How to make Soccer More Popular in the USA; Steps 2 through 5.

I know I promised 4 more blog posts on Soccer. But I just couldn't do it.  Its just not in me.
So here are the next 4 steps in a single blog post.

Step 2 : Stop the Diving; Stop the Fake Injuries

There is not much more for me to add to this. It is without a doubt, the worst thing about the sport. 

Players are blatantly diving and faking injuries where little or no contact takes place. There are
other situations where contact takes place, but world class athletes fall down and roll around on
ground like 10 year old boys. I am half expecting a player’s Mom to come out on the field and
check on the “boo-boo”.   It is so bad, that when there was a more serious injury does take place, like
Neymar, it was hard to believe that he was actually hurt.

This is not the only sport with this problem. Hockey had the problem and basketball still has a 

bad flopping problem.

Here is the solution. First, introduce a penalty for “embellishment”. They have one in the NHL.

Rule 64.1 Diving / Embellishment – Any player who blatantly dives, embellishes a fall or a reaction, or who feigns an injury shall be penalized with a minor penalty under this rule

Second, if play has to be stopped because of your injury, then you must come out of the game.  This 

happens in the NFL. It happens in hockey.  You can’t roll around on the field and then jump up and 

continue unless you are playing 10u AYSO.

Step 3: Change some rules

First, the offside thing stops a lot of offense. I would get rid of that rule and create a blueline like in hockey. 

You still have offside but only when you enter the scoring zone before the ball. This will create some 

breakaways and more scoring. The game definitely needs that.

Second, this penalty kick thing has got to be adapted. First of all, they should not be awarded for every 

foul in the penalty area. That Mexico/Netherlands game is a perfect case in point. The guy had about a 

5% chance of scoring, when he was arguably fouled. His reward was a kick from point blank range where 

there a 75% chance that you score. Worse than that, the primary way the goalie saves the ball is by 

“guessing right”. Are you serious!!!!! Why not move the shooting spot back a few meters to give 

the goalie a 50/50 chance. Its an easy fix.

Step 4: Put a New York team in one of the Top European Leagues

Americans are not going to watch the MLS. It’s like watching minor league baseball. All the world class 

athletes in the game play in Europe.  Americans might watch them. There are not going to watch Landon 

Donovan type players.

I know this will be hard, but some billionaire could buy his way into the league.  Balmer just paid $2B for 

the Clippers. We know money talks. If you had a New York team in the EPL or the Spanish league, 

Americans would get a view of world class soccer on a regular basis, rather than once every four years. 

It would be a big ESPN contract and I am guessing Sunday Night Soccer!

Step 5: Grow some American Soccer Stars.

Here is another base problem. Our best athletes play Football and Basketball. Imagine Lebron or 

Durant playing soccer; Or Kaepernick or Adrian Peterson or Calvin Johnson. I personally would
like to see Richard Sherman be a soccer player!  ( Do they test for Adderall in Soccer?)
We need to find a way to get one of those guys to be a soccer player and then maybe the floodgates
open.

Not sure exactly how that happens, but here is one contributory idea. Switch the High School
and Collegiate Soccer season to the spring. Right now Soccer has to compete for the best athletes
with Football and Basketball. Football is a fall sport and if your team makes the postseason, it
will overlap significantly with Soccer. The body needs a rest after the football season. You are
nursing a lot of aches and pains after a football season. Few want to jump in and play soccer.
Basketball is a winter sport and completely overlaps with soccer. If you make soccer a spring
sport, you can compete with Baseball and Lacrosse for athletes. And while baseball is popular,
you are not competing for the same type of athletes. Pitchers, corner infielders and outfielders
are not natural soccer players; you want football and basketball players. If they grew up playing
soccer, I think a lot of kids drop out of soccer because of this season thing. And you will never
get the best football player to come out for soccer, if it  is a winter sport.

Not sure this moves the needle, but worth a shot. If you couple it with Step 4, you might find some top 

athletes watching soccer on ESPN and choosing it over football or basketball.

OK. So there you have it. For a guy who doesn’t watch soccer, I think there are some nuggets of
gold in here. Please let me know the email address of US Soccer. I will pass this along.

