PARIS (AP) — Kiss goodbye to soccer as we know it.

In getting machines to help men spot when goals are scored, soccer is making a mistake. This pact with the devil of goal-line technology will come at a cost to the sport’s soul.

Policed solely by humans, soccer can offer lessons on life for those prepared to listen.

Referees who fail to spot when the ball has crossed the goal line, or who award a goal when it hasn’t, remind us that nobody will ever be perfect and that making mistakes is part of the human condition.

So, too, is trying to make as few mistakes as possible. Many referees do that admirably week after week. It would be better for them, the game, and for our blood pressure if we were more accepting of the maybe 5 percent of big decisions that match officials get wrong, instead of insulting them or squandering millions on technological aids.

Accepting the golden rule that the referee’s word is final, even when he or she is wrong, also teaches respect for authority - something our societies are hardly over-stocked with.

An incorrectly awarded or disallowed goal can feel grossly unfair, just as life does sometimes, too. Those who win don’t always deserve to and those who lose sometimes should have won. Again, soccer can teach us to shrug a shoulder at that, to move on and trust that justice will be done next time.

So, ultimately, this is about choices. Do we accept flaws, even cherish them, or kick, scream and demand they be excised like an unsightly mole?

I used to be one of the screamers. I was there and angry when a linesman from Uruguay missed Frank Lampard’s perfectly good goal for England against Germany at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. I repeatedly wrote that goal-line technology was needed, took swipes at FIFA boss Sepp Blatter for resisting it and likened technophobes to dinosaurs. Bring in infallible machines!

Yet now that goal-line technology is actually upon us, I find that I’ve become a dinosaur, too. Having lobbied for the soccer equivalent of plain, white bread - games stripped of goal-line errors - I now find myself hungry for whole wheat - matches with human dramas, flaws and moral lessons. In soccer, goal-line controversies and errors have always been part of the feast and, I realize now that they’re facing extinction, part of the charm.

These things stick in our craw and so give us stuff to chew over long after the final whistle is blown. As Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand asked: What will be left for us to debate in the pub? ”Will we miss it?” he tweeted. I, for one, now think I will.

The cameras of Hawk-Eye and GoalControl - the first chosen by the English Premier League, the second by FIFA for the 2014 World Cup - could have told us whether Soviet linesman Tofik Bakhramov correctly called Geoff Hurst’s goal in the 101st minute for England against Germany in the 1966 World Cup final. How sad. Because that would have deprived soccer of a call so infamously controversial that it has endured as a story through the decades since.

Which also shows that such incidents are remembered not because they happen every week but because they don’t. Even fewer of the goals wrongly given or not are actually decisive.

After referee Martin Atkinson wrongly awarded Chelsea a goal in the 2012 FA Cup, Harry Redknapp griped: ”We’ve seen so many matches over the years decided by wrong decisions that it’s farcical.”

But his statement doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. His Tottenham team lost that semifinal 5-1. If allowed, Lampard’s goal would not have prevented England’s loss to a superior Germany in 2010. Hurst scored another goal in the last minute in 1966 to make the final score 4-2. So only very rarely will goal-line technology prevent sporting injustice.

The Premier League calculates that the technology, if installed this season, could have proved useful in around 20 of some 320 matches played thus far. In many of those, the ball was either clearly over the line or clearly not, few were difficult calls, and officials mostly got them right. Perhaps the most glaring error was referee Mike Jones not awarding a goal when Victor Anichebe’s header for Everton crossed Newcastle’s goal-line in September.

GoalControl costs $260,000-$330,000 per stadium to install. There are also small running costs of $3,900-$5,200 per match. Hawk-Eye and the Premier League won’t say how much their system will cost for the English clubs who’ll need the cameras perhaps just once per season. But with the money going on goal-line technology in England and at 12 World Cup stadiums in Brazil , you could have rebuilt the bombed-out soccer stadium in Gaza, laid the first turf pitch in Bangladesh and paid for the first artificial grass field in Greenland and still have come out with perhaps a couple of million dollars in change.

