Only in the USA (and Canada) does the word “football” conjure a rather violent sport involving an oblong ball and heavily padded hulks colliding with great purpose and force. That’s football, American style – not to be confused with Latin America’s futbol or European football.

But during my summer sojourn from Hanoi, I’ve found myself absorbed by two great sporting dramas. One, of course, is the World Cup, which has engrossed perhaps a billion fans around the world. This includes millions of new American fans, in part because of valiant, close-but-no-cigar efforts of USA goalie Tim Howard.

The second is baseball, “the great American pastime” that is growing in popularity around the world. Why? One night I caught “Million Dollar Arm,” a film inspired by the true story of a contest in which baseball scouts tried to find and train the best throwing talent in India. (Two javelin throwers scored minor league contracts.)  While following my favorite pro teams, the Dodgers and Angels, I also checked Facebook for updates on the Hanoi Capitals under-12 youth team, which (I’m told) exhibited great heart playing to a 0-5 record at a regional tournament in the Philippines. And which sport, I wonder, truly deserves to be called “the beautiful game.”

Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me, a baseball-loving, baseball-playing, baseball-coaching American, to explain what’s wrong with soccer – well, if you insist, futbol. But I suspect even the most ardent futbol fans sense the weaknesses of their beloved sport.

For starters, there’s the flopping. Slow-motion replays often reveal the players to be thespians who fake violent collisions and injuries to try to draw penalties against opponents. Do fans really approve? This may be good gamesmanship, but it’s bogus sportsmanship. I’m convinced that it was the Europeans, steeped in their style of football, who brought the art of flopping to professional basketball.

But that isn’t futbol’s greatest flaw. Nope, it’s great flaw is the acceptance of games that end in either a tie or a tiebreaker that demeans the arduous contest.

Nobody likes ties. On a philosophical level, I can appreciate how a sport, like life, might provide the anticlimax of a stalemate. But we Americans have a saying: “A tie is like kissing your sister.” Ugh, a great sport should inspire passion.  

Now, as every futbol fan knows, the 0-0 or 1-1 contest in single-elimination rounds is resolved with a series of mano-a-mano duels between a striker and goalie. These duels are artificial; in baseball, the duel between a pitcher and batter is an intrinsic element of the game.  Football’s tiebreakers are dramatic – but it’s not the best possible climax.

Why, this American wonders, don’t they just play until one team finally scores the game-winner? We call this “sudden victory” in American football. If they’re worried the game will drag on too long, why not simply widen the goals by a couple of meters for overtime? Scoring would be that much easier. This would add more beauty – literally a timeless aesthetic – to the game.

The great beauty of baseball, after all, is it’s timeless quality. Unlike both kinds of football, basketball and hockey, there is no clock in baseball but rather a set number of “outs” and “innings” allotted to each team –three outs per inning, and nine innings in a professional game. In sports that run on a clock, a game can essentially be “over” long before time runs out if one team compiles a substantial lead. But in baseball, as the saying goes, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.” The point emphasizes the possibility of dramatic comebacks because there is no clock. Nor is there a bogus “tiebreaker”: teams keep playing in the overtime of “extra innings,” as many as it takes, until somebody finally prevails.

Baseball fans would not want a tie resolved by, say, a home-run hitting contest.

After moving to Hanoi in late 2010, I was a bit taken aback by how European teams like Arsenal and Manchester United were showcased in the sports sections of Vietnamese newspapers. The Vietnamese love the sport though they know it may be decades  before their national team can compete with the world’s best. As I write these words, the World Cup has come down to its four finalists: Germany, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Argentina. Two teams from Europe, two from Latin America. Which team, I wonder, do the Vietnamese favor? A colleague suggested that the Vietnamese fans may be divided by their personal preferences – but that all would be rooting for good games.

Such games, I assume, would be free of flopping. And shouldn’t the victor be decided by an honest-to-goodness goal?