Five Steps to making Soccer more Popular in the USA Step One: Make the Net Bigger

Soccer will never be a top tier spectator sport in the USA. I am sorry for all you soccer maniacs. It won’t. Its not is our history. The game has too little offense and insufficient excitement. Don’t kill the messenger. It is just a fact. Soccer will always struggle as a spectator sport.  I don’t care about the new MLS TV deal. The cold hard facts are MLS broadcasts get about 127K viewers. How bad is that? Regular Season Hockey on NBC draws about 500K viewers and that is considered poor. The average NFL regular season game draws 18.7 Million viewers or 150 times greater than soccer. Depressingly, “Here comes Honey Boo Boo” scores up to 2.8M viewers.

Soccer will always sit outside football, baseball, basketball and even hockey. So I am writing this blog to soccer fans and officials, not to beat the big guys, but so it that can beat NASCAR, MMA, Lacrosse and Professional Paintball.

There are five things soccer can easily do. I will write one in each blog post:

Number 1: Make the Net bigger.

Few people are going to watch a game when the Vegas over/under line is 2 total goals for the opening game of the World Cup.  I know my soccer purist buddies will tell me about the “beauty” of a Nil- Nil game, but it won’t make the game easy to watch by the masses. Every major US sport has undertaken rules to increase scoring. We have lower mounds, 3 point shot lines and stringent pass interference rules. The luddites running baseball are even rumored to be juicing the ball up next year to improve scoring. Soccer has an offense problem and there is no denying it.

Here are some stats for my quant friends:

Sport	Average Scoring Plays Per Game	Minutes Per Game	Scoring Play per Minute
Basketball	~50	48	.96
Baseball	4.82	NA	NA
Football TDs +FGs	8.8	60	6.8
Hockey	5.73	60	10.5
Soccer	2.46	90	36.6

The average World Cup game will see less than 2.5 goals and it will take an average of 36.6 minutes of play to see a goal. This will not cut in a Attention Deficit World consuming media at a frenzied pace on smartphones. In the 36 minutes it takes to score a goal, the world will have:

• Tweeted 10.1M times
• Completed 150M Google Searches
• Watched 5 Million hours of YouTube videos
• Purchased 68 thousand smartphones 

In the last world cup there were eight games, where no goals were scored at all. None! Nil-Nil ties! There are only 64 games, so 12% of all games had no goals scored. Furthermore, there were 16 games that finished 1-0. That’s 24% of all games. Add that up 36% of all games played have 1 goal or fewer scored!!

But here is the most incredible set of stats.  Spain won the tournament. They played 7 games. Surely as the champion, they must have filled the net! But how many goals did they score in 7 games?   They scored 8!!!!! This is not a typo, they scored 8 miserable goals on route to the World Cup! That’s 1.15 a game. They did manage to score 2 goals once. That was against the powerhouse squad from the Honduras. (GDP of 18.2 or about half the GDP of North Dakota).

Something must be done. I am not a expert on the game of soccer and can’t tell them how to tweak the rules, but the easiest thing to do would be to make the net bigger.

I know this seems like a poor idea. The net is already ridiculously large by US Standards. Its 192 square feet already. You can park most RVs in the net. There are apartments in San Francisco that are damn near 192 square feet.  So you can live in a soccer net. You don’t walk up to a soccer net and say, “Hey, we should make this thing bigger”.

Further the net is not relatively larger than a hockey net when you compare to puck/ball size. See stats below:

Sport	Goal Width	Goal Height	Goal Area	Ball/Puck Size	NetSize to Ball/Puck Ratio
Soccer	24 ft.	8 ft.	192 sq. ft.	28 inches	987.4
Hockey	6 ft.	4 ft.	24 sq. ft.	3 inches	1152

So, if the net is already really large and relative to ball/puck size its not out of line, why do I recommend a larger net? BECAUSE THEY STILL DON’T SCORE! Its pretty simple really. I don’t need to go pull anymore Nate Silver on you. Scoring is less than half of hockey and less than a third of football! Make the frickin’ net bigger!

One more thing, I did a Google search for historical size of the soccer net. Turns out they set the size of the net in 1882. That’s 132 years ago! I am pretty sure that goalies have gotten bigger, faster and more athletic since Queen Victoria roamed Windsor Castle. So come on, LETS MAKE THE D*MN NET BIGGER. 