And the goal-line is just a first frontier for machines. With cameras watching the goal area, technophiles will more readily be able to argue that they should also be used to expose off-sides and fouls that referees miss. GoalControl managing director Dirk Broichhausen said they are already developing software to automatically spot handball. ”Not tomorrow, but in the future years it will be possible,” he said.

Sounds scary, suspiciously like the start of technological creep into soccer if the game’s guardians aren’t vigilant. Although soccer also is big business, it is first and foremost a game. Keep it simple and human, warts and all.

—John Leicester 

Opinions from the AP journalist on the impending utilization of goal line technologies by the English Premier League and FIFA.

Personally, I do agree with him but all sports on the global stage go forward into technological advancements; it’s the world we live in. And until laser offside technology and robo-refereeing is a thing, at least there will still always be some human aspect to the game to inspire frustrated and spirited ‘remember whens’ for years to come.

afootballreport:

Before we move forward, let’s take a step back.

2013 will bring new stories, and writers will continue to unveil value in the context of our day-to-day lives. But before we jump ahead, we really should take a step back. The internet is a wonderful place, but our constant consumption of content allows us to forget which stories were truly compelling, creative, well-researched, and told with conviction. For the second year in a row, I have compiled what I consider to be a list of the best writing in football. This year, I called upon some of the game’s most influential voices to reflect on how writing best interpreted, dissected, and brought meaning to the beautiful game.

Consider this project to be a sort of anthology. The games will be remembered in history, but our reactions and our stories could have been forgotten. Instead, they’re here.

View some of the best football writing that 2012 had to offer:

PDF in Browser | Download.

(Note: Titles in the PDF link to their respective URLs. For the sake of continuity and accessibility, we did not feature pieces that were only available offline or behind paywalls)

Thanks to the list’s contributors: Laurent Dubois, Richard Whittall, James Tyler, Gwendolyn Oxenham, Chris Mann, Tom Dunmore, Robert Langham, Musa Okwonga, Jeff Livingstone, Ed Malyon, George Quraishi, Maxi Rodriguez, Kevin McCauley, Elliot Turner, Dominic Vieira, and Stefan Bienkowski

Design by the amazing Dan Gribbon, of 3nil

Compiled by Eric Beard

Finally, thanks for your support throughout 2012. Here’s to another year full of vibrant conversation.

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pitchinvasion:

Football’s magic is to take all the emotions that define what a club means to one fan and make it equate to those of every one of the hundreds, thousands or millions of people who share the same allegiance. Football serves a deep human need for community, and that – plus the unscripted drama of the game – explains its success. We love our clubs because of what they are, not for what they do for their owners or employees.

That’s why a co-operative form is a perfect fit with football, because in a co-op economics flow from purpose, not the other way around. In Europe, co-operative and mutual ownership is commonplace, with almost a quarter of the top-flight clubs in UEFA’s 53 member countries being owned and run this way. When Bayern Munich play in the Champions League final in 10 days’ time, they will make it the 14th final in the past 21 years to feature a fan-owned and run club.

Our read of the year from 2012 is Dave Boyle’s superb essay from the Guardian in May on the sustainable model of clubs owned by co-operatives of fans. Read it!

By KEN BELSON

Sometimes a soccer ball is more than just a ball. Sometimes, it’s a lifesaver.

Tim Jahnigen has always followed his heart, whether as a carpenter, a chef, a lyricist or now as an entrepreneur. So in 2006, when he saw a documentary about children in Darfur who found solace playing soccer with balls made out of garbage and string, he was inspired to do something about it.

The children, he learned, used trash because the balls donated by relief agencies and sporting goods companies quickly ripped or deflated on the rocky dirt that doubled as soccer fields. Kicking a ball around provided such joy in otherwise stressful and trying conditions that the children would play with practically anything that approximated a ball.

“The only thing that sustained these kids is play,” said Mr. Jahnigen of Berkeley, Calif. “Yet the millions of balls that are donated go flat within 24 hours.”

During the next two years, Mr. Jahnigen, who was also working to develop an infrared medical technology, searched for something that could be made into a ball but never wear out, go flat or need a pump. Many engineers he spoke to were dubious of his project. But Mr. Jahnigen eventually discovered PopFoam, a type of hard foam made of ethylene-vinyl acetate, a class of material similar to that used in Crocs, the popular and durable sandals.

