If you got to watch football in the 90s and early 2000s, then you’re one of the really lucky ones, because these days, football seems to be losing everything that made it so entertaining back then. This might be difficult for many to accept because of how you were guaranteed to see a great display of skill, fearless tackles, drama, showmanship, and everything that makes football beautiful. But over the years, we seem to have been losing every bit of that day by day.
First of all, the sport now seems to be over reliant on statistics. Youngsters these days are not interested in displaying skill and entertaining the crowd. All they want to do is run and get a goal for themselves.
All so mechanical. The few who still dare to entertain us with skill are criminalized by the media. We saw what the English media did to Antony and Richarlison for “showboating”.
We seem to have all forgotten that it was these skills that made many of us fall in love with the sport back when we watched the likes of Ronaldinho and Jay Jay Okocha play. Even defenders these days seem to be built different. Back then, we had center-backs who would always fearlessly go for last ditch tackles, make insane clearances, put their bodies on the line, and when necessary, take one for the team.
But these days, everybody seems to want to be too careful and overthink their tackles. And sometimes, you can’t even blame them because the things we see being called as fouls these days are just outright ridiculous. For example, a player could clear the ball cleanly, but because his foot lands on the opponent after the clearance, he gets sent off for it.
You would watch the replay and see that there was absolutely nowhere else for the player to land his foot, but the red card is still shown. A defender could jump to head a ball in the box, and because the ball touches his arm which was out a little, a penalty gets given. Have you ever tried to jump without using your arms to help with elevation?
That’s virtually impossible! But people are punished for stuff like this. Straight up ridiculous!
We have even seen 50-50 tackles being blown as fouls and even penalties. A perfect example is Salisu’s tackle on Ronaldo at the World Cup. Weird decisions like these continue to be given and that’s why defenders have become more and more careful, making the game generally more mechanical, and therefore, more boring by the day.
Even the goalkeepers are not exempt. We’ll admit that there are more sweeper-keepers in this generation than there were back then. And yes, seeing a keeper run out of his box to try and make a tackle or clearance is exhilarating, but that’s just about it.
If you ask the keepers right now, they’d tell you that the evolution of the laws of the game has stifled them so much. For example, they are now required to remain on the goal line when a penalty is taken, however, the penalty taker can do whatever they want, be it a staggered run or the hop-skip-and-jump. Now, how is that fair?
On top of all that, IFAB just recently announced that, from next season, mindgames are basically banned from football. From the 1st of July, 2023, goalkeepers would no longer be able to get into the players’ heads via the legal means that were hitherto available to them. They can no longer try to distract the player or delay the kick.
Hell, they cannot even touch their goal posts anymore. What the hell is this sport turning into? And trust them to throw out a blanket statement which will lead to different interpretations from different referees.
IFAB also added that goalkeepers can no longer exhibit behaviors that fail to show respect to the penalty taker. Now, what is even your definition of respect? As far as we’re concerned, as long as you’re not physically assaulting your opponent, all else should be fair.
These people are really just sucking the fun right out of this sport. Think about it for a second, the two most captivating, exciting, and exhilarating games at the 2022 World Cup were, without a doubt, the games between Argentina and the Netherlands in the quarter finals, and Argentina and France in the final. And what made them so interesting?
The fierce contest, high emotions, high stakes, fearless tackles, and the penalty antics in the shootout. Now, what does the IFAB go to do not long after the World Cup? They take away one of the main things that made those games very enjoyable to watch, so they can make the game even more mechanical than it already is.
And this is a slippery slope. They told goalkeepers to remain on their lines yesterday, tell them not to attempt any mind-games today, what will they do tomorrow? Tell them it’s illegal to come out of their box at any point in time in the game?
It might sound ridiculous to think about now, but many of these rules that are governing the game right now sounded utterly ridiculous 20 years ago. And let’s not even talk about VAR. That one is just sucking the life blood out of football with each passing day.
There’s no longer drama. The brawls between players that we all used to live for back in the day are now in short supply because, you know, Big Brother is watching. Also, attacking players no longer want to stay on their feet in the box.
One slight touch and they fall like a pack of cards because they know that VAR knows just how to blow things out of proportion. Everything looks much more intense in slow-mo. We all know this.
Even unintentional handballs are blown as penalties these days because, again, everything looks worse in slow-mo. You can no longer even celebrate so joyously after scoring because you know at the back of your mind that VAR can come in and cut your joy completely short. And if you perhaps take off your shirt after scoring a crazy goal and get carded for it, you don’t get the card rescinded if VAR rules it out.
Madness! Oh, and the time-wasting! You might be trying to build momentum in a game and VAR would just kill it by halting the game for minutes trying to check for a foul or an offside.
You who’re watching from your house would make the correct decision in seconds, but VAR would take minutessssss, and guess what! They’d still get it wrong sometimes. Now that’s the most frustrating part of all of this.
Like it’s not bad enough that VAR is sucking the drama and entertainment right out of the sport, they get the decisions wrong too many times. We made a video about 10 biggest VAR blunders in football. Go check it out and see just how ridiculous it gets.
I mean, if you’re going to bring technology into football which will potentially make the game more boring and mechanical, the least you can do is make sure it’s perfect. VAR has failed to solve the one problem it was brought in to solve but we’re still suffering the many negative effects of its introduction. Fans are just losing on all fronts right now.
And to be brutally honest, VAR is not even the only technology that’s ruining the sport. Social media is, too. These days, fans seem to only want to watch football for the purpose of bantering on social media.
Fans are no longer patient with players, coaches, or rebuilding processes. Rashford had one bad season and United fans wanted him out immediately. Arteta did not hit the ground running at Arsenal and fans immediately started calling for his head.
Now, these guys have managed to turn things around at their respective clubs, but fans still haven’t learned anything. Ansu Fati is having one bad season at Barcelona and the fans want him sold immediately. Mount is having a bad season at Chelsea and the fans are pretty much driving him out of the club.
And bear in mind that these guys are products of the clubs’ academies, so it’s not even like money was spent on them. This is not what football is about. It has never been.
Fans now seem to only want instant success so they can have something to banter about on social media. We no longer watch the game to enjoy it, we read the stats to have talking points. Hence why “007” is a big thing on football twitter.
But surely, the fans are not as guilty as the football executives. With the over-commercialization of football and football players since the turn of the century, gaps in quality between the rich and the not-so-rich clubs continues to widen. How can Bundesliga clubs compete with Bayern when they buy their best players and even their coaches every season?
As this gap in quality continues to widen, the quality of games between clubs on either end of the spectrum will continue to drop. So, is football getting boring? We’ll say a big yes to that, but you’re free to disagree with us.
Go ahead and make your case in the comments. We’re actually open to our minds being changed. If you agree with us, you can go ahead and help us with more reasons in the comments.
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Bye!
