(European) Soccer Explained for Americans

so i've been wanting to start following soccer for a while now but as an american i always found it complicated not like how they play most three-year-olds can kind of understand more or less how it works i just mean how everything kind of works in europe you know i followed the world cup and i grew for the united states if they made it and then i'd root for iceland because clearly they've all been practicing that clapping and they're really good at it but that only happens once every four years so i turn on my tv and it would be a like a random game like parma versus bologna and first i'd make sure that i wasn't watching the food network but then i had no frame of reference for this game like are these teams good you know is this a big game which one of these guys is pele you know i i didn't know and i had all these other questions you know why why are teams getting kicked out of leagues why are they all rolling around on the ground so much how are guys getting traded to different countries and why why does everybody in the stands have a scarf so a few months ago i tried to start figuring it all out and i started watching some matches that's the first thing they aren't soccer games they are football matches and i bought fifa for my xbox and i bought a scarf and a vuvuzela because that's like the rules or something so anyway this is all the info that i wish i'd known a year ago this is my crash course of translating soccer into american i'm going to assume that you kind of know the rules the biggest difference between american sports is how offsides works and the clock lots of people get upset about the clock it goes up instead of down get over yourself it doesn't really matter americans also get mad because the clock doesn't stop and games pretty much end whenever the ref feels like it and you actually adjust to this pretty quickly the game's an hour and a half long you'll have your chances to score and if you can't score then it's not the clock's fault some people and when i say people i'm referring both to discussions i've had with other americans as well as like myself six years ago so people think soccer is too slow and when americans look at a soccer field something in our minds we think that it's like playing hockey or playing basketball just on a big grass field and in those sports guys like go full tilt a lot like most of the game so when two players are just standing there passing the ball back and forth we wonder like why aren't they trying to move forward just go and on the other side we expect the defenders to be attacking the guy with the ball rather than just standing five feet back and letting him do what he's doing the key difference is that soccer fields are much sorry football pitches are much larger than basketball courts and hockey rinks and if you tried a full court press for the whole soccer game you would be exhausted and you would probably lose see the the pace of a soccer game is actually much closer to baseball most of the game is going to consist of guys just slowly passing the ball around real peaceful and then it's going to be all of a sudden followed by these short bursts of extremely fast action basketball players it's estimated run an average two and a half miles during a game soccer players can run seven if not ten miles during one game and remember you only get three subs games but most of these players will be playing the whole game one thing americans will appreciate is that other than halftime there are no commercials so it's like the anti-nfl which is great it also means that no matter where the ball is both teams are always potentially about 30 seconds away from scoring which creates this kind of constant tension it also creates a scenario where you can't ever really run to the bathroom or get a drink soccer players seem to have a reputation for being lazy in the u.s because they don't always pop right back up after going to ground and get right back in the play certainly some players do embellish things and some go over the top but i don't really think that on the whole it's quite the issue that people make it out to be so they get made fun of in europe too so here's a fun experiment to try the next time you have a few minutes go to like a local field and then quickly draw a glass around that field for like 10 minutes and then suddenly sprint down the middle of the field as fast as you can and when you're halfway up the field while you're still sprinting have one of your friends to shove you over onto the ground and if you can pop right back up and keep sprinting then you can keep complaining about those guys a lot of the time they're just taking a little rest they never want to either just keep playing around them or both teams will be a little tired so who cares it's not a matthew riley novel out there the other reason for guys slowly passing the ball around is that one of the strategies currently employed by most teams is to just to maintain possession as much as possible obviously this is no different in american football or why russia is really good at hockey the other team can't score when you have the ball so teams will just pass the ball back and forth and even pass it back to their own goalie because it's better to go backwards with the ball than to maybe make a risky pass and let the other team have the ball on occasion you'll see a team make like 50 passes without the other team touching the ball which can take a really long time but then they'll go down and they'll score and that's like as good as it gets it's all about waiting for the precise moment for things to align and then all going together at the right moment in terms of like positioning and formations you'll usually have three or four numbers like four four two or four three three or four two three one these numbers will always add up to ten and then the goalie is just assumed different positions include the center backs who would just stay as defenders and then the full backs are both the left and the right back who will defend but then they'll also usually join the attack as well and then we have midfielders like a center midfielder who can go both ways a center attacking midfielder or a center defending midfielder and then up front we have like a left wing and right wing sometimes a center forward and a striker up front who will it's his job to just score goals one thing i'll mention that makes it easy to kind of get into soccer is that you can watch legally watch some old matches on youtube um this is unlike american sports like why isn't there a website that i can go to to watch any game like in itunes for sports it's like i can pay two dollars to watch any game in history like all these games are on tape somewhere they exist but i can't watch a game in the 1986 world series unless an international pandemic