“It’s changed my life,” he said.

Figuring out how to shape PopFoam into a sphere, though, might cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and Mr. Jahnigen’s money was tied up in his other business.

Then he happened to be having breakfast with Sting, a friend from his days in the music business. Mr. Jahnigen told him how soccer helped the children in Darfur cope with their troubles and his efforts to find an indestructible ball. Sting urged Mr. Jahnigen to drop everything and make the ball. Mr. Jahnigen said that developing the ball might cost as much as $300,000. Sting said he would pay for it.

“Even on the harshest of terrain and in the worst of conditions, the ball could survive and the kids could still play,” Sting said in a public service announcement he made with Mr. Jahnigen. “I said, wow, yeah, let’s make it.”

Creating a prototype, it turned out, cost about one-tenth as much as expected and took about a year. Sting called it the One World Futbol, a homage to a song he sang with the Police, “One World (Not Three).”

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afootballreport:

By Maxi Rodriguez, writing from Los Angeles

It’s a cliché, especially in the sports world, to describe a certain “electricity in the air” surrounding a sporting event. Used to describe everything ranging from the enthusiasm that precedes a Vegas title fight, to the excitement that surrounds certain sports memorabilia conventions (I know, I don’t understand it either.), the idiom is a crutch for the generic sportswriter in the face of stifling deadlines. And yet, after deliberating for hours since the confirmation of David Beckham’s departure from the Los Angeles Galaxy, I’ve yet to come up with a more appropriate way to describe the collective current that passed through the Home Depot Center each time David Beckham touched the ball.

Straddling the border between suburban banality and industrial mire, the Home Depot Center was an odd place to find such a cosmopolitan figure. His time with the Galaxy was similarly at odds, riddled with flaws from the outset. In the early years, intrusive journalists and fragile egos resulted in less than adequate performances for the man charged with spreading the gospel of football to an unwilling nation. Even when the team had developed a certain harmony and success seemed assured, weak knees and a weaker back gave way to the occasionally listless performance.

Even this season, as the team pulled together after a difficult start and Beckham labored through the summer circuit with an atypical dedication, justifiable concerns over his relative contribution to the team mounted. The struggles should have diminished the aura that surrounded him, but even during the most difficult stretches, the indignation and the disgruntled editorials were always overwhelmed by a persistent sense of anticipation amongst the assembled crowd at the Home Depot Center.

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Good piece.

thesubstitution:

Sometimes, just because there isn’t, there is nothing to talk about. It’s not always our fault that there isn’t anything to talk about, but if there isn’t, it’s on us to make something up. In sport, this seems to happen more often than in other arenas of life. There are always thieves, murderers and zoos to keep us occupied in the wider world, but for those who are more inclined to thrust their heads into the sand and look for a football match than wonder where Syria is, the week can seem like a great void interrupted sporadically by goals and racism.

So when we had concluded discussions on the gloriousness of Juan Mata’s ultimately pointless free kick a few Saturdays ago; after we had said all that we can possibly say about Mark Clattenburg to this point without resorting to outright libel; after United were awarded their billionth penalty at Old Trafford since records began last week, we turned to something else. Manchester United had won a football match, so some decided that there is a pro-United conspiracy that goes right to the top of the FA.

It wouldn’t have been entirely fair to have gathered sharpened pitchforks and come to an immediate conclusion, so I decided to give it a few weeks after United visited Stamford Bridge in the Premier League – a realistic length of time when categorically determining whether or not a sport is corrupt – to be absolutely certain. I’ve stepped away from the fire now, and am prepared to make a reasoned declaration. 

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Max Grieve, ladies and gentlemen. 

o

afootballreport:

By Giancarlo Rinaldi

Sweeping back his trademark flowing locks on the sidelines at the Etihad Stadium, Roberto Mancini contemplates which multi-million pound star to throw into the fray. The fans sing a hymn in his praise and he waves, smiling, in recognition of their words. But, in his coaching career, ithas not always been this way. The former Sampdoria star cut his managerial teeth in a much more trying set of circumstances. More than a decade ago, before he had even properly hung up his boots, he was thrown in at the deep end to run a club on the brink of financial collapse with its fans in a state of continual turmoil. Welcome to Fiorentina in 2001.

