Why Is Football Better Than Soccer on TV?

Multiple-increment scoring and offensive evolution.

Soccer has many strong points, such as that you can be good at it at any size:

For example, 5’7” Lionel Messi is leading the World Cup through two games with five goals scored, while 6’5” Erling Haaland is tied for second with four.

Also, 11 on 11 soccer is a simple game that doesn’t need all that many referees, coaches, timekeepers, first down crews, and so forth. So, anybody can play a soccer game on an empty field that more or less resembles a World Cup final in everything except skill.

In contrast, American sportswriter Chuck Klosterman points out in his recent book Football that trying to organize you and 21 of your friends to play an 11 on 11 game of American tackle football in your yard would be like trying to put on Death of a Salesman in your living room. And I think that’s understating the challenge — the English upper classes used to frequently mount amateur theatricals in their country houses. I’d say organizing your own tackle football game would be like staging in your living room a spur of the moment grand opera production of Aida, complete with elephant.

But American football is a better televised sports spectacle.

One inherent shortcoming in soccer as a spectator sport is that, like ice hockey, it has single-increment scoring so that no single game ever comes down to win or lose on a single play, which is not all that rare in American football, basketball, or baseball.

As an analog, consider ice hockey, a sport that Americans tend to respect without being all that enthusiastic or annoyed about. Like in soccer, a team can only score one point on a single play. So, a team never finds itself in a position where a single play determines whether it wins or loses that game.

In contrast, some 21st Century examples of a single win-or-lose play in American team sports:

In the 2006 Rose Bowl, the undefeated #1 USC Trojans were leading the undefeated #2 Texas Longhorns 38-33 with about two dozens seconds left. Texas had the ball on USC’s 9 yard line on 4th and 5, when Vince Young dropped back to pass.

With the San Antonio Spurs leading by one in the 4th game of the 2026 NBA finals, Jalen Brunson of the New York Knicks missed a shot, but his teammate OG Anunoby tipped the rebound in.

The New York Yankees led the first game of the 2024 World Series 3-2 over the Los Angeles Dodgers with two outs and the bases loaded in the bottom of the 10th inning, when Freddie Freeman hit a grandslam. (Here’s video of the even more desperate Kirk Gibson homer with two outs and two strikes and the Dodgers losing to the A’s 4-3 in the first game of the 1988 World Series.)

Soccer fans tend to respond this with complex scenarios in which a single goal allowed, say, a draw allowing some sort of season-level success such as avoiding relegation. But, still, that never happens at the game level: in soccer and ice hockey, it takes two events to convert a loss into a win.

Or they claim that all ten penalty kicks in game deciding shootout count as a single play.

Is there a clever way to change the rules to add win-or-lose plays to soccer?

Paywall here.