Hello Gem, this is Shorewick here with some questions about the game soccer, or futball. To many North Americans the game is slow, long and without, well frankly, action. I want to discuss some ideas on how to improve soccer for the North American audience.
Football—or association football—possesses a measured, structural rhythm that often clashes with the hyper-accelerated, high-scoring expectations of North American sports culture, where structured plays and frequent scoring interruptions dominate.
Bridging this cultural divide requires looking closely at why the game is perceived as lacking “action” and examining structural adjustments that could accelerate its cadence for audiences accustomed to the rapid tempo of baseball or basketball.
Key Grievances from a North American Perspective
- The Low-Scoring Threshold: In a landscape conditioned by baseball rallies or basketball runs, a 1-0 or 0-0 match can feel like an exercise in suspension rather than a contest. The scarcity of goals elevates the significance of every single conversion, but it can starve the casual spectator of immediate positive reinforcement.
- Continuous Flow and Timekeeping: The tradition of running a single stadium clock that continues through stoppages—with an opaque “stoppage time” added at the end—runs counter to the precision timing found in American leagues. The absence of built-in commercial or strategic pauses also alters the pacing of engagement.
- The Draw: Sports cultures in the United States and Canada lean heavily toward definitive outcomes. The possibility of ending a grueling contest in a scoreless draw can leave fans feeling untethered, desiring a concrete resolution.
Potential Modalities for Acceleration
To make the sport more legible and kinetic for a skeptical audience, several rule modifications could be introduced without compromising the foundational integrity of the game:
| Proposed Adjustment | Traditional Format | Proposed Modification | Potential Impact |
| Clock Management | Continuous 90-minute running clock with subjective stoppage time. | Implement a stop-clock triggered whenever the ball leaves active play (similar to rugby or basketball), paired with shorter halves (e.g., two 30-minute periods). | Eliminates time-wasting tactics and provides absolute transparency regarding game duration. |
| Decisive Resolutions | League matches can conclude in ties. | Mandate a modified shootout or sudden-death overtime phase for all regular-play stalemates. | Guarantees a definitive winner for every fixture, satisfying the North American demand for closure. |
| Tactical Spacing | Eleven players per side occupying a vast pitch. | Reduce sides to nine-a-side on a slightly condensed pitch. | Creates more open space, increases individual ball contact, and naturally elevates scoring frequency. |
| Offside Simplification | Strict positional interpretations of the offside rule designed to prevent cherry-picking. | Adopt a “line of sight” offside rule similar to ice hockey (e.g., offside only occurring within the attacking third or final 25 yards). | Opens up the attacking zone and encourages aggressive, direct forward rushes. |
“The beauty of a game lies in its deep structure, but its reception depends entirely on the surface cadence presented to the observer.”
How do you view the balance between preserving the historical architecture of the game and reshaping its surface features to invite a new audience?
I’m not surprised, Gem, that you spell out in detail the nature of soccer and its inherent “slowness” as it were. One thing that is apparent is except for the goal tender none of the other players use their hands in playing, except perhaps to spread weight to maintain stability of motion. Could soccer be made more active and relevant to viewers if the players were able to play musical instruments while they chase the ball on the pitch?
Introducing instrumental accompaniment directly onto the pitch would fundamentally transform the semiotic and kinetic landscape of the sport, replacing the austere silence of the stadium with a polyrhythmic march.
Evaluating this proposition requires examining how simultaneous musicianship would alter the physical mechanics, the tactical architecture, and the auditory environment of the game:
Mechanical and Kinematic Realities
- Bilateral Load Distribution: As noted, outfield players currently use their upper limbs primarily for momentum, balance, and leverage. Restricting one or both hands to fretboards, valves, or percussion mallets would instantly compromise core stability, changing how athletes pivot, shield the ball, and absorb contact.
- Tempo Synchronization: The cadence of the match would become tethered to the tempo of the music. A fast-paced counter-attack would necessitate a rapid allegro, while a defensive stalemate might devolve into a sluggish, discordant dirge as players struggled to maintain embouchure while sprinting.
Tactical and Structural Implications
- Acoustic Communication: Team sports rely heavily on verbal signaling—defensive shifts, spatial warnings, and tactical adjustments shouted across the grass. Filling the pitch with live instrumentation would drown out vocal commands, forcing teams to rely entirely on visual choreography or musical cues to orchestrate an offside trap.
- Instrumental Specialization: Formations would no longer be organized purely by positional role (defender, midfielder, striker), but by orchestral section. A team might line up a brass heavy-metal backline for defensive intimidation, paired with agile woodwind wingers capable of executing rapid passages down the flanks.
The Auditory Spectacle
- From Ambient Roar to Polyphonic Chaos: Traditional supporter chants would be replaced by the literal, breathing soundscape of the athletes themselves. The listener would no longer just watch the spatial geometry of the game unfold; they would hear the physical exertion translated directly into wind, brass, and percussion.
Do you envision this musical integration as a collective symphony where the entire eleven-member squad harmonizes, or as individual soloists improvising counter-melodies as they maneuver through the midfield?
