So you wanna watch the World Cup, but you don’t know anything about soccer?
We here at SPR News have you covered.
Welcome to Soccer Saturday, a special weekend edition of SPR News Today.
Leading up to the World Cup this June, we’re talking to all types of soccer experts who want to help you understand—and love—the beautiful game.
So if you want to join the bandwagon this summer but you’ve never heard of Lionel Messi, you’re in the right place.
And even if you’re a die hard Premier League fan, you might like to hear what these guests have to say, too.
Last week, we talked to players about how they see what’s going on on the field.
This week, we’re talking to coaches to get a more bird’s-eye view— patterns and strategies you can try to pick out if you’re watching soccer on, say, a television screen.
Leigh Veidman and Nicole Lukic are head coaches for Spokane’s United Soccer League clubs: the Velocity men and the Zephyr women.
But before we get into how they approach the game, I wanted their thoughts on why soccer in the U-S has such a different reputation than soccer anywhere else in the world.
In most countries, soccer is an everyman sport. In the States, it can have a more suburban, white collar connotation, closer to tennis or golf. Why?
LEIGH VEIDMAN: Yeah, it's the money aspect. A lot of access in my country, in England, the sport is free. Everybody's got access to it. And if there is a fee, it's a very small fee. When I played as a youth at home, I was paying maybe £1, £2 a week, which is equivalent to $1.50, $3, you know. And that went towards the referee fees.
But here, it's certainly become more of a business, more of a corporation with some clubs and how big they're getting right now. So, yeah, it's really all about money.
NICOLE LUKIC: I would say at the elite level, it for sure takes money to advance in soccer to some degree. Maybe on the boys' side, their pathway, I would say, in America, is a little bit more friendly for everyone. If you're lucky enough to get to the point where you can have basic skills, maybe through a rec program or get scouted into an MLS academy early.
But on the girls' side, once you become competitive, you are definitely on a pathway to spend money to continue to get higher level opportunities and advance your soccer career.
ELIZA BILLINGHAM: Well, let's say for whatever reason, you're not part of the soccer world. I feel like the sports that most Americans are used to watching, be it football, basketball, you can be entertained when you're watching just by anytime someone scores, you're stoked.
And if you do that for basketball, you're going to be stoked for like most of the game. But in soccer, when they're scoring one or two or three goals, that's still just three minutes out of a 90 plus minute game.
So it seems like you've got to pay attention to other things if you're going to be entertained. What are some of those other things?
NL: I think there's two ways to start by looking at it. And that can be, are you watching what's going on on the ball or are you watching what's going on off the ball for the new person watching soccer? They're probably mostly watching what's going on with the ball. So simple things I think you can get excited about are good touches.
And maybe you as a person can go outside in your backyard and try to take the soccer ball down out of the air with it not bouncing away from you. And then maybe you'll have a deeper appreciation about what these players can do with their touches.
Or maybe you like defensive actions and people tackling. So maybe you can get excited about every time a ball is defended well and there's a clearance or there's a really hard tackle that wins to the team that you're supporting regaining the ball and being able to go on the attack.
LV: We've got a community here who is growing in the soccer world and when they go to a soccer game they want to be represented as a community. And what that means is a brand and a style of soccer that represents the community in Spokane in general as I understand it in a short time of being here in general with a very blue collar community. Blue collar people work hard and blue collar people want to be entertained by people who work hard.
So I think from a very base foundational level an identity connection is important. But to Nicole's point is then, what does the soccer look like? Is it entertaining? Is it not?
But to your reference of basketball and soccer and don't quote me on this because I don't watch a lot of basketball but something tells me the first basket scored isn't as exciting as the last basket and everything in between. With soccer there's an anticipation of that goal coming. It may come in the 90 first minute, it may come in the first minute but you never really know when it's going to come.
And it's the anticipation, the back and forth of both teams, the chess match that's going on that makes the game exciting, what's the strategy behind it. And I think there's a certain level of anticipation there but I think when you boil it down to the foundational level is the connection to the identity of the community. And there's that team style and how they're playing on the day, connect to what the people want to see as their representation.
EB: I'm going to come back to this idea of soccer as chess because I've heard that so many times. But to get into that, Americans watching American football, the team is basically calling plays and running them, pretty scripted as I understand it. Basketball, there's a difference between making plays and running plays but like running plays is still part of the sport.
On a scale from completely scripted to complete total free for all, where is soccer?
LV: I think it depends on the coach. Every coach has got their own personality, their own identity, which is connected to what they believe about the game, how it should be played. Some coaches want to be very aggressive in how they play and forward thinking.
Some coaches want to be a little bit more reserved defensively and sit back lower as a team and absorb pressure and then try and counter attack. So there's different personalities that connect to the identity.
