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Will refs respond to Garber's sensible request?
Paul Gardner, Soccer America

MLS Commissioner Don Garber has recently had some pretty sensible things to say about the state of soccer within his league. He wants to encourage attacking play and he believes that some changes in the attitudes and actions of referees will help bring that about.

I wish him well. Of course referees should be harsher on studs-up tackles, of course they should not be so quick to make offside calls -- and ditto with holding and shirt-tugging and persistent fouling. Garber is 100 percent correct in noticing that defending players get away with far too much. Referees do, definitely, need to adopt a sterner approach.

I fear that Garber’s attention to refereeing will be taken by many as a sign that MLS referees are not doing a good job, that they are sub-standard.

That is not the case. As it happens, there is not a league anywhere in the world -- and that takes in England’s EPL, the Italian Serie A, Spain's La Liga, and all of South American soccer -- where people are satisfied with the refereeing. How can they be, when everyone involved is a devotee of this or that club -- leading to the inevitable bias that makes objective judgment impossible.

MLS referees are neither the best nor the worst in the world. I think that, on the whole, they do a good job. But the comparison I’ve just made with the rest of the world, reveals a problem. I’m judging MLS referees by the standards that are adhered to globally -- those either set by, or permitted by, FIFA.

The problems that Garber, rightly, wants to address start there. The global standards are not strict enough. They vary, of course. They are at their weakest, their most permissive, in England. They are probably at their strictest in South America. But in all instances, they are too lenient, and the areas singled out by Garber should, indeed, be tightened up.

Will it be possible for MLS referees, then, to referee in a way that will be considerably more punitive than anywhere else in the world? I have my doubts. Referees see plenty of foreign games these days, they are bound to be influenced by what they see. It’s decidedly unfortunate that the most frequently seen games are from the EPL, where the refereeing can often seem to be actively encouraging violent play.

Just this Saturday we had Manchester United’s Paul Scholes committing a foul eminently worth a second yellow card -- but referee Chris Foy merely administered a short talking-to. An approach that simply makes a mockery of the rules.

If there's one thing that MLS referees could be told not to do, it is to administer these little disciplinary chats, complete with the exaggerated arm gestures intended to make a feeble referee look tough. If it’s a foul, call it. If it’s a yellow card, give it. The same with a red. There is no need for explanations or any words at all. The players know the rules ... or they are supposed to. If they don’t, that is their problem.

Tactical fouling should be high up on Garber’s list. That is defined on page 115 of the rule book, and calls for an obligatory yellow card. Those yellows are usually not given. Even less frequently seen are yellow cards, also obligatory, for objecting to a referee decision -- “dissent by word or action” as the rulebook puts it.

Diving calls present a problem. Most of them, as currently called, are flat out wrong. If all of Garber’s suggestions were adopted (which, of course, they will not be) then I’d probably agree that referees should be looking for divers. But as long as the defenders are allowed great liberty to foul without punishment, my sympathies are with the divers. There is also, on these calls, the unmistakable suggestion that when they occur in the penalty area the referee is using them as an excuse not to call a penalty kick.

Garber does not have direct control over the referees. They are assigned by the U.S. Soccer Federation, so Garber cannot simply tell them how they are to interpret the rules. That calls for close cooperation between MLS and USSF.

But Garber has at his disposal another way of encouraging attacking play, one that does not involve working with the USSF. The most direct route to more attractive, attacking, goalscoring soccer is for MLS teams sign players who can provide it. Which, in turn, means MLS teams appointing coaches who understand and believe in that type of play.

At the moment, Garber’s attitude is that the clubs can appoint any coach they like. He will not interfere. That seems the correct way to do things, but it has led to some pretty awful appointments. Mostly because the league is full of ownership groups and general managers who simply do not understand the sport.

Dictating which coaches a club should sign, and then telling the coach which players he can sign, is clearly not a workable policy. But the creation within MLS of an atmosphere favorable to attacking soccer and hostile to defensive play, the encouragement to search out attacking players, the provision of help in knowing where to look for them, even the creation of a centralized scouting system -- these things are well within the power of Garber and his single-entity league.

It remains something of a mystery to me how easily MLS coaches find average defenders and midfielders to sign. But what difficulties they have finding good attacking players!

MLS: No change, despite Garber's Plea
Paul Gardner, Soccer America

We're just about a week into the MLS season now -- we've seen all 18 teams at least once, so in the dodgy tradition of instant experts, I feel perfectly justified in making at least one assertion. To wit: that Commissioner Don Garber's plea for a more offensive game and his appeal to referees to be harsher in punishing certain defensive fouls has had no effect whatsoever.