shuts down the world there's no sports and i just happen to put it on nbc or something like come on so anyway um so keeping the ball and attacking is referred to as positive football you're always trying to move forward this is what most teams do this is what people like to watch a little more it's kind of exciting it's more exciting to watch that way but of course there's always a yin to the yang so begin is this guy named jose mourinho and he basically says i don't want the ball i'm going to stand back with my players in front of my goal and you're not going to score and then every once in a while when you're falling asleep and all your players are up in my zone we're going to steal the ball and we're going to run down and score which sounds a little bit risky except that it actually does work if you do it well jose is considered one of the best managers there is and he has the trophies to back it up he's won plenty of big tournaments with teams then i'm told if you tried to have that team keep the ball the whole time like most coaches would they would have been destroyed they were too old and they just would have got worn out and wiped out but but by playing this negative defensive strategy they were able to win and despite this teams that employ the strategy seem to get a bad rap for playing negative as opposed to positive football because keeping the ball seems to be the end thing right now so obviously there's more thought that goes into into it than i've described here like diego simeone and athletic madrid have been using this negative strategy for years and they've been successful with it on the flip side the guys who've risen to the top playing possession football were also widely sought after two of the most well-known coaches right now are jurgen klopp and pep guardiola and i highly recommend watching the series all or nothing about manchester city on amazon prime it's about guardiola's team a few years ago and it's quite clear from interviews with these guys that they're you know quite thoughtful and well traveled i couldn't name a single baseball manager who can speak three languages so speaking of manchester city they play in england their four main football countries in europe there's england spain germany and italy england has the premier league spain has la liga germany has the bundesliga and italy has syria so to take one country they're all the same but to take one country england the premier league consists of 20 teams every team plays every other team once at home and once away and these leagues don't have playoffs you get three points for win one for a tie the team with the most points at the end of the season wins and this can and has come down to the final day of the season before in the us our leagues pretty much have the same teams every year so if you suck and even if you start to lose on purpose you actually get rewarded with the top draft pick the next year if you finish in last place in one of these leagues they literally kick you out of the league but they call it relegation because that's a nicer sounding word before we keep going here's a quick aside on the mls major league soccer is the top league in the united states it's different in many ways than the european leagues there's no relegation so the teams do stay the same from year to year and there is a salary cap talent wise i guess globally speaking it seems to be an okay league but certainly not on par with any of the european leagues so under the premier league which is at the top under them is a league called the english football league championship the three teams who finish at the bottom of the premier league are relegated to the championship for the next season and replaced by three teams from the championship the bottom three teams in championship are relegated to league one the bottom three in league one are really gated to league two whose losers go to the national league whose losers are um nobody really cares about them except their moms at this part but you get the idea unless you really get into soccer you'll never hear about anything below the premier league again but just so you're aware of what's happening down there this system does a few things first off just because you're near the bottom of the standings your games can still be extremely important they still count because you're not trying to win the league anymore but now you're trying to literally stay in the league and the higher the league you're in the higher the track you get from tv contracts so it's kind of a big deal it also creates this kind of theoretical meritocracy where you could start a team with a bunch of guys anywhere in the country get into a kind of a tiny league and then ultimately work your way up to the premier league in reality that'd be like trying to take a single a baseball team and work your way up to the majors while the other better teams with bigger pocketbooks are trying to buy all your best players the whole way but for the teams at the top just winning the premier league sounds pretty easy you're playing maybe one game a week but that's the catch there's other things going on here so there's also the carabao cup which is a tournament open to the top four leagues in england and then there's the fa cup which has been going on since like forever that it's literally open to every like team in england so over 700 teams entered this one tournament last year like imagine if every major and minor league baseball team had one giant tournament so could any team win yes they could will the small teams upset the bigger teams at some point maybe a few will but is it likely that a non-premier league team is going to win no probably not so more fun to think about in theory than practically i guess the final tournament is the the big one like what if we could find the best team in europe and i don't mean like each country gets a team that's the european championship that happens every four years this i'm talking about the league clubs so the best teams in from all over europe from 55 different countries battle it out each year this is the uefa champions league so as a side note on these acronyms here fifa is the organization that runs like big international tournaments like the world cup and they help to coordinate things across different regions if you're an american you probably heard a fifa because somebody on sportscenter mentioned somebody that was involved with some kind of corruption investigation or something anyway within fifa the world is divided into six different regions uefa is europe that's where like the best players go concacaf you may have heard of because that's what the us is in the confederation of north central american and caribbean association football which is short and sweet and then there's like the rest of the world and each one of these groups has tournaments