"Winning team receives six points for a victory in regulation time or overtime. In games decided on shootout, winner receives four points, loser receives two. Teams receive one point for each goal scored in regulation up to a maximum of three per game."
The preceding admonition adorns every table in the APSL and -- in modified form -- the USISL. Is this as confusing to you as it is to most soccer fans, the AP and USA Today, virtually all non-soccer sports writers, and even the pro leagues themselves? I thought so!
Why does American pro soccer feel that such a system is necessary? Supposedly American soccer fans must always have as many goals as possible and never have a drawn match. While most soccer fans would subscribe to such ideals, does the current scoring system in the APSL and USISL actually produce better more attacking play that the new FIFA standard (3/1/0) scoring system? Does it produce results that people can understand easily?
The answer to these questions is no. To be effective, a scoring system must be immediately understandable to the average fan and reward offensive play. This article argues that: 1) understanding the league results and tables in their current form is impossible; 2) the system does NOT encourage more offensive play; and 3) changing the foolish playoff "mini-game" system will allow the best clubs to emerge from the playoffs. It concludes with some thoughts on American "Exceptionalism" and pro soccer.
1) UNDERSTANDING THE LEAGUE RESULTS IMPOSSIBLELet's take the issue of understanding the results first. When your team wins a game, you should be able to take the result, go right to the table and understand immediately where your team stands.
The current system so opaque that fans, the press, and even the APSL and USISL themselves can't correctly determine how many points a team has earned. Many times during the past season, the AP and USA Today had to revise the tables on a daily basis because they got either the number of points or the number of goals wrong. And it is not just a problem that occurs occasionally either. Apparently the end of the regular season produced a fiasco at USISL league headquarters in Dallas because it took 4 or 5 people an entire weekend to calibrate the final standings and determine who would be in the playoffs! This is clearly an indication of a fundamental problem with the league's scoring system!
During the course of the season, I have kept two sets of tables thanks to a program called USTOTO, written by a German colleague of mine, Andreas Werner. One is the "official" APSL table and other is the emerging FIFA 3/1/0 standard. The purpose of this was to see if the arcane "official" system produced different results than the 3/1/0 system. The 3/1/0 system counted as draws all matches that ended tied after 90 minutes and did not count goals scored in sudden death in the teams' totals.
Winning team receives six points for a victory in regulation time or overtime. In games decided on shootouts winner receives four points, loser receives two. Teams receive one point for each goal scored in regulation up to a maximum of three per game.
3/1/0 Standard Table Pd W D L G+ G- GD Pts 1 Seattle Sounders 20 14 2 4 38 15 +23 44 2 Los Angeles Salsa 20 10 5 5 35 21 +14 35 3 Montreal Impact 20 10 3 7 27 18 +9 33 4 Colorado Foxes 20 9 3 8 25 26 -1 30 5 Ft Lauderdale Strikers 20 5 6 9 22 33 -11 21 6 Vancouver 86ers 20 6 3 11 25 40 -15 21 7 Toronto Rockets 20 5 0 15 14 33 -19 15As you can see, there is no difference in terms of the order of finish of the clubs, so there is no point of the APSL's using a system that is used nowhere else in the whole world!
What's really the problem with the APSL/USISL system?
With a normal scoring system (like the 3/1/0 one), you only have to know one thing, the result. With the APSL/USISL "official" system, you have to understand 4 things: the result; whether it was in normal time; whether it was in extra time; or whether it was a shootout.
Let's take some examples, each of which seem to have have the "same" 3:2 result:
+ a 3:2 normal time result gives the winner 9 points, the loser 2.
+ a 3:2 extra time result gives the winner 8 points, the loser 2.
+ a 3-2 "shootout" result gives the winner 6 points, the loser 4.
The problems arose when the APSL or the AP would incorrectly record the victory in the shootout as a 3-2 victory and add 3 goals to the winning team's total when it should have had only 2, because shootout "goals" are not "real" goals. Other times, they would confuse a "shootout win" with a "sudden death" win and be wrong on both points and goals!
More seriously, what do you suppose that sports editors think when they might even be disposed to post the tables sometime? This scoring system gives these sports editors justified reasons for not including the standings because they are: 1) complicated, 2) non-intuitive, and 3) late in getting to the media and 4) usually wrong!
My preference is for the 3/1/0 system, currently in use by the World Cup, UEFA, and 19 of the top 32 leagues in Europe, and now mandated by FIFA itself for all league play beginning with the next season in all countries.
