Dear Soccer,<\/p>\n
It was real. It was fun. And I mean it. It was a good time, and I’m glad you were here and enjoyed the ride. We all did.<\/p>\n
For starters, your fans are off the charts. They’re the best in the world in any sport. Sure, they drink a lot, but they weren’t hooligans, at least not here.<\/p>\n
The chants and songs are awesome, and the spirit of the game created a refreshing celebration of sport.<\/p>\n
I love your stars. Messi, Haaland, Harry Kane, Bellingham, Ronaldo and Mbapp\u00e9. Your sport understands that to attract fans and viewers, you need stars. And soccer has plenty of them.<\/p>\n
You even found a way to love us back. You embraced Buc-ee’s, barbecue, Cheesecake Factory and ranch dressing. Heck, Erling Haaland even left with a stuffed raccoon holding a whiskey bottle that he paid $750 for at a Dallas taxidermy shop.<\/p>\n
But here’s the thing. The game itself still needs work.<\/p>\n
More scoring. I don’t know, maybe double the size of the goal. Maybe have two balls in play at once.<\/p>\n
I’m kidding… mostly.<\/p>\n
But we’d love to see more games ending 5-4 instead of 1-0. The absolute best moments are when everything comes down to penalty kicks. Maybe we should just skip straight to that and save everyone an hour and a half. Again… kidding.<\/p>\n
Can we also stop the flopping?<\/p>\n
Change the rules. Penalize the bad acting. If a guy goes down like he was hit by a sniper, then pops right back up and keeps playing, that should be a red card.<\/p>\n
And the clock…<\/p>\n
I know the sport has been around for centuries, but we’ve invented pretty good clocks since then. Everyone deserves to know exactly how much time is left.<\/p>\n
Don’t even get me started on stoppage time.<\/p>\n
Just stop the clock when play stops, restart it when the game resumes and play 90 actual minutes.<\/p>\n
Not 90 minutes plus mystery time that only one person knows.<\/p>\n
Every other major sport has evolved. Even baseball has a pitch clock.<\/p>\n
So let’s work on it together. I’ll keep an open mind if you promise to do the same.<\/p>\n
Good talk.<\/p>\n
Soccer, we’ll see you again in four years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dear Soccer, It was real. It was fun. And I mean it. It was a good time, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381087,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[82,84,83],"class_list":["post-381086","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio","tag-san-antonio-headlines","tag-san-antonio-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381086\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}