You can’t evaluate a player based on goals because they happen so infrequently. The strongest player metric they’ve found that correlates with scoring in soccer and a player has control over is xG (expected goals). It’s an equation to shots taken by a player considering distance from goal, his angle, whether the goalie is out of position, etc. I can’t find an actual formula anywhere online, so apparently it’s proprietary. A team’s xG and actual goals have a correlation of 52%.
If you take a traditional metric in baseball such as a team’s batting average, it has an 80% correlation with scoring. Since the Moneyball revolution they have measures such as OPS, wOBA, EQA that are upwards of 95%.
The only time you can actually measure something in soccer are corner kicks and penalty kicks, because you actually know when something starts and something stops. In American football, you do that the entire game.
Furthermore, there was study by an astrophysicist that showed that in soccer, you need to win by 3-4 goals in order to be 90% sure who the better team is. How frequently does that happen?
I don’t know how non-Americans bear watching twenty-two people do something so pointless for 90 minutes.
I like to think of football as referring to a game that primarily involves using the foot to control a spherical object. I hadn’t realised they had a game like that in America too!
That’s a misunderstanding of the word’s etymology. Football refers to sports played on foot to distinguish them from more elitist sports played on a horse.
The only other types I can think of I can think of are soccer and rugby. You have
more offshoots like Australian rules mentioned above, which looks like a combination of rugby and basketball.
association football
American football
rugby football
Australian rules football
According to your definition of football, you are forgetting table tennis and fencing which - last time I checked - are not played on a horse.
Although I have to say I am tending to agree with you, as the idea of horseback table tennis does seem quite amusing, making the regular ‘football’ table tennis seem boring-ass in comparison.
