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.