Decisive win? You lose.

Which is why the overlords will never let you be in charge.

Private contracts. None of our business until we started shoveling money at them.

Exactly, they took the money, fuck their "contractual obligations".

"The leftist mindset"?

Shit, no, they were, and are, unruly pirate fucks who believe in nothing.

And I'm sure they didn't play rigged soccer as kids.

Sometimes that works out, sometimes it doesn't, but in instances like this, it's not a bad idea. In "giving the kids something to do during the summer" type leagues, distributing the talent among the teams makes some sense. In these leagues, no one is competing for scholarships or performing for scouts, it really is supposed to be about fair play and sportsmanship.

Without fail, though, over-competitive adults fuck up things like that. I've seen it with the stepkids. Some sponsor who's got an "in" with the township gets to pick his team from the pool every year, then every other sponsor pulls names from a hat. Year after year, that sponsor's team is "the one to beat", and every kid in the league knows it. At that point, it's not really about what's being done for the kids, it's about another little plastic statue in the trophy case.

If you could take conniving adults out of the team-building process, or even let the kids try out then allow sponsors to pick round-robin style, you'd be back to "fair".

But even that, at it's worst, is better than punishing a skilled team for being winners.

Wow. How incredibly short sighted.

You know, I'm all about people feeling good about themselves. I want to be happy. Most people want to be happy. Life is short, and happiness and contentment are important. Being happy and content leads to greater creativity and productivity, and can, by proxy, result in better, higher quality contributions to the whole of society, resulting in a net benefit for everyone, because of those successes.

When you hold success back in the name of self esteem, you're doing nothing more than short changing not only yourself, but future generations. We grow when we learn from our mistakes. Losing hurts. Losing makes you upset. Losing makes you want to try harder next time. If our mistakes are mitigated in an effort to make us feel good about losing, then we lose the motivation to become better. Humanity's growth and development depends on learning from failure, and then succeeding. It's like a social evolution. You grow and adapt to what works and leave behind what doesn't.

Granted, this is about a soccer game, but it's more than that if you think about it. It's an example of the prevailing mindset of the baby boom generation, that wants it's children to have better than what they had. Well, guess what? They do. There's ensuring a legacy for future generations to pick up the mantle and continue forward, and then there's just spoiling the children so they turn out like self absorbed, entitled brats.

They're spoiling the children.

I wonder if Bill Gates learned any life lessons for better or for ill from team sports....

The only thing approaching the complete idiocy of this mercy rule is the notion that it is somehow the fault of "leftists" or "liberals".

Not if you don't give a fuck about the game.


Lotta kids are forced into these dopey team sports by their striving anal parents, and find them boring as shit.

And they're right.

Well, you lot ARE the ones that believe competition is bad and equality of outcome is good. So...

More mindless and meaningless spam. Wow. I wonder who I can work with to improve the wordforge software to make "ignore" really work well?

Hey, pick some lotto numbers with those psychic powers.

Try suicide, that tends to blot out all sensory input known to exist from what I hear.

I'm not just talking about the game, Dicky, I'm talking about life in general. Losing sucks, but it's that feeling of failure that should make you want to try harder, or even better, find a smarter way to solve the problem. This soccer game ruling is going to start teaching these kids to think "I don't have to try hard or be smarter, I can just put little effort in and the government/my parents/my peers will make sure everything works out for me".

There's support, and then there's submission. One is not the other, but this ruling really blurs that line, and it can cause that line of though to enter other aspects of our social culture.

Imagine that. Look who knows they're guilty of spamming up the place.

No, that's your strawman interpretation of what the left believes.

Which is why I brought up the Bill Gates example.
I don't think he gave a fuck about soccer.
Why, he must've picked up his business habits elsewhere!

Again, not if they don't give a fuck about soccer.

And they don't.

How do I know?

America at large doesn't give a fuck about the rest of the world's obsession with it.

Beckam? Who's he?
Mr. Posh Spice?
Who cares?

All this soccer shit since the 80's hasn't worked.
It's not going to.