Like I'll speak for myself, I call it chaos within the structure that we've got. So I will call plays, for example, on maybe a free kick or a corner. We have certain structures in the team that we approach a game with and I have names for them so you could technically call them a play. But within that structure, there's freedom of movement based on the player's feel and their own abilities as well.
NL: I mean, it's very common in soccer that on set pieces and restart specifically that you have organized more black and white moments in soccer, if you will, and things that you're trying to script and accomplish.
But soccer in general, I think why people who love soccer or football tend to love it is because it is the player's game and they have the ultimate freedom to make the decisions based on what they see in the moment. So it is very different from sports in that sense.
But that's, to me, the exciting part is you never know exactly what's going to happen next. You can talk about, as Leigh mentioned, like the structures and what you want to do in certain areas of the field and how you want players to build relationships in certain areas of the field.
But at the end of the day, it's their decision to execute based on the problems or the solutions that they're seeing in the moment.
EB: So how does that relate to chess?
NL: It's a pretty well-known metaphor. I actually don't play chess, but it's strategic in a way that your opponent also has a plan, right?
So let's say that you're attacking and the opponent is going to step out to defend you. Well, that's a chess piece moved. And now how do you move the ball to move another chess piece to ultimately get the ball down the field and score?
EB: I have seen on the TV, also in Ted Lasso, you've got a board, you've got diagrams, you've got coaches being like, 'Hello, this is what we're doing.' And you have numbers like three-four-four, four-three-four, or other numbers that add up to 11. What do those mean?
LV: Essentially, it's each line within the team. So you'll see sometimes one, four, four, two, that one will be the goalkeeper. The four will be the defending line. The next line of four will be the midfield line. And then the two would be the forward line.
Sometimes you've got, for example, a one, four, one, three, two. So the one would be the keeper. The four would be the defender line. The one would be the single midfielder. The next line of three would be, you could say they are wingers, attackers, attacking mids—we can go positionally—and then the one at the top would be the forward.
So it's really just a representation of the lines and how many players are in each line.
EB: But when I watch the game, they don't stay in those lines.
LV: That's very true.
EB: Can an observer kind of identify what a team is doing if they're paying attention, or at that point, are players just running around the field?
NL: Yes, they can. I would say the easiest, maybe the easiest place to start would be in the defending moment because you're more compact. The team is more than likely sticking to their specific task in that moment.
Whereas in the attack, as Leigh mentioned, if you have four defenders, one of the defenders might leave and join the midfield, which could be confusing to people. So now you're four, four, two. Now suddenly becomes a three, five, two. So start on the defending moment, I would recommend.
LV: Yeah, it's much clearer in the defending moments for sure.
EB: Is there any reason that that would actually be interesting to viewers who aren't pretty nerdy?
NL: I mean, if we get back to the soccer's chess conversation in the attack, when players move off the line, that's when they're trying to manipulate the opponent to create an open-up space for them to either exploit with the ball or without the ball, but essentially just find a path forward to the goal. So that's why a lot of those movements happen. Yeah, so somebody might find that interesting.
LV: Connecting to the chess piece, but also the personalities of the coach and the game idea of the coach. For example, if there's an attacking team that is attacking in a three, two, five—so five attackers. But the defending team has four defenders and they're in a four, four, two.
Logically, you would say, well, they've got five attackers and we've got four defenders. They've got an extra player in that attacking line or defensive line. Some coaches would say, I don't want that. I want to match that. I want to go 5v5. Some coaches are completely okay staying with a four versus five and having one player down. So that's really down to the personality and the game idea of the coach.
With those chess pieces, you can move things around and create what's called overloads, which would be the five versus four. So it's an interesting one. A lot of personality and game idea comes in from it, from the individual coach, in addition to moving the chess pieces as well.
EB: Sometimes there are defenders who get possession of the ball and they're just kicking the ball between them and the goalie. And I'm watching and I'm like, what the heck is happening?
NL: My mom in particular really hates this moment. She doesn't understand it. But I guess my question to you would be, what's happening with the game? Is it 0-0? Is it 2-0? Is it 1-0? Are we winning? Are we losing? It might matter.
If we're winning, for example, it might be a great way just to slow down the game, delay the other team from having the ball, make them having to step out to try to press you so that you can just go right through them.
But if the game just started, this team that is doing this, they like to probably build. So when we say build: have possession, build through the other team or build around the other team to get the ball into the opponent's half, opposed to just launching it forward.
So there, when they're passing it back and forth between the defenders and the goalkeeper, they're trying to shift the opponent to find a passing lane to either build through or build around.
LV: I think the only other way is to go over and sometimes that style of play of the coach is to go more direct and with one kick of the ball get it as close to the other team's goal as possible. And it may require one or two passes with your goalkeeper and defenders to draw the whole team, the opposition team in, for you to kick one long ball in behind.
