English Premier League soccer will never be confused with the NFL, MLB, NBA or NHL. And that's a good thing for everyone involved. The proliferation of expanded instant replay in the "core four" American sports leaves me increasingly convinced of the following scenario: my grandkids will grow up watching their favorite sports on the SkyNet - I mean, ESPN - family of networks as Terminator robots call and officiate games, solve labor disputes and quell the inevitable Ed Hochuli-led human resistance with machine-like efficiency.
The use of instant replay certainly lengthens the already excessive game times of most U.S. sports. But we're Americans, dammit! We eat more s'mores, win more wars and produce more "world champions" than any other country. We have a manifest destiny to get the calls right, and if that translates into four-hour football games, well, it also means more minutes of pounding PBR and handfuls of Cheez Balls. And how many denizens of the Land of the Free are opposed to that?
As it turns out, not many - or at least not enough to stem the growing tide of pro-replay sentiment in American professional sports. But across the pond in Europe, where the 90-minute version of football reigns supreme, officials have maintained a preference for soccer "with errors," in the words of current FIFA President Sepp Blatter. Blatter would rather officiating decisions be made by "a man, not a machine." Despite the proven success of modified Hawk-Eye technology - akin to that used in tennis - for close calls, Blatter argued that the inconsistencies and mistakes of human referees actually "increase the fascination and popularity of [European] football," and that soccer video evidence should only be used to address subsequent disciplinary decisions.
That all sounds very neat and noble, but I'm here to tell you that it's complete bullocks. Remember Thierry Henry's shenanigans during the qualifying stages of the 2010 World Cup? If you don't, that essentially debunks Blatter's blustering about human error equating to fascinating and popular football, but let me take things one step further. During that game in November 2009, FIFA officials inexcusably failed to whistle Henry for a blatant handball against the Republic of Ireland - a handball so blatant that Henry readily admitted it and suggested a rematch. With the last World Cup berth on the line, referee Martin Hansson's error not only allowed Henry to set up William Gallas' decisive goal for France - and cruelly snatch the last tickets to South Africa from Ireland's hands - but also reportedly robbed the Irish economy of at least $150 million in World Cup-related revenue. Owen James, a financial analyst at the renowned Centre For Economics And Business Research in London, told South African newspaper Business Day that the whopping sum would have been even bigger had Ireland advanced out of the Cup's group stages. Blatter got his "fascinating" result, but I'd wager that he and FIFA are about as popular as a potato famine right about now.
The Ireland example is an extreme one, but it contains an important truth inherent in the beautiful game - in no other sport does scoring matter more than in soccer. During last year's 2010 season, MLB teams scored an average of 4.38 runs per game. During that same sports season, NHL teams averaged 2.84 goals per game, while NFL teams averaged 22 points per game, and NBA teams averaged 100.4 points per game. In contrast, during the 2009-10 season in the English Premier League - Britain's top professional soccer league - the 20 EPL teams collectively averaged just 1.39 goals per game.
In the grand scheme of a professional baseball game, a questionable ball here or strike there will never even remotely approach the massive significance of a scoring opportunity in soccer. I've been watching baseball for more than a decade, and I've yet to witness a game where an umpire's imperfect strike zone didn't cause a batter to start arguing balls and strikes. And yet, crucial official rulings on goal-line and offside decisions or penalty kicks and red cards in soccer are made with the same "home-plate umpire" mentality of periodic inconsistency and indiscretion. That's to say nothing of the fact that soccer referees and linesmen have one-tenth as clear a view of the action as an MLB umpire such as Jim Joyce, whose "safe at first" call denied Detroit pitcher Armando Galarraga the first perfect game in Tigers history. If Joyce managed to blow a relatively clear-cut call on such a significant play, I think soccer - a sport in which scoring comes at even more of a premium - can at least adopt a version of MLB's current "boundary-call" replay rules, which deal almost exclusively with potential run-scoring plays. A selective replay system admittedly would introduce new stoppages into professional soccer, but it hardly could disrupt the flow of the game any more than the incessant theatrics of diving, protesting and celebrating players do already.
Soccer needs such a system to review the crucial plays that not only elicit celebration, as in a goal-line or offside questions on a goal, but also those that cause tempers to flare, such as penalty-kick and red-card decisions. Saturday morning, I watched the Premier League match between Arsenal and Newcastle United that finished in a 4-4 draw, bucking soccer's low-scoring trend but profoundly illustrating the game-changing potential of a red card. Arsenal entered the halftime locker room with a commanding 4-0 lead, but that all changed when Arsenal midfielder Abou Diaby received a red card for shoving Newcastle's Joey Barton, whose aggressive but unpunished tackle moments earlier looked to leave Diaby smarting. The decision drastically swung the game in favor of home team Newcastle, which proceeded to score four goals in 20 minutes against 10-man Arsenal. Barton scored two of the four goals from the penalty spot, and referee Phil Dowd appeared to hand the home team several gift decisions down the stretch as Newcastle overcame the largest goal deficit in EPL history. Newcastle deserves plenty of props for completing the epic comeback, but against the backdrops of Henry's handball and Joyce's imperfect call, the game serves as a stern reminder that a lack of instant replay in select situations can make or break history. When that happens, the whole sport loses.
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