The people who say football has become soft are simply right. Players are way too protected. Sport should be a simulation of war, not a competition to see who can perform the biggest Neymar Oscar-winning flop.
Physical football should be allowed much more.
A Theodore Roosevelt thought, slightly reworded
Yellow cards for diving should be handed out much more aggressively, and if they keep doing it, show them the red card. (If someone caused a serious injury and was way too aggressive, the incident should be thoroughly reviewed after the match. If it was avoidable, maybe they should be banned for half a season.) You can be aggressive intelligently.
From football's perspective, we don't need to protect €100 million legs at all costs when these players earn billions collectively every year. They'll survive.
The whole tiki-taka nonsense is way overplayed. Not everyone is a small, low-center-of-gravity player like Messi, Xavi, or Iniesta. For them, that style of football was perfect. Long-range shots and physical contact should be more important.
Bale and CR's duo record against the Messi-Xavi-Iniesta trio was 4W, 2L, 1D.
To me, Bale and CR always represented individualistic, physical football, while Barça represented a community of small, perfectly coordinated dwarfs playing together like a very efficient little communist collective.
You simply shouldn't keep the ball on the ground against Messi. You should constantly lift it and bounce it whenever he's nearby. Even if it looked cartoonishly and ridiculously funny from the outside, I think it would be effective against Messi. He could only really do his magic when he was dribbling on perfectly smooth grass with the ball staying on the ground without bouncing. If this tactic had been used against him consistently, he would've had fewer opportunities for those solo runs. But no one really applied it against him that extremely.
Football's other huge problem is that it's become fake slop.
The whole Messi vs. CR debate is one of the biggest fake, media-created sports psyops ever.
Messi is a laboratory Frankenstein. Maybe he's so good because he was the only elite footballer to receive years of growth hormone therapy, which could even have changed things like bone density? It's interesting how other similarly short, low-center-of-gravity football geniuses like Modrić, Iniesta, and Xavi were never capable of those kinds of solo runs... BUT THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANY REAL DEBATE ABOUT THIS! Like, maybe he's the GOAT because his body developed in a way that gave him football superpowers? ZERO discussion...
CR spent years in a farmers' league where his teammates kept feeding him the ball. (Yes, 2008 CR was an elite football god, etc., but my first description fits most of his RM years better.)
Messi vs. Ronaldo is a fake question.
When was it ever really a legitimate debate? It's Messi. Anyone who still argues otherwise probably just hates Messi for some reason. It shouldn't have been a debate for at least the last 10 years. Sooo dumb, sooo fake.
The offside rule could also be abolished as an experiment, or maybe the pitch could just be shortened a bit. There would be more goals, individual skill would stand out much more, and matches wouldn't be decided by subjective things like whether someone deserved a red card or not, and then Spain won in the 106th minute because the other team had to play with 10 men and simply couldn't physically hold on.
Honestly, I'd invite every country to the World Cup, like the Olympics. If one country can't host it, neighboring countries could join in, or even an entire continent. Replace the World Cup qualifiers with something else. These billionaire stars will somehow survive the extra workload. Every small country would have its own national team of heroes. It would be a much bigger experience. Football just isn't very people-centered.
It'll also be an interesting question in the future how much Black players will dominate every team because of their physical advantage, and how interested white people will remain in football because of that. In such a highly physical sport, even if white players have a slightly better technical edge, it might not matter that much.
I have to say that the emphasis isn't so much on physicality, but on protecting the players. This helps non-Black players a lot.
Football should be exciting, interesting, and a hobby where the average viewer can learn from it, get inspired, and apply it to real life through football.
The unnecessary spread of Guardiola's tactics, and the complete lack of reflection on it, says it all. The fake Messi vs. CR debate also shows that the football community is stuck at the level of fake discussions, which reflects the intellectual quality of the community. It can't innovate or evolve effectively because there simply isn't enough intellectual capacity within the football community to even demand better discussions.