2) ATTACKING PLAY NOT ENCOURAGED
Let's take the other issue of whether the current system rewards the best teams, and produces attacking soccer. The 1994 APSL season produced the following:
% drawn matches ending in: Goals/game % matches "drawn" "sudden death" "shootout" 2.70 15.7 4.3 11.4This system, supposedly to produce "attacking soccer" actually produced .62 goals a game LESS than the similar system did last year! In fact, the 1994 World Cup produced MORE goals per game than the current APSL system! The World Cup was seen as wildly successful in the USA, so why not use the same scoring system?
What about the "draws"? Don't the low number of draws suggest that the system is "working" and producing winners? The low number of drawn matches (there were 11 out of 70) that were won in "sudden death" (there were only 3) suggest that the current system actually produces MORE cautious play in sudden death!!
Why?If a match is won in "sudden death" the winner gets the same 6 point difference between the winner and loser as it would if it won the match in normal time. What do teams do under this situation? They play cautiously to avoid the 12 point "swing" between winning and losing. If they take it to the shootout, the "swing" is only 4 points.
As everyone agrees, matches should be settled on the pitch and not via some artificial method such as penalties or shootouts. I would suggest that a 3/1/0 system would actually produce FEWER draws than the current system produces, since the difference bewteen 3 points for a win and 1 for a draw gives greater incentive to go for a win in normal time than the current APSL one does, despite the league's protests to the contrary.
This current scoring system is broken and desperately needs fixing. Whatever combination of professional leagues we have next year MUST have another system.
Why not use the new international standard: 3/1/0?
3) APSL PLAYOFF "MINI-GAME" FIASCOIn 1994 we had an APSL Championship game between only the 3rd and 4th best teams in the league, and not the top two. What happened to them? They were victims of the "mini-game" foolishness.
What's wrong with the "mini-games" as a tiebreaker if the two games in the semifinals are drawn?
The current US Pro "logic" completely contradicts the one that governs the regular season, when goals are actually more important than wins. In the APSL in 1993, for example, Montreal had more wins than either Toronto or Ft. Lauderdale but finished below them in the standings because they had fewer goals and therefore fewer "bonus" points.
So if goals are more important than wins for the regular season, why toss out the significance of the total goals when you get to the playoffs? So now we have the additional problem of a scoring system that is not even logically consistent from the regular season to the playoffs!
This playoff system is even more ill-designed than the regular season scoring system? If you are going to have a 2 leg semifinal series, what's wrong with the FIFA standard system of only 2 matches in which the tie-breakers are: wins, goal differential, away goals scored? If it isn't settled then, you could go to a "mini game" (or more accurately, "extra time" (and then shootout/pks) after the second match.
If the APSL playoffs worked like a normal FIFA 2-leg series, the championship match would have been:
Seattle should have won _deservedly_ 4:3 on aggregate. But, instead, the teams won one each and so after a 0-0 "Mini-game", the Foxes went on to win 2:1 in a "Shoot Out".
Meanwhile: Montreal Impact - Los Angeles Salsa 2:1 Los Angeles Salsa - Montreal Impact 3:0The Salsa should have won _deservedly_ 4:2 on aggregate. Instead, after another scoreless "Mini-game", the Impact steals it by winning the "Shoot Out" 2:1.
The name of The Game is to score goals. This system does not reward that, which is absolutely deplorable!
Under the present APSL system, one strategy for a team would be to rest the best players in the away leg, don't care if they lose 10-0, and hope they win the home leg 1-0 with their rested players who would still be fresh enough to help their team win the "Mini Game". This is not good!
4) AMERICAN "EXCEPTIONALISM"Why does US soccer still resist conforming to the world game on these points? It will only serve to damage the standard of our professional leagues as a reputable competition on the world stage if these types of rules persist against the pattern used by all other countries.
The most bizarre aspect of the current APSL/USISL scoring system is that -- despite all the push for rules changes to US Pro soccer -- the APSL & USISL use a regular season and playoff system designed over 25 years ago and first used in the failed NASL. Why do all other rules come under scrutiny while this scoring system is religiously defended by the APSL & USISL against all logic?
Finally, I would caution US Soccer that any changes in rules MUST be sanctioned by FIFA. We simply can not go be a "lone ranger" because we in the USA think the game would be better if we tinkered with it ourselves. The NASL's 35 yard line, and the 6 points for a win scoring system for the most egregious examples of this.
Some soccer people here in the US (and Canada) argue that sports fans don't like soccer the way it is played in other countries and conclude that we have to change the rules. But the strange thing is -- in one way or another -- we have not played with ALL the FIFA rules in the USA since sometime in the 1960s! In other words, how do we know that playing by FIFA rules won't be attractive to Americans? The only bit of empirical evidence we have is the World Cup -- which WAS played under ALL the FIFA rules -- and it far exceeded everyone's expectations!
Let's just play with the existing FIFA rules on scoring (i.e. 3/1/0) and on two-leg playoffs for a year or two here and see if this is enough.
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