Advice on Advice: What I remembered on my recent trip to Disneyland

The family and I recently took a quick 4 day trip to Disneyland . They had to drag me kicking and screaming. It might be the happiest place on earth for some, but not for me.

The reason I have distaste for Disneyland is that I have always gone there when my kids are young. Despite what every one tells you, young kids are often reduced to exhausted, over stimulated toy buying machines when they visit  “The Mouse”. The second reason I dislike Disney is that I once read some advice about how to handle kids at Disneyland and it was some of the worst advice I have ever read or been given.

Here is the quick story:

Disneyland is a wonderful place and is designed by wonderful people. It also has some of the best marketers and merchandisers in the world. Every attraction, show or ride is carefully supplemented with a well placed “store”. When you get off the Little Mermaid ride, you will find yourself in a well-stocked store filled with Princess costumes, wands, toys and every whatchamacallit in Ariel’s Underwater Grotto. If you stand in line to get an autograph from Snow White, you will be standing in line with kids with Disney purchased autograph books and Cinderella pens. If you drop by the Indiana Jones show, it will inevitably funnel you out where you can pick up a commemorative Harrison Ford hat and lasso.

So here is the advice that I received. In order to combat the Disney merchandisers, you should sit your children down before you go to the park, Tell them how fortunate they are to be at Disneyland. Tell them that is costs a lot of money to come to Disneyland and that they should be very thankful that they are here. Tell them that there are many toys and souvenirs for sale at Disneyland, but there are going to be some rules. Tell them they have a budget of certain dollars or that they are limited to one souvenir. This advice seemed rationale and well reasoned. I gave it a try. Complete Fail.  Not even close.

Here is the problem., Whoever wrote that advice had a) never had kids, b) had kids but had never taken them to Disneyland  or c) had kids well outside two standard deviations of the norm.

Young kids are completely over matched against Disney merchandisers. These merchandisers are outstanding. They have exact replicas of the props from the movies. They are hanging on hooks that are at exact eye height of a 5 or 6 year old child. The store is set up, so that there is no way you can get to the exit without passing he most tempting and expensive souvenirs. The childrens’ still developing brains and associated impulse control are no match versus for Disneyland.  It is Seahawks-Broncos Super Bowl XLVII type matchup!

So here is what is going to happen if you try this advice. Your kids are not going to be able to implement it. You will keep to trying to reason with them and remind them of what you talked about last night and then at some time, there will be a complete child meltdown that includes crying , screaming, and wild body gyrations.

So here is my practical advice. Do not listen to the theory that you will read on line. I suggest you have one of three options.

1 Just buy the stuff. Not all of it, but enough to keep the peace. You can work on your child’s impulse control later when you are not getting ready to stand in a 45 minute line for the Thunder Mountain roller-coaster while sipping a $5 bottled water.

2. Just reconcile yourself to the meltdown. It is happening to a lot of kids there. No need to be embarrassed. Just put them in the stroller and move on.  This is much harder said than done.

3. I never tired this, but I think a blindfold could work. Maybe a Pirates of the Caribbean bandana that must be worn as you exit the rides and shows. They have to put on the blindfold and be carried or wheeled through the toy gauntlet!!!

I am not sure what will work for you, but I can assure you that my practical advice will be much better than the theory I read online.

So,…why I am writing this?  It’s not really to give you parenting advice. It’s to give you Advice on Advice.

Lately, I think we are overwhelmed by business advice: blogs, online articles,  social media, books. Our fiends give us advice,; our investors give us advice, our peers and co-workers give us advice. We hire or employ advisors to give us advice. I think it is too much. Here is my advice on advice: 

1. Advice is good. Be open to it.. You are not as smart as you think you are.
2.  Don’t spend too much time getting advice. Its better to actually do something.
3. Advice from people who have been successful at similar things should be considered heavily.
4. Advice form people who are not trying to solve similar problems or who are from outside your industry can be considered, but usually that advice has to considered more broadly and less tactically or specifically.
5. Advice from people, who have not been successful, should be avoided.
6. Remember the decisions you make are yours to own. So while, you can get advice, in the end you should do what you think is right!

So I “advise” you to read fewer blogs and select your advisors carefully. Seek out people who have done it before, not people who have talked to people who have done it.

And by the way...one more piece of practical advice.: Disneyland is way better when your kids are older.