The Viola had been regulars in the Champions League but, in the background, their president, film producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori, had failed to keep a close eye on the books. Without the watchful gaze of his father Mario, who passed away in 1993, things spiralled out of control. In a desperate attempt to balance the accounts he had sold Gabriel Batistuta to Roma in the summer of 2000 and there were rumours the players were not being paid. It was a script which would not have a happy ending.

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DALLAS — At the moment when everything changed, when life became about more than stopping shots and winning soccer matches, FC Dallas goalkeeper Chris Seitz was where you could always find him on a mindless weekday afternoon: sitting in his office playing a testosterone-filled game of “Halo.”

The most important two hours of his day were over, a training session in which he pushed his body as hard as he could with the simple goal of improving. This was his life, that of a backup, where practice was often more important than the game. But now that work was over, it was time for play. Seitz and three of his teammates had met online and were hunting a group of strangers in a virtual reality. The task was simple: kill or be killed. 

In the middle of it all, Seitz’s phone vibrated. He first ignored the new email, then put his controller down and began to read. He couldn’t believe the words staring back at him. “Bone marrow?” “Donor?” “Match?” Huh? 

Four years ago, Seitz and his then teammates at Real Salt Lake — along with hundreds of others in the tightly-knit MLS family — registered to become bone marrow donors. It was a show of solidarity for Salt Lake midfielder Andy Williams’ wife, Marcia, who was battling a rare form of leukemia. 

In the years since, Seitz would receive a monthly newsletter from DKMS, the bone marrow center where he registered, and would delete it. But this email was different. This email involved a total stranger who needed help. 

“Guys,” Seitz said to his Dallas teammates online, “something has come up. There’s this email. I gotta go.” 

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whatahowler:

What Hope Solo’s new memoir says about the growth of the women’s game.

By Gwendolyn Oxenham

Illustration by Alvaro Tapia-Hidalgo

THERE’S SOMETHING TELLING IN THE EVOLUTION of name-based puns in female soccer stars’ memoirs. In Mia Hamm’s Go for the Goal, the first chapter is titled “There is No Me in Mia”—quite the opposite sentiment of the genre’s new arrival, Solo: A Memoir of Hope. While one generation’s star focuses on being a team player, the other’s prides herself on going it alone.

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KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — With Germans wowing like Brazilians, the attack-minded Italians shedding their defensive skins and the Spanish hogging the ball to suffocate opponents rather than dazzling with ”Ole!” artistry, the European Championship has delivered a festival of enthralling and cerebral soccer that has challenged national stereotypes.

But, strangely, it feels a bit funereal, too.

In years ahead, when the matches on offer aren’t, say, the Netherlands vs. Germany or Italy vs. Spain but maybe Wales vs. Estonia, will we mourn Euro 2012 as the last great international soccer tournament, truly memorable for unrelenting high-quality play from first day to last?

Possibly.

As UEFA President Michel Platini convincingly argues, opening the Euros to more teams - 24 beginning in 2016 instead of the current elite of 16 - will be more democratic and more inclusive for European soccer’s lesser nations, the likes of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Estonia or Norway that narrowly missed out this time.

Better value for money, too. More teams will mean more matches, which in turn should mean greater use of stadiums, airports and other expensive public works built for a sporting extravaganza that lasts just weeks. Landing at the new airport in Euro 2012 host city Donetsk - the terminal shiny and imposing although there are very few planes on the tarmac - one cannot help but wonder whether the money couldn’t have been better spent.

So the head says ”yes” to Platini’s plan. But the heart says ”no” after 28 games at Euro 2012 that, with a few exceptions, were hugely engrossing, with quality matchups and play. The fear is that by watering down such fine wine to make it stretch further, Platini may also rob the Euros of some flavor.

Another feature of Euro 2012 has been that soccer, the beautiful game, has outshone the mindless hooligans and ugliness associated with it. Fighting between Polish and Russian fans, against the police and with each other when their teams played out a 1-1 draw on June 12 in Warsaw was the exception not the rule.

