Soccer – football to everyone outside the U.S. and Canada – is a wonderful sport.  My boys played, and I got into it as much as they did, playing a bit myself (terribly; no one ever accused me of being an athlete), coaching, refereeing, and helping run the local soccer club.  Due to the lack of scoring it bores a lot of people to death; kick the ball up the field, then down the field, then back up again.  Fall down and pretend to be mortally injured, jump back up again and run like crazy.  Constant swirling action, no apparent strategy, and little or nothing to show for all that running around.  I get it.

And then, for those who get that far, there are 2 rules that render the sport mystifying to many:  the advantage rule and offside.  Both allow players to commit offenses and get away with it.

I won’t bore you with the details; just suffice it to say that the official FIFA rulebook devotes thousands of words and tens of pages and dozens of diagrams to explaining them, even though the statements of the rules themselves are very brief.

Well, the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule are brief, too.  It’s putting them into action that causes difficulty.

Same with advantage and offside.  With the advantage rule, the referee isn’t supposed to stop the game because of a foul if he decides (in a split second) that by doing so he would give an advantage to the offending team.  With the offside rule, a player can be in an offside position without being offside.  Go figure.

Feel free to dig into the explanation if you like, but it’s not my subject.  The point is that one person, the referee, is empowered and required to make instant judgement calls in the middle of the action, with no do-overs.  His decision is final – it says so right in the rulebook.  And that makes the soccer referee the most powerful rules-enforcer in all of sports.  Referees can and do get it wrong, and when they do, it can affect the outcome of a game.  At the higher levels, corruption is a real and ever-present problem.  But whether it’s a bunch of 5-year-olds playing “bee ball” (like bees swarming around a ball covered in honey) or a bunch of dazzling young millionaires with careers on the line, the thought of one person having that much control over their destiny is troubling.  In sports, as in life, justice is supposed to be blind.  That it might not be, that the person enforcing the rules might be incompetent, prejudiced or bribed- or just having a bad day – is a constant worry.

Well, that’s life.

But I also know this:  Changing the advantage or offside rules would fundamentally change soccer, and not in a good way.  It would actually encourage tactical fouling and discourage aggressive attacking play in a sport which needs all the aggressive attacking it can get to keep things interesting, and already has more than enough incentive and opportunity to foul.

Worldwide, soccer is a multi-multi-billion dollar sport, but it’s still just a game.  Real life, though, has its versions of the advantage and offside rules, and they are indispensable; organic, really.  Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor and very wise man, has a great article at National Review Online that brilliantly illustrates one aspect of this, and it’s well worth the read: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/fisa-reform-and-national-security/.

McCarthy argues that a handful of Republican senators, with the support of many Democrats and President Trump, were holding up reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in their determination to extract reforms that would have, in McCarthy’s view, the perverse effect of making the nation less safe.  McCarthy has credibility on the issue; he worked on national security issues for years as the lead prosecutor on terrorism cases, and has been one of the harshest critics of the Obama administration and the FBI regarding their abuses of power during and after Trump’s 2016 campaign (his book on the subject is Ball of Collusion).  He knows the risks, he knows the bad guys and just how bad they are, he knows what’s needed to stop them, and he knows that the powers the executive branch needs to do the job are problematic; they can be and have been abused.  Nonetheless he argues powerfully and persuasively that it’s worth tolerating the occasional mistake and abuse because the powers can’t be effective unless they are very broad and the officials wielding them have great discretion.

He himself calls the situation a “conundrum”, and he’s no doubt correct.  To grant the powers invites abuses that will inevitably occur; to not give them unnecessarily endangers the nation and its people.  There is no solution that will satisfy everyone, and any halfway-workable solution leaves everyone with something to dislike and perhaps to fear.

We’re in this impossible situation for two reasons.  First, 9-11.  It proved beyond dispute that fighting terrorists requires extensive unconventional surveillance tools that inherently contain the ability to illegally spy on innocent Americans.  Second, the 2016 election.  The Obama administration’s determination to stop Trump went beyond all bounds, best personified by FBI Director James Comey; his insufferable smugness, self-righteousness, and willingness to break the law for “the greater good” did incalculable damage.  (As he has proved repeatedly since his firing, he still doesn’t get why he was wrong.)  The FBI and other intelligence agencies squandered the one absolutely essential thing that enables them to do their job – the trust of the American people.  Not even their boss, the President, trusts them.  Yet they are indispensable.  Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

The trust and confidence so severely damaged in the 2016 election debacle can and will be rebuilt, but it will take years and a new generation of leadership to do it.  Over the next few years, as more and more comes out about the abuses that occurred, the outrage and calls for fundamental reform will grow.  Inflamed passions, though, are not good guides to intelligent policy setting; that requires just the opposite – cool, dispassionate, rational consideration.  We must be very careful not to allow the backlash to make it impossible for the intelligence agencies to do their indispensable job.

Kenneth D. Gough © 2020