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The only improvement needed in football...
Make the Goals Bigger
The latest World Cup in Germany, 2006, has been a great success. World-wide television audiences reached all time highs, as did the quality of the stadia and the organisation of the tournament. Hooliganism was most notable by its absence but the quality of the football, including some stunning goals, was notable by its presence. Another football feast was served up, and millions of us became satiated by it.
However, once again, many football fans were left with a rather familiar bad taste in the mouth, and this was not only due to the early exit of their team. A number of aspects of the World Game are becoming increasingly irritating and in need of a solution. High ranking in any football fans' wish list of improvements to the game would, surely, be the need to find a solution to the play-acting which has become a major requirement in the repertoire of any international player. The almost impossible job of referees to determine, in a split second, whether a player was tripped or dived, without the benefit of slow motion replays from five different camera angles within five seconds of the incident that everyone else takes for granted, has turned the game, at this level, into a lottery. Instead of the game being won by the most skillfull over 90 minutes, more often than not, it is determined by the team that is most organised in defence, most disciplined at not getting key players sent off, most talented at deceiving the referee into giving undeserved free kicks,  and most practiced in the art of taking penalties.
It is argued here, in these pages, that the solution to all of these problems, and more, is astonishingly simple. It simply requires a single law of the game, in place and unchanged since its inception in 1848, to be slightly relaxed. The law that states that "the size of the goal is 8 yards wide and 8 feet high" needs to be changed to "goal size is determined and fixed at the start of each competition for all teams participating, but shall be three times wider than they are tall." That's it!
I've been a football fanatic for 35 years and watched thousands of games and became convinced that this was the only thing wrong with the game in 1996, when England failed to win Euro 96 despite being the best team in the tournament. Since then, I've been trying to persuade my fellow football fans that this is the way to go. This web site is my latest attempt to do so. My advice to anyone who is already skeptical about the idea is this...
Suspend your natural feelings of conservatism and just look at the evidence. If you do, I'm sure you'll agree with me that this simple change would make the game immeasurably better.
See also This link