By levying fines totaling (euro) 325,000 ($400,000) against Russia, Croatia, Germany, England and Poland, UEFA demonstrated commendable intolerance for rowdy behavior and fans who racially abused Italy forward Mario Balotelli, who is black.

But UEFA muddied the message by imposing a one-match ban and a (euro) 100,000 ($125,000) fine on Nicklas Bendtner after the Denmark forward celebrated a goal by lowering his shorts to reveal the name of a betting firm on his underwear. The severity of the punishment gave the impression UEFA is more concerned about tackling guerrilla marketing and preserving exclusivity for its sponsors than weightier issues like fan racism and violence.

Unlike this season’s Champions League, UEFA’s top club competition won by Chelsea with defensive and reactive tactics, Euro 2012 has rewarded bold and dynamic attack-minded soccer.

The four semifinalists - Italy, Germany, Portugal and Spain - took games to their opponents, instead of merely sitting back, soaking up attacks and waiting for opportunities to quickly counter, as Chelsea did against Barcelona and Bayern Munich in the Champions League.

In the Champions League final, Bayern had 35 attempts on goal, Chelsea just nine. But Bayern still lost, so soccer and fortune did not favor the most enterprising team.

But the reverse was true in the Euro 2012 quarterfinals. The losers - France, the Czech Republic, Greece and England - together made just 24 attempts on goal. That was as many as Germany, alone, in its 4-2 win over Greece and a stunning 11 fewer than Italy, which from Daniele De Rossi’s shot against the post in the third minute peppered England’s goal but somehow didn’t score in 120 minutes.

Still, Italy’s subsequent 4-2 penalty shootout victory justly rewarded a team and its coach, Cesare Prandelli, whose flowing forward attacks are dismantling the stereotype of defense-heavy Italian soccer grinding out ugly wins.

For Prandelli and Germany coach Joachim Loew, the aesthetics of victory are important, too. Prandelli hopes the richer new palate of hues in the Azzurri’s style of play will rub off on Serie A clubs, too.

”Coaches need to start playing football more, and not just look for results,” Prandelli said. ”There are two years of work behind this and I think this is the future of football. In terms of quality, we’re not lacking anything to anyone.”

No huge new star emerged at Euro 2012, with the exception, perhaps, of 21-year-old Alan Dzagoyev. But his three goals for Russia were dulled by his team’s collective failure to reach the quarterfinals.

Instead, this has been a tournament where established names - notably Cristiano Ronaldo, Andres Iniesta and Andrea Pirlo - again demonstrated with awesome play why they are stars.

Other established names - the entire Netherlands squad, England’s Wayne Rooney and France’s uncouth and uncool Samir Nasri - left us doubting whether they are quite the stars they take themselves to be.

If there is a Euro 2012 bone to pick, it is that too few fans from western Europe were able to venture this far east, seemingly because of cost, the daunting logistics of travel to and between co-hosts Poland and Ukraine and, possibly, because of pre-tournament concerns of racism and hooliganism that, it turned out, were hugely overblown.

Stadiums filled with fans from Poland, Ukraine, Russia and former Soviet republics who relished the chance to partake in a tournament that previously had been no farther east than Germany and the former Yugoslavia. And, naturally, once their own nations went out in the group stage, local crowds didn’t root for remaining teams with the same fervor that Spanish or Italian fans would have had they been here in greater numbers.

They still paint their faces and make plenty of noise. But their cries of ”Ukraine! Ukraine!” during, for example, England vs. Italy and France vs. Spain, were divorced from the on-field action and therefore disconcerting.

But that is perhaps a snobby western opinion that ignores the fact that since taxpayers from Poland and Ukraine are footing the bill, they can damn well enjoy this party in whatever manner they like. The same could be said of South Africans who insisted on blowing their earsplitting vuvuzela plastic trumpets at their World Cup in 2010.

If that is our only complaint, these have been very successful Euros, indeed. A true celebration of soccer but, sadly, perhaps the last of its kind.

—-

John Leicester is an international sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jleicester(at)ap.org or follow him at http://twitter.com/johnleicester