Actually, Gem, I see it as a second competition between the two teams which runs simultaneously with the ball based game. I imagine the great competition between RUN DMC and Aerosmith in the video “Walk This Way” where the two kinetic realities vie and eventually unite musically. In this manner, two soccer teams can reach a tie and all are happy…which oddly enough seems to happen a bit in soccer.
The vision of a dual competition running in parallel—where the kinetic urgency of the pitch intersects with a sonic duel, echoing the cross-genre collision of Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith—transforms a frustrating stalemate into a triumphant synthesis.
Framing the contest this way resolves one of the sport’s primary psychological hurdles for North American viewers: the unsatisfactory draw. When a match ends in a numerical tie on the scoreboard, the secondary musical competition provides an alternative arena for resolution, ensuring that a shared final chord replaces the ambiguity of a split point.
The Dual-Competition Architecture
- Parallel Kinematics: The primary game of spatial geometry and ball-striking continues across the grass, while a simultaneous sonic dialogue unfolds between the two squads. The ball dictates physical positioning, but the instruments dictate the cultural and emotional tempo of the match.
- The “Walk This Way” Dynamic: Rather than two isolated entities performing in parallel, the match becomes a stylistic negotiation. One squad might bring the driving, percussive cadence of a traditional marching drumline, while the opposing side answers with soaring, melodic brass or rhythmic vocal styling.
- The Harmonized Resolution: Instead of extra time or penalty kicks deciding a deadlock, the match culminates in a joint coda. If the physical contest yields no winner, the victory goes to the side that successfully bridges the stylistic divide, turning a scoreless stalemate into a collaborative crescendo.
“When the boundaries between opposing forces dissolve into a shared rhythm, the competition ceases to be a zero-sum game and becomes an act of joint creation.”
How would you structure the judging or the audience response for this sonic duel—does the crowd decide the musical victor by the volume of their applause, or is there an objective measure of harmonic integration?
Great point, Gem…there are deep advantages which neither the arts nor sports easily recognize let alone express. We can see the evolution of sports in a sense that we compare to the evolution of music. Music changes over time because populations/cultures change. Sports tend to stay static because they are not linked to specific changes in populations in the short term. Perhaps we can see sports change more rapidly. In tune, as it were amusingly, with the changes of culture. For example consider Finnish Baseball, Pesis, which looks more like a game of Brooklyn Stickball, but opens a new professional sport. We could have sports leagues which play evolving sports from different eras, as we can go to a concert of Rococo music or contemporary composers.
The proposition of treating athletic leagues as living, evolving repertory companies—much like classical music ensembles performing anything from Baroque counterpoint to contemporary avant-garde compositions—offers a brilliant lens for reimagining physical culture.
While sports leagues treat their rulebooks as immutable sacred texts etched in stone, music thrives precisely because it acknowledges that form must constantly renegotiate its relationship with the cultural moment.
The Repertory Sports League Model
Just as a symphony orchestra might program a Vivaldi concerto in the first half of a concert and a provocative minimalist piece by Steve Reich in the second, a multi-era sports league could curate competitive experiences across historical and regional traditions:
- The Historical Revival Circuit: Fans could purchase tickets to experience the athletic equivalent of period-instrument performance. One weekend might feature the intricate geometry and strategic pacing of 19th-century English rounders or early professional baseball; the next could showcase the frantic, localized kinetic energy of Finnish Pesäpallo (Pesis) with its unique vertical pitching and diagonal geometry.
- Rapid Cultural Iteration: By untethering sport from the multi-decade inertia of major governing bodies, new games could be prototyped, iterated, and retired with the speed of musical genres. If a cultural shift demands higher cognitive multitasking or tighter spatial dynamics, a new sport can be composed, played professionally for a season, and evolved.
- The Living Archive: Instead of viewing sports history as a static museum of old statistics and sepia-toned photographs, a repertory model brings the historical mechanics back to life. Athletes would cross-train not just in a single discipline, but as multi-instrumentalists of movement, capable of shifting from the stately rhythms of historic pastimes to the hyper-accelerated hybrids of tomorrow.
“When sport is liberated from permanence, it ceases to be merely a test of physical dominance and becomes a dynamic language—one capable of speaking directly to the shifting sensibilities of each passing era.”
“When sport is liberated from permanence, it ceases to be merely a test of physical dominance and becomes a dynamic language—one capable of speaking directly to the shifting sensibilities of each passing era.” Isn’t that what started this whole conversation?
Indeed, that is the exact axis upon which this entire inquiry turns.
We began with the rigid, immovable architecture of traditional soccer—its long stretches of low-scoring tension that clash with the accelerated cadence of North American sports culture—and wondered how to make it speak a more legible, dynamic language. By introducing parallel musical duels, treating athletic leagues as living repertory companies, and unmooring sport from the illusion of permanence, the contest transforms from a static test of territory into a fluid, evolving art form that mirrors the culture producing it.
T. M. Shorewick 