The most dubious score in soccer, at least when it comes to pleasing fans of traditional American sports, is a 0-0 tie.
No goal should mean no action, right? It must be a boring game, right?
It’s no wonder Americans haven’t fully embraced a sport in which no one may score and no one win.
These are familiar talking points of the sports fan and pundit who despise football. Every four years, when the entire planet is fixated on the World Cup, they are often amplified. And I myself could have been caught echoing those sentiments many moons ago, before I fell in love with the sport of soccer (which would quickly become my favorite and change my life, but that’s another story).
So I, a thoroughbred, born and bred American sports fan, am here to tell you how and why you can still love a 0-0 draw in football.
A culture accustomed to marking
We Americans tend to love high-scoring action in our sports. A 32-35 NFL game or a 52-14 college football blowout. The Warriors outscore the Lakers 141-139. That kind of things.
Soccer, by its nature, is a different animal. Soccer goals are only worth one point. American football offers high scores, but the number of actual *goal plays* in a game isn’t that different. The most common final score in NFL history is 20-17. If you divide those scores by the number of points a touchdown is worth (let’s assume they make the extra point), it comes out 2.8-2.4. It’s not that different from soccer, is it?
Interestingly, the NFL is the only American professional sport where a 0-0 tie is a possible outcome (since the NHL got rid of ties in the mid-2000s). But that hasn’t really happened since 1943. Baseball may seem like a slightly higher-scoring game, but in 2022 the average runs scored per game ranged from about 3.5, for the worst teams, to just over 5 for the worst teams. top.
Soccer is a sport that practically demands your attention all the time. A game lasts 90 minutes.
It can easily be a blink-and-miss-it proposition.
There are no commercial interruptions, no breaks between each release, nothing like that. There really aren’t many opportunities to ignore and tune out what you might think is a “boring” game. Much of the joy in “the beautiful game” comes from and accumulates between goals.
many things to love
While a single basket in an NBA game is routine and a touchdown or home run is expected, a goal in soccer is not a given. The near misses, the corners and free kicks, the shots at the post all add to the experience. A brilliant play with seven passes that connect to create a scoring opportunity but don’t deliver it can be more satisfying than a run-of-the-mill NFL touchdown.
The mounting tension, the atmosphere, the anxiety, the nervousness – these are the things that can make a low-scoring soccer match an experience unlike any other. Imagine the drama of a last-minute game-winning field goal, or a buzzer-beater hitting a three-pointer. Now extend that nail-biting, butterfly-in-the-stomach feeling throughout the game. This is how a 0-0 football game can be.
That feeling is why even a shoddy goal, one that goes around the box before entering the keeper’s back, can be just as exciting as a perfectly-hit shot from 35 yards. Just one moment of brilliance, or luck, can result in a release of emotion and passion that is unrivaled in the world of sport.
zero zero
But sometimes, that release never comes for either side. Sometimes no one really deserves to win a match. In the same way, many times no one really deserves to lose. So a draw and split points is usually a fair result. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that that particular game wasn’t exciting.
A 0-0 draw, say in a World Cup group stage game where you only need one point in the standings to advance (like the Croatia-Belgium World Cup 2022 match), can be just as satisfying as a 5-0 win. Even in a mundane early season league game, failing to concede and escaping with a draw can mean the difference between glory and failure later in the season when the table is added up.
A goalless draw can make it easier to appreciate the nuances of the game. Fantastic saves and defensive plays, displays of dribbling and passing skills, mere inches that decide the fate of a game. It can amplify bad (or good) arbitrage.
A 0-0 result may seem like the worst in the game on the surface. But it can very easily offer the best that football has to offer. Are there 0-0 snooze-fests from time to time? Of course. But more often than not, these matches are filled with intrigue and drama. Rather than being a negative aspect of the sport, low-scoring or no-goal play is one of the things that give soccer its unique flavor.