These kids will play soccer, find it boring and retarded, especially if it's rigged, and learn positive work habits from some mentor, or book, or something.

Or, negative ones from a mentor like Gordon Gekko.
That seems to be more prevalent.
And the Gordon Gekkos are anything but fucking commies.

So much for you having me on "ignore".
That was an easy test.

Dicky has no clue about being a parent and, apparently, he's too young to know how other peoples' parents treat their own kids. Some of them do push their kids to try things they may not like. There's a good chance, though, that those kids will, with experience, get to make up their own minds about the game.

This article had nothing to do with his bad experience. It had everything to do with your comment here. Games teach kids to try - smarter, harder, whatever - but this ruling teaches them that trying will only be punished.

I didn't say you were on ignore. I said the software needed to be better. If I was just ignoring you, how could I get so much amusement out of your comments?

There's so little you say worthy of comment you might have thought I had you on comment, though...

In soccer.
Which sucks.
So quit soccer, and do something meaningful.

Come on now, this isn't soccer.

Let me be clear and say that this proposed rule strikes me as a bizarro up-is-down sort of thing, like it seems everyone here. I'm in no way defending it.

However, I don't know if a mercy rule is any better. In practical impact, I don't see much of a difference between a mercy rule and this.

Both rules effectively punish the better team and its members. Heck, you could argue that the mercy rule punishes the bad team too by cutting short the game and their chance to have fun and gain experience.

Yes, it's a bad thing that the violation of the new rule would result in a loss. However, in reality, it seems like that's not likely to ever happen. Coaches are on notice of the new rule. And with it in place, coaches will softpedal once the team is up by 4 goals. Everyone will get to play the full game. Kids on the winning side still will win. Kids on the losing side still will generally lose unless they can stage a major comeback.

Although it's probably a dumb rule, I don't see it as cause for cats-and-dogs-are-living-together mass hysteria. It doesn't even seem strictly worse than the mercy rule in application.


Why shouldn't the better team be able to give 'em a body bag and show that there's no pain in this dojo?

To be fair, 5 goals is a heckuva lot in soccer. It's not unheard of in the pros but it is rare. At this level, though, a coach that doesn't back off somewhat is just being a jerk.

Still, the point that a team that goes up by 4 or so they're going to have to start scoring own-goals just to keep from losing with the way this nonsense is explained. The other team could, conceivably, when down by 4 and with time running out, score a couple of quick own-goals of their own and win by rule when the final score was 6-0 against them.

There are much better ways to handle this situation. This stupid rule sets up some even more stupid possibilities.

Because there's a major difference between the lessons - this penalizes being successful.

A mercy rule does not penalize being successful. It establishes that one team may simply be so much better that there is no need for further competition.

Yes, those are dramatically different outcomes. And yes, the moral that being too much better than your peers is wrong of you is innately unethical to those of us with gonads.

And yes, it's associated with political correctness touchy feely crap, that is far more the cornerstone of the left than the right on any political compass.

Which does not explain how virtually everybody on all sides of the political spectrum in this thread agrees that it is stupid. So no, not buying the political argument.

The mercy rule as I described it in high school football earlier is, as you say, a way of saying another team has so dominated another that there's no further point in keeping people out there any longer than necessary. Players on both sides are less likely to get careless and hurt as well, so there is an added benefit.

I think it's cruel and insulting...imagine being on the field and knowing the other team is being forced to "play down" so your team can have a chance for some charity points. You're there to play a competitive game and your opponents after a certain point stop really playing and start passing and futzing around while time runs out.

I think that is far more damaging and humiliating that simply losing by 60 points. At least I'd still have some dignity and real incentive to improve and wipe the field with them next time.

Given that it's *BRITISH* Petroleum, yah, I'd guess a lot of their execs think like Dan Leach.

Agreed, with the provision that the "everybody on all sides of the political spectrum in this thread" does not include individuals who are responsible for the creation and execution of public policy.

I'm glad I don't have your life.

I do agree with your point about not sheltering the kids from taking their lumps, but I haven't found life to be one crushing defeat after another.