First off, I enjoyed the soccer article. I was surprised it made its way into the magazine and was expecting it to end up relating to game theory or sports betting, which it didn't, but I enjoyed it. I hope the magazine keeps putting articles like that up as a number of the regular, long running series poker articles just don't seem very magazine worthy to me.
That said I wish the article would have been less general. It made a lot of points but none of them were really more in depth than the stuff a very casual observer would already know. To me it should have expanded on some of the individual points even if that meant being less broad or meant breaking it up into two parts (not to harp on it but stuff with far less appeal has been extended for far longer). As an example give me more than just a Mourinho quote and a few vague statements regarding the difference between 4-4-2 and other formations, give me some concrete numbers on the experience disparity between youth soccer coaches and coaches in other youth sports in America, or tell me which specific players or prospects in our system might or might not fit the mold of another system and specifically why. The article as it was, while good enough, was just a little too far towards the wikipedia over-view side of the scale for me.
The article this month on football contains some factual errors. Firstly, Spain have conceded several goals in the past three international tournaments, not zero as claimed. They have even lost one group match.
Three of the ten knock out games that Spain have played in that period have gone to extra time. This is barely sufficient to suggest they have a game plan based around forcing the matches to last 30 minutes longer.
Furthermore, footballers are no doubt conditioned to play 90 minutes in 8 days, week after week. National sides have insufficient time with their players to alter the players' physical condition significantly, and attempting to do so would surely be a waste of time and resources, given that there is the more important issue of only having a handful of weeks in order to mould a side of unfamiliar elements to face the best in the world. Electing to choose to play 30 minutes more than every other side is at best foolish, as the fatigue of an international tournament would be dramatically heightened.
Spain have also played defensive football in the group stages of the two more recent international tournaments. There is no extra time in these matches, and accruing a point per match for a draw makes it highly unlikely they would progress. So the argument that they are taking a game theory optimal course of action seems erroneous as it is both inconsistent with the way the side have played, and contains glaring factual errors.
I also take issue with the argument that Barcelona should adopt a more defensive attitude to matches; there are few more wonderful sights that I have seen in sport than Barcelona attacking in full flow with all of their artistes on song. To suggest that they adopt this willfully ignores why sport is loved throughout the world. The result is important; the spectacle more so.
Cool article, maybe a bit over simplified in some of the conclusions/assumptions. I recommend that the OP takes a look at a site called zonalmarking.net - great discussion of tactics on there and lots of previous reports to look up, including some old USA games. gl
