If Soccer Bloggers Ruled the World

By: Laurie | November 12th, 2008

We at The Offside love being football/futbol/soccer bloggers. We really do. But we have noticed that there are some things in life that make our jobs harder.

If we ruled the world (and we genuinely believe that we should), here are a few things we’d change:

If Soccer Bloggers Ruled the World

All player names would be capped at seven letters, tops. Diniyar Bilyaletdinov, you’re outta here!
YouTube’s Terms of Service would allow English-language videos to stay up just as long as pirated ones in Chinese.
Someone would invent a special Soccer Bloggers’ Keyboard, so we could type “Emre Belözoğlu” without having to copy and paste from Wikipedia.
That ubiquitous “10% luck, 20% skill etc” song would be banned from player highlight reels. We get it, he’s good.
Someone would invent a special universal currency for use in football transfers, so we don’t have to type €15m (£11.88m, $23.44m etc). The new currency will be called transfer vouchers. So it would be “Aston have offered Portsmouth 10 transfer vouchers for Niko Kranjčar.”
When liveblogging, we could decide which games go to extra time and penalties, according to our own personal and family schedules.
Big football news wouldn’t break while we were out buying groceries.
The NFL would start describing its sport as something other than “football”, to make searching for proper football news much much easier. May we suggest “throwball”?
We’d tip the scales so that mainstream media sites would love it when we link to them because of all the extra traffic it brings. But we’d be really tight and hardly ever do it.
It would pay a lot better.

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Category: World Football

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Laurie

Funny, I thought that one had Chris written all over it.

(I have no idea who wrote what in this one -- it was started in Euros, so I don't even remember which ones I wrote.)
Daryl

Guilty as charged Marco. And 100% agree about Digg. There should be more to life than stories about iPhones.
Marco P.

Laurie wrote:
I should point out that this post was a joint effort. I know Chris and Daryl both contributed, and I think Ian may have as well?

In that case I bet point #4 to be definitely Daryl's. I remember he was bi***ing about it not so long ago.

I have another good one:
- Social networking sites would finally give a damn about soccer. Yes, I'm looking at you Digg!
Dan Michalski

I think it's funny how many American-flagged commenters here talk as if they are Brits. C'mon, man ... it's soccer to us! And we know it's also football when said with an accent. All good -- if there's room for both "lift" and "elevator", "tv" and "tele", then there's also room for soccer and football.

Great list, by the way. Funny and inspirational -- enough to make me think oy, what a terrible existence soccer blogging stands to be!
Vic

We call American football "carry-ball," because that's what they do, they carry it around.
Laurie

@Alan: Duh. How did we forget those?!?
Alan

Recommendation:
-the team you blog for would always play in accordance with your timezone
-there is no such thing as an out of market game and/or all games would be streamed live online
Sam

I refer to that shitty sport as "yardball".
Weston (@wpazzurri)

spot on, this was perfect
Rob

Best thing you guys have done in awhile, and absolutely right :D
Bruno Romani

yes, it would pay.
Laurie

I should point out that this post was a joint effort. I know Chris and Daryl both contributed, and I think Ian may have as well? So I can't claim credit for the "football" one. But you're right -- it is good.
Juliet

Hear hear, Laurie! Am v. much taken with #8 - proper naming. American football looks childish, less demanding, and less manly than actual footie. Let's call it "wussy babyball."
Greg

How about for the vast majority of the bloggers here, we modify that last bullet point to be "It would pay."
Laurie

Isn't that the story of life, a.?
a.

In the end it was all about money.
Laurie

Very good, Lissette! (I found it by doing a google image search for "Dictator." The second I saw it, I knew it had to go in the post.)
Julian

I love that last bullet point :P
Lissette Evil Blue

Laurie its that Bill Clinton lol :) I know Bill when I see it
Lissette Evil Blue

YES WE CAN, Impossible Is Nothing, Just Do It. Laurie those Ideas R Nice The Universal currency its a great idea . Can we just name "American Football, Helmet Ball" Cus 4 me it seems like they the just stole Rugby & named Football, bunch of wankers. ;)
Laurie

Damn, Mustafa. I changed if from Tuncay Şanlı at the last minute because Belözoğlu looked like it had more accents. But you're right! I should have left it as it was!
Mustafa

I don't mean to pick nits, but, doesn't the example in your 3rd rule violate the first rule? (You could have gone with, say, Hakan Sukur?)
Aintza

I WISH they'd call it "throw ball" lol. I can't quite bring myself to call it soccer as it doing so would be bad juju.
Brian

Hear, hear. And I think we could achieve some of these goals, too. If only we had 15% concentrated power of will...