This is far from a final judgment, of course, given that the season has many more months to run. But the immediate impact of Garber’s diktat, if that’s what it was, has been undetectable.

Well, that’s not too surprising. We’re talking about referees here, who are -- like all other branches of the law-enforcement profession -- a highly conservative bunch.

Trying to get soccer referees to change the way they do things may well be one of the least rewarding tasks in the sport. Maybe you remember various FIFA attempts? An example: before the 1994 World Cup, a major crackdown was announced on “the tackle from behind.” To general applause, and murmurs of “about time,” FIFA announced that such tackles would be penalized in the World Cup with a red card.

The idea behind the FIFA clamp down was precisely the same as that motivating Garber’s ideas: To allow more scope for attacking play. The FIFA ban didn’t last very long. Just 14 minutes, really -- that was how long the opening game between Germany and Bolivia had been going on, when Germany’s Thomas Haessler launched himself into the back of Bolivia’s Luis Cristaldo, and knocked him down amid a nasty tangle of legs. Right in front of the referee, Mexico’s Arturo Brizio, who had been specially selected as the man to make sure the new severity started off well. Brizio blew it, big time, calling a foul, but failing to give Hassler even a yellow card. And so it went during the tournament -- to my recollection there was one red card for a tackle from behind. But there were certainly plenty of such tackles.

It evidently takes a good deal of time for officials to alter their mindset. We saw the same thing after the 1997 alteration to the offside rule (that a player in line with the last defender was to be judged on-side and not, as previously, off-side). It took nearly a decade for that new thinking to sink in.

It almost looks as if referees, as a body, decide to ignore any changes, but that of course, is ridiculous -- not least because referees have never been known to act in concert. The reason for their intransigence is evidently that, quite simply, they do find it difficult to adjust their way of doing things.

Hence the opening MLS games that revealed nothing new. Scoring: 25 goals in the first 9 games, an average of 2.8 per game, perhaps marginally higher than might have been expected. A total of 32 cards doled out, an average of 3.6 per game - and only one red card.

Looking more closely at the 31 yellow cards (I’m using the stats published on the MLS website) reveals that 20 of them were for physical fouls, mostly reckless tackles. The good news is that there were no calls alleging that a player had dived -- this is positive whichever way you look at it. Either there were no dives, or the referees are reluctant to make those calls -- which they should be, given that most of them are inaccurate.

Less encouraging is that only three yellow cards were given for tactical fouls. Only three tactical fouls in 10 games? How likely is that? The game that I attended, the Red Bulls vs. the Seattle Sounders, featured at least three such fouls, but no cards.

There is just nothing in any of those figures to suggest there’s anything different in the way that MLS games are being played or refereed.

What Garber -- quite correctly, in my opinion -- wants to see is more attacking play, more goalscoring. He sees, again correctly, that defensive play dominates. Certainly that can be countered, to some extent, by getting referees to be tighter in their calls, but, as I’ve tried to explain above, that will not happen overnight.

It is, anyway, the performance of the players, not the referees, that is at the root of the matter. MLS has built itself the reputation of being a physical league. That seems true enough to me. MLS is a league that contains too many average defenders, and certainly too many destructive players. And those players are there because there are too many MLS coaches who want such players. Who want a physical league.

In the game I saw, Seattle’s Colombian forward Fredy Montero suffered a good deal of physical contact, as usual (“I thought we handled Montero well,” said Bulls coach Hans Backe after the game, apparently without irony). Asked later if he considered MLS a particularly physical league, Montero replied with a laconic “Si.” More physical than the play in his native Colombia? Montero’s eyes flashed as he instantly replied Muchissimo! .

How to counter that Muchissimo!? A quick fix that might have some effect is the one tried by the old North American Soccer League -- that of awarding points for goals scored. Briefly, that scheme awarded a team 6 points for a win, 3 for a tie, none for a loss, and one point for each goal scored up to a maximum of three. Thus, in a 4-3 game the winning team would get the maximum 9 points, while the losing team would get 3 points for its three goals.

It sounds good on paper, but we have no proof that it worked in practice. One is inclined to think it did have a positive effect, but as we have no way of knowing what the NASL would have been like without that points scheme, that is no more than guesswork, or wishful thinking. Incidentally, back in 1996 when MLS was still in formation, before a game had been played, its fledgling competition committee considered that points-for-goals system - and thumbed it down.

While I applaud Garber’s efforts to promote a more entertaining game, the sad reality is that his strictures on refereeing are not likely to accomplish too much, certainly not any time soon. Hence an opening round of MLS games which proclaim that it is very much business as usual.