tendencies, but the sport’s blithe tolerance for tie games is worrisome. Supposedly, a tie is “like kissing your sister” – a line that makes you wonder about the guy who first said it. How would he know?
As disconcerting as this image is, let’s just be grateful this guy didn’t take the analogy any further. Even if he had said a tie “is like feeling up your sister,” I doubt soccer players would be particularly perturbed. Indeed, ending every game in a 0-0 draw seems to be the ultimate ambition of the Italian national soccer team. Maybe that’s because, at the end of the day, they’re still Italian and unspeakably suave. Still, it does seem a little unseemly. And unsatisfying. The whole point of competitive sports is to 1) create tension and then 2) resolve that tension. With a tie, there is no resolution. It’s an aesthetic failure all around. Yet last year, more than a quarter of Major League Soccer games ended in a tie.
Perhaps there’s a good reason for tolerating all these ties. Perhaps it’s because, come playoff time, the way ties are ultimately resolved in soccer – in penalty kicks – is so incredibly stupid. It’s hard to believe that this is the best planet Earth has come up with. Sure, it’s a nail-biting experience, the mano a mano thing, but the ability to score on a penalty kick has no correlation whatsoever to the ability to play soccer. They might as well play 90 minutes of soccer, plus two extra 15-minute time periods, and then repair to the curling rink and resolve their differences there.
For what it’s worth, here’s my proposal: If 90 minutes of regulation play ends in a draw, remove three players on each side (i.e., eight on eight), and move the goals 36 yards closer, each in line with the penalty box. If the game is still tied after 15 minutes extra time, remove two more players (i.e., six on six). If the teams are still tied after 30 minutes of extra time, remove another player (i.e., five on five). And so on. It’s conceivable that a game could be reduced to two on two competition or even one on one, though with a smaller field and fewer players, it’s unlikely the game would ever get past the second extra time period.
I mention all this because last Friday I had the icky and unsatisfying experience of watching the Austin Aztex kiss their sisters – their third draw this season. After a shaky start, the Aztex got their groove back in the second half against the Puerto Rico Islanders, with Yordany Alvarez (who defected from Cuba a little more than a year ago) tying the game in the 67th minute on a pass from Eddie Johnson. Afterward, coach Adrian Heath took satisfaction in the fact that, in four games so far this season, the Aztex still hadn’t been beaten. And there’s something to that. But it’s time the team stopped pussyfooting around and made its move.
This article appears in May 15 • 2009.