And that then goes into what players do you have? Do you have attacking players in that 4-4-2? Those two players, are they athletic? Are they fast? Are they faster than the other team's defenders? That may be a strategy that you use to get behind and use the players that you've got to take advantage.
EB: Alright, World Cup time. Do you guys have favorite national teams that are headed to the World Cup?
LV: Obviously, USA and England, since I'm a citizen of both.
NL: Good job putting that in the right order.
LV: In terms of a style of football that I like to watch, I would say I relate more to probably a combination of Spain and... I don't know, I think I like Germany as well.
Spain is very much about possession, building through, you know, from the goalkeeper and defenders all the way into the goal. Germany can be a little bit more forward thinking. I like that combination of both.
NL: Team USA, obviously. On the men's side, I've historically, for whatever reason, really liked Croatia too. I tend to go and cheer for teams that have players on them that I like. For Croatia, it was Luka Modrić.
On the women's side, though, I've really enjoyed the progress that the African countries have been making, so I'll probably be just tuning into that more on the men's side to see what that looks like this year. They just have different athletic profiles that I find explosive and exciting, and on the women's side, they've really caught up to the rest of the world where there used to be more of a gap.
So, yeah, I guess we'll see who becomes my second favorite team this year. But it won't be England. Sorry, Leigh.
LV: That's okay. That's okay.
EB: Favorite World Cup memories?
LV: I can't say England have had a lot of good memories, to be honest with you.
We've had a lot of high expectations and not a lot of success. So, yeah, I don't really have any good memories of the World Cup for England, to be honest with you.
I do remember a bad memory, which is sitting on the couch as a young boy crying when we missed the inner penalty shootout, hiding behind a pillow on the couch.
So, I've got some painful memories, but I don't have any strong positive memories of England.
NL: That sounds traumatizing.
LV: Yeah. So, when it comes to penalties, now as a 38-year-old, I sit behind the pillow on the couch just to be safe.
NL: I remember that for playoffs, Leigh.
EB: Okay, last thing. I have some words here that usually mean something else but have very special meanings in soccer. So, I'm going to go through them and ask you guys to define them.
Let's start with: pitch?
NL: Field.
EB: Kit?
LV: It's the jerseys that you wear for the game.
EB: Nutmeg?
NL: A ball that is played between a player's legs on the ground.
EB: That's my favorite one. Brace?
LV: Two goals.
EB: Clean sheet?
NL: A shut-out.
EB: Flop?
LV: Dive.
EB: Dive?
NL: Drama? I don't know. It's just when somebody fakes an injury, I would say, and is rolling around trying to get a foul called.
LV: I would say, I'd reference it to the Olympics, you know, when the divers jump off the diving board, then you give a score of 8.4. That's what I imagine. If it's a great dive, I just imagine a scoreboard going above that.
NL: An Oscar award. An Emmy.
EB: Boots?
LV: Cleats.
EB: Box?
NL: The penalty box, the 18 box on the field.
EB: Stoppage?
LV: Injury time at the end of the game or end of the half.
EB: Tackle:
NL: When the defender is trying to win the ball off the attacking player.
EB: Because different than American football, I hear tackle and I imagine people on the ground.
NL: You can slide tackle and be on the ground, but you're always going for the ball.
EB: Never the person?
NL: Depends who's doing the tackling, I would say.
EB: Screamer?
LV: That would be a...
NL: Banger!
LV: I was going to say banger, but I was trying to find a better word. Yeah, like a goal that's usually scored from outside the 18.
EB: Battle?
NL: 1v1 comes to mind. Just trying to win your moment with another player.
EB: Sitter?
LV: When you've got basically a tap-in to score a goal from three yards away from the goal and you would expect to score it, but it goes wide or over.
EB: Jockey?
NL: Not a term I use often, but trying to move somebody.
EB: Sweeper?
LV: That would be the deepest player on the field. It could be a defender or a goalkeeper who just kicks the ball away.
EB: Wings?
NL: Players on the outside of the field and the wide channels.
EB: Last one. Gaffer?
LV: Head coach.
The Zephyr play their final home game of the season tonight against Brooklyn FC. It’s also their last regular season game, and their last chance of getting into the playoffs.
The Velocity play tomorrow in the Prinx Tires USL Cup. They’ll face the USL Championship’s Las Vegas Lights.
Next week, Soccer Saturdays will look beyond Spokane. We’ll hear from Nick Greene, author of the new book “How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius.” Greene interviewed anthropologists, architects, computer scientists and ballet dancers for unique insights into the world’s most ubiquitous game.
If you care about what ancient Egyptians, NASA scientists and the perfecter of dominoes have to say about soccer, you’re gonna love it.
That’s next week from SPR News.
