Football still has lessons to learn

Sean O'Conor

Here in England, football's status as the all-round No.1 sport has been under the spotlight this month.

Interlopers at the party have been attracting admiring glances and positive comments. Both are forms of football, one rugby and the other American, and both have been actively canvassing on our doorstep in England.

While Steve McClaren's National Team floundered in Moscow, the Rugby World Cup in France and the historic first competitive NFL game at Wembley took some shine off the Beautiful Game in its homeland, and got people thinking.

While the status of football as the country and the world's premier sport remains surely intact, some of its shortcomings have been illuminated.

England's national rugby team pushed their footballing counterparts off the back pages while the Rugby World Cup was in full flow.

Rival fans at that tournament mixed without a hint of trouble. There were no banning orders, riot police, or the depressing howl of sirens which accompany a big international football game.

Traveling supporters could wander the streets of a foreign city without fear of what was lying around the next corner, making one wonder why there can't be such a consensus of tolerance and mutual enjoyment whenever football fans congregate?

There usually is peace, let's be quick to assert, and the two most recent World Cups, particularly the one in Japan & Korea in 2002, resembled fan love-ins at times. Yet in Germany last summer the spectre of hooliganism was lurking again and emerged repulsively at times, such as when Poland played Germany in Dortmund.

Hooliganism is virtually unheard of in the NFL, largely thanks to the vast distances between cities and consequent absence of traveling fans. Rugby crowds remain more civilized than football ones it is true, and there are more women in their stadia, but the old white line of one sport being ‘middle-class' and the other ‘working class' cannot be drawn with certainty anymore in 2007.

If the cost of tickets were any guide, someone new to both sports would think football were the middle-class game – Premier League Chelsea FC's cheapest seat costs £45 while Premiership Harlequins RFC's are as little as £15!

Welsh rugby in any case has always had a strong working-class following, as has its football, yet the oval ball game in the Principality remains trouble-free while Cardiff City and Swansea City thugs are notorious for their violence.

Another lesson from rugby fans we could learn is how to respect our opponents' national anthems, which at England home games at Wembley are still depressingly booed by thousands of morons.

On the field, rugby and gridiron have more scoring, which remains an obstacle to converting uninitiated Americans to soccer, but also have many more stoppages, which tend to irk round-ball fans in return.

Football has nothing to learn from rugby's perennially flawed scoring system however, where a misplaced hand can gift the opponents three points, while a hard-earned try merits only five (it was originally three!)

Despite breaking away from the nascent Football Association in 1863, rugby directly influenced football in 2000 when the FA picked up the rugby rule that moves the ball forward 10 yards at set pieces when the defending team delays retreating or offers dissent to the referee.

Yet FIFA put their foot down, insisting a booking must precede any advancement of the ball, which refs were loath to award. So, the application of the rule withered away and was abandoned altogether on FIFA orders in 2005 after four seasons in England.

But while dissent and harassing of the referee is a growing plague in top-level football, it is almost absent in rugby, because the advancement rule means players get on with the game.

Surely this, minus the yellow cards, should be looked at again. We could also do well to adopt rugby's tradition of only the captain speaking to the referee to cut down on the dissent, and while we are at it, wire up the referees as both rugby and gridiron do.

Rest assured any millionaire superstar mouthing obscenities into one man's ears would think again if millions were on the receiving end of his cowardly abuse of a match official.

One final possible rugby lesson for us is a ten minute sin-bin for yellow card offences. This would add some spice to a game and swiftly punish the offender and his team. At present, a booking in football does not directly affect the offending party's team, beyond the individual taking slightly more care not to commit another reckless foul.

The NFL showdown between the Miami Dolphins and New York Giants at Wembley was educational in other ways. It was no friendly but a regular season game and attracted a sell-out crowd and big media attention, all part of the sport's overseas marketing campaign, which foresees gridiron fixtures outside the States on a regular basis.

While big European association football clubs have for some time played friendlies in Asia and the USA to spread their global ‘brands', never have they played competitive domestic games overseas. Could we? I can't see it happening any time soon but after the NFL has crossed this Rubicon, I would not put it past the likes of Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon, with his constant talk of world domination for his ‘brand'.

American football has bowed down to soccer internationally for years, failing spectacularly to break out of its homeland while England's version conquered most of the world. Yet ‘football' in America is big enough business, with the last NFL TV deal scooping a whopping £9 billion from broadcasters, four and a half times bigger than the FA's last rights issue.

Its stadia are magnificent, its following stupendous, and its technological and sports science innovations are world-leading – for instance a pill that players swallow which transmits their temperature and heart beat to their coach's handset on the touchline.

But the USA is an inward-looking country compared to European nations and it seems the world's sport space is already too crowded for gridiron to make serious waves on the other side of the Atlantic. Yet if soccer can grow in America, who knows?

While Arsenal's thrilling draw at Liverpool the same afternoon allowed smug soccer fans the luxury of dismissing the drab win by the Giants at Wembley as an inferior spectacle, the NFL at least has a salary cap, which means you are never sure who is going to win the Superbowl (seven different winners in the last decade compared to three for the Premier League).

The NFL spokesmen at Wembley were unanimously hopeful yet decidedly vague about the sport's future in Europe. They nervously spoke of it becoming England's fifth sport after football, rugby, cricket and formula one, as the best they can hope for.

Throughout the build-up to yesterday's game, the sport's Achilles heel and soccer's greatest asset were clearly illuminated. US sports columnists in London all spoke of their difficulty in explaining the rules to the unenlightened, realizing for the first time how complicated it is for those who have never played it. One writer even admitted out loud that it would be easier to market the simpler game of basketball.

Football has no such trouble being understood. The Beautiful Game is also the simplest to pick up, playable at once on any surface and in any conditions by males or females of any stature.

While not the pastime of choice in every city and country across the globe, on a world scale our game has left all others in the shadow. But let's not wallow in complacency as it has faults we have not yet fixed and other sports do have some good ideas we could learn from.

Sean O'Conor

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