with national teams and their league clubs like the concacaf champions league and the uefa champions league and these are called like the champions league but really it's just a tournament so the uefa champions league is played in conjunction with the uefa europa league which is kind of like the ncaa and nit basketball tournaments but with a bit of a twist they play the qualifying rounds for the champions league first so if you get knocked out of the big boy tournament but you finish high enough you can just move down into the europa league and try to win that and i won't get into the qualifying but typically you're going to have teams that you may have heard of as a as an american like manchester city liverpool manchester united tottenham hotspur from spain they'd probably be barcelona and atletico madrid and real madrid syria from italy we'll have juventus and inter and roma and atlanta germany is pretty much dominated by brucia dortmund and bayern munich and then there's other popular teams like perry saint germain from france and leone from france and iacs from the netherlands and then you throw in a few russian teams and you're ready to party so back to the premier league you remember how your team's playing that kind of standard 38 game schedule so now also at the same time you're competing in the premier league the carabao cop the fa cup and the champions league and there's like a bunch of other small one-off games happening too so even if you have the best team you're still probably not going to win all these tournaments just because of the wear and tear if you can win three trophies in a year that's like special that's called a treble if you win four that's called a quadruple but that's pretty rare and so the biggest payday is for winning your league although i for some reason find the champions league is hard to beat for excitement so even though you can soccer teams tend to trade players less than they do in the us rather teams will just buy players from their current club so a contract is going to include your salary obviously but also something called a release clause which is a fee that would go to the current club for that player so while any team could negotiate a transfer fee with a player's current club a release clause takes that current team just out of negotiations altogether so a baseball player unhappy with the situation he could demand a trade and they might trade him and he'd be happy but if they refuse to trade him then he's kind of stuck whereas a soccer player could just find another team willing to pay that release clause and once a team agrees to pay the clause then they can just negotiate directly with that player obviously the better player the higher the fee is going to be so the current club can go out and find a reasonable replacement another big difference is that while most sports in the us have a trade deadline and that's followed by a few weeks afterward where players cannot move to another team soccer is kind of the opposite so most of the time you cannot move to another team there are two periods a year called transfer windows that you can move during so usually before and then halfway through the season and you could sign a new contract for another team whenever but you can't actually start playing for them until that next transfer window and the last thing in terms of contracts is that in the u.s most leagues have a draft but soccer is pretty much like the wild west so teams will sign players or as you say kids like into their youth academy very young like 10 8 years old and smaller teams who find a really good player could also include something called a sell-on clause when selling a player to a larger team that says if the team buying that player turns around and sells the player again to an even bigger club then that original team will get a percentage of that secondary sale all right so if you're still here at this point you probably want more so what's next they're like an unlimited number of top or best goal compilations on youtube which are kind of interesting in the sense that you can actually show new people to soccer the potential that the game has lots of americans exposure to soccer is like the women's world cup and obviously we have a great team there but you never really get to see that what different strategies look like like look up barcelona tiki taka videos you won't regret that they make grown men look like children as i mentioned the all or nothing series on man city is great if you have amazon prime and obviously just watching games is good fifa tv has a youtube channel that has lots of international matches or just look on youtube for full football matches you're smart you'll find them uefa tv has old champions league matches i think you might have to register but it's free you'll probably want to follow br's football channel on youtube they have a lot of good stuff including this very funny series called the champions which i'd probably wait a little bit until you learn a little more about the top players before watching that one place i always turn to when trying to learn a new sport is video games so fifa would probably help although the big caveat there is that it has horrible reviews that said if you're just trying to learn the rules like basic tactics and which players are on which teams and who plays where i would say it's been pretty helpful for me most of the negativity toward the game is the for the online the fifa ultimate team mode where you end up paying for players for your team but if you just avoid that and then like stick to playing against the ai then you should be okay the only thing i hesitate to do is play as barcelona because you could control leo messi and like who am i to tell god what to do so i usually avoid that part the alternative here it would be a game called pez which i've heard good things about although it doesn't have licensing from any of the teams so jerseys will look different and team names will be slightly off which i guess might be confusing to someone new and i think fifa's player faces are a bit more recognizable too newswise there's coverage like everywhere of soccer although i do enjoy the site1football.com which brings us to the sponsor of today's video which is there's no sponsor for today's video um i just make these videos to push the boundaries of powerpoint and see how mad i can make myself anyway hopefully that helps somewhat you're now ready to venture off beyond the coasts of the united states and become an even bigger soccer fan just if you if you're leaving the us call it football they get mad if you call it soccer anyway good luck thanks for watching

Channel: TheOnDeckCircle

Views: 572,824

Keywords: soccer, football, soccer for americans, soccer basics, european soccer

Id: 6winTSyOePg

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020