See the sidebar at the end of the story for suggestions on balancing the competitive situation in a one-sided game.

Flashback: It is August of 1968. Middlebury College’s soccer team, one of the first American teams to play in Europe — and the first ever to play behind the Iron Curtain — has a match in Helsinki, Finland, against a first or second division (semi-pro) club team. On the first play of the game, Middlebury’s keeper dives for a save and breaks his collarbone. Since the reserve keeper is playing in another match on the other side of Helsinki, a field player is drafted to play in the goal.

Despite heroic efforts by this converted forward, the score is 10-0 early in the second half. Coach Joe Morrone, who would go on to become one of college soccer’s winningest coaches at the University of Connecticut, abandons the idea of breaking his clipboard and turns his attention to supporting the battered psyches of his players. The Middlebury team rallies, thanks to a Finnish mistake, and scores a late goal, but winds up losing 12-1.

What a young fullback on the overmatched Middlebury team remembers most about the match is a sequence of short passes late in the game in which the Finns worked the ball right into the American team’s goal mouth. Instead of tapping in a 12-inch shot, the Finnish striker simply left the ball on the goal line. He trapped the ball with the sole of his shoe and then nonchalantly jogged back toward midfield. There was no taunting, no appeal to the spectators for special recognition. He just left it there.

After the match, the Middlebury squad joined the Finnish team at its training facility for a genuine sauna, a sumptuous meal and some international socializing. For the American players, Helsinki was one of the highlights of the trip, despite losing by a very lopsided score. The act of leaving the ball on the line seems, in retrospect, an extraordinarily powerful yet subtle statement about the team’s mastery of the sport and about the players’ humanity.

The match described above was, by any definition, a blowout. The magnitude of the score differential is ample evidence that one team demonstrated its superiority over the other. Similarly one-sided scorelines are found in the results of youth league, high school and college games every week. Unfortunately for many teams, the soccer runaway experience is frequently more stressful than it was for the Middlebury team 28 years ago.

Anyone who has played soccer for any length of time has undoubtedly been on both sides of this scoreline. It’s not much fun to lose under any circumstances, but it’s especially difficult when an opponent runs up the score. Players are brought face-to-face with their shortcomings, and their confidence erodes. Even the winning team tends to suffer a bit in a lopsided game. Some players feel badly for friends on the losing team. Others may feel shortchanged because they received less playing time when the coach cleared the bench, or because they didn’t get a chance to play as competitively as they would have liked.

Attending to players’ bruised feelings and self-esteem is a difficult but important job for losing coaches in blowout games. They have to put aside their own feelings of frustration and find positive outcomes from an unpleasant experience. In soccer, as in any learning situation, success is a vital element in improvement. Yet it’s a real struggle to find ways to have players perceive anything about a one-sided loss in positive terms.

What can players, coaches and organizers do to avoid blowouts? And if one-sided contests can’t be completely eliminated, how can we minimize their negative effects? Our purpose in writing this piece is not to deliver the definitive answer for handling blowout situations, but to sample opinion, invite reflection, stimulate discussion and perhaps generate some constructive strategies for handling games involving mismatched teams. To that end, some thoughts from a coach and two players:

• Most winning coaches dislike blowouts, too, although there are some who seem to revel in running up the score on an overmatched team. Many strong teams get into bad playing habits when they face an inferior opponent, and sometimes these patterns may come back to haunt the team when it faces a more evenly matched side. Coaches on the winning side have to confront attitudinal issues as well. Just as losing teams suffer from eroded confidence and low self-esteem, a winning team may find arrogance, laziness or poor sportsmanship among its players.
  
• Frequently coaches of stronger teams will impose restrictions on their own players in an effort to hold down the score. Although this strategy may succeed in restricting scoring, the psychological effect may be every bit as insulting to the weaker team if the coach and players flout their restrictions in a condescending way. (For some creative approaches to player restrictions, see sidebar.)
  
• League or tournament rules sometimes have the effect of compounding the blowout situation. If teams are rewarded with higher seedings or tie-breaker advantages for goals scored or goal differential, there is a disincentive to keep the score from becoming one-sided. As a result, some organizers have opted for “fewest goals allowed” as the primary criterion for seeding, rather than “most goals scored.”
  
• Ironically, many players and coaches who would describe themselves as “competitive” would really rather win than compete. Coaches need to remind themselves and their players that true competition necessarily involves evenly matched opponents in contests where real uncertainty exists about who will prevail. If we find ourselves enjoying the easy wins more than the hotly contested, hard-fought losses then we may be fairly typical, but we’re probably not “competitive.” Too many blowout wins — especially if they are excessively glorified by coaches, parents and fans — may dilute an athlete’s taste for the legitimate struggle of real competition.

A junior soccer team in Bucharest, Romania, abandoned the field with two minutes remaining in a game because fans threatened to strip the players naked if they gave up two more goals. With the score already 16-0, the team apparently took the fans at their word and fled to the locker room.

More than a quarter century has elapsed between the Middlebury College loss in Helsinki and the recent incident in Bucharest. Blowouts continue to occur. We are not likely to eradicate them entirely from soccer or any other sport. But there is at least one former player who finds considerably more dignity in the Finnish strategy of “leaving one on the line” than the Romanian “solution.”

Editor’s note: At the time this article was published in the January/February 1998 issue of Soccer Journal, Keith J. Conners, Ph.D., was professor of education at Salisbury State University. He captained the 1968 Middlebury College team, the first American college side to compete behind the Iron Curtain. He founded the high school soccer program at Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 1970 and coached at UConn under Joe Morrone from 1972 to 1975. He was the head coach at Salisbury State from 1976 to 1982 and has coached in youth soccer since that time. Victoria Brooks and Amanda Brooks were named to the Capital Athletic Conference all-star team while leading Salisbury State to regional prominence in its first two seasons of varsity competition. Amanda Brooks returned in the 1996 season as an assistant coach.

“Shoot with the weaker foot” and other low-scoring ideas
What can the winning team do to keep the score down while still playing good soccer and benefiting from the experience? Here’s a list of possible conditions and restrictions that coaches and players can accept to help balance the competitive situation on the field and still play hard. The list is arranged in approximate order of difficulty:

• Change positions, including keeper.
  
• Shoot only with weaker foot.
  
• Score only after successfully executing give-and-go in the offensive third of the field.
  
• Make 10 consecutive passes before attacking the goal.
  
• No one may score until a designated player scores.
  
• Enforce two-touch passing limitation.
  
• Allow two-touch passing in defensive end, one-touch in offensive end.
  
• Score by heading only.
  
• Following restarts (including throw-ins), all 11 players must touch the ball before attacking the goal.
  
• And leave one on the line!