I came across this article the other day, talking about how there are too many cards given each year to soccer players. The NFHS Officials Quarterly magazine got me to thinking about this problem. It was full of statistics from other sports that tried to make the point that soccer was a sport full of hooligans that needed to be controlled. This control, as the example from the state of New Mexico, was determined to be limitations on the amount of cards that players and teams as a whole could receive throughout the year. Once these maximum numbers were met, consequences were given to the offending player or team.
This was an interesting concept, as here in Illinois they instituted a sliding scale penalty for repeat offenders of yellow cards. After five cards, you end up with a one game suspension, after three more cards you get a two game suspension, etc…. I can see this step as being a good step to prevent some serial offenders. Some players out there are great players and don’t foul very much. Then you have the players that aren’t as good as the good to great players, and they tend to foul to make up for their lack of skill. The final group of players that I see are the ones that are great players, but either foul out of frustration/anger, or are very aggressive. This sliding scale would do a good job of providing a punishment for repeat offenders, and the punishments do not seem to be too harsh.
The part that I did not like was New Mexico gave the entire team a maximum amount of cards that they could receive in a season. This number was set at thirty-two. This may seem like a pretty high number, but most teams play upwards of twenty to twenty five games in a season. This is slightly higher than one card in a game. If you achieved this number of cards, you are banned from postseason play. I do not see a huge problem if you have a few players getting cards every game. Two to three cards per game should be considered normal in my opinion. If two teams were in a hotly contested match, it would be easy to get two to three cards per team in such a game.
The other question I have is, is it fair to punish the team and take away their post season for playing twenty-five games compared to the team that only played fifteen games? It does not seem fair to me. You will most likely have teams playing fewer games in a season to prevent this banishment from the post season. The other problem that I see arising from this, is that every referee does not call the game the exact same way. What I might give a card for, the next referee might not think that the offense was worthy of a card. And you have the possible problem of referees taking a game just to give cards to a team that might be on the bubble. I don’t know if this would happen, but referees have been known to hold a grudge against a team or coach. I do think that some level of accountability needs to be there for the super-aggressive soccer players, but I am not so sure about a team penalty.
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