The official FIFA World Cup 2018 thread

[Zakalwe]

Originally Posted by DARK_KNIGHT

Things that really strike me about Soccer:

1. Amazing cardio. World class cardio.

2. The kicking effect placed on the ball. WTF? Major physics at play.

3. The amount of money that flows thru soccer. Do they have Salary Caps in soccer?

4. No time outs? WTF? Really? I´ve noticed one single Coach in a coaches box on the sidelines and he appears to be yelling out strategy, but with the size of the field and the amount of noise, do the players actually respond to the instructions? In american football when your coach tells you do something, the only thing coming out of your pie-hole , better be : Yes, Coach !!!!!

In american football we have coaches for everything. From what I can tell from TV, seems to be only two coaches.

5. Substitutions: 3 per game? Per game? Even the substitution system is strange to me. No surprises.

Salary caps would be league dependent, but no salary caps as far as I know in the major European leagues. The best players in the world earn $500k + dollars per week (don't ask me why by tradition football salaries are quoted weekly rather than annually). But then somebody like Ronaldo dwarfs that income through endorsements - I think he's been in the top three highest paid sportsmen in the World for a few years now, with Messi and Neymar not far behind, though the top 100 list is dominated by Floyd Mayweather, NFL and Basketball players.

Top footy teams have lots of coaches though International teams at the WC have far fewer. International players only spend a few weeks with their national team per year, so actual skill coaching happens at club level. At International level the coaching is really all tactical and comes from the head coach and his assistant. At club level there will be numerous skill coaches, a fitness coach, a defence coach, an attacking coach, a goalkeeping coach. Then there are coaches for all the youth teams. Then again there are player scouts. There's a director of football/recruitment at many clubs. A top club will have dozens involved in the playing side. Whilst the coach does shout from the sidelines, most of his instructions are communicated via hand signals. But football is in large part spontaneous and certainly not based on too many discrete plays like in NFL so the input of the coach in the middle of a game (rather than half time) is minimal, no matter how much shouting and hand waving goes on (to be honest I think a lot of that is for the camera and is why a lot of top managers dress like they're going out for a nice meal). He will sometimes get to talk to players during a natural break in play to pass on instructions. Substitutes also pass on instructions to the team when they come on.

Curious as to why three subs per game is odd, genuinely? I think it used to be 2 subs from a bench of 5, now it's 3 from 7 at the top level.