I agree. I do not know why people challenged me so much when I stated this before.

Lol at soccer scoring as much has the National Hockey League.

"For the fourth straight year, the NHL saw a decline in goal scoring in 2013 with an average of 5.44 goals per game. The league hasn't quite dropped down to the level that it was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period in league history that is infamously referred to as "the dead puck era."Apr 29, 2010"

http://mweb.cbssports.com/nhl/eye-on-hockey/22167901/goal-scoring-declines-in-the-nhl-again

Premier league

This has remained remarkably consistent despite the evolution of football tactics over the past 22 years. The lowest average was 2.45 goals per game in 2006/7, and the highest came in 2011/12, when the average was 2.81. However, for the past five seasons the figure has stayed above 2.75. As we’ve seen, this doesn’t necessarily mean that most games will see a hatful of goals, but rather that high-scori

If a player is expelled in Soccer, the team crumbles most of the times. Even one position with a not so good player, the other team can exploit that position, like having a fast winger and a slow right back it can lead to fast plays from the wing and crosses for the forwards to finish. A great center midfield in a team can lead to solid play and control in the midfield and just disable the other team from doing anything significative. And did you ever hear about the greatest soccer club competition in the World, the European Champions League? It has the best teams from Europe and its final's audience surpasses the Super Bowl. And the World Cup simply obliterates any other sporting event. The thing I was talking about was that if people don't understand a sport, it does not mean others are better or bigger. Football and Basketball are great, for those who like it, and they are also huge and they are complex sports. But just like Soccer.

You should watch some Athletics, the way it's done coverage switches between events so you never get bored plus the 4xRelays are great.

The different positions exist for soccer, they only aren't set by the rules. At least you have players specialized in defense, middle field (important thing to create good situations) and attack. But in detail you have in modern professional soccer even more specialization in detail. There are even players that work mostly on the right or left side of the field. That the rules don't fix positions isn't meaning they aren't existant. You have to watch TV-broadcasts about soccer here, before the play starts there is a lot of discussion about the current positioning of the players. And again at half-time. But trainers have the freedom to choose their positional system, it gets names like 4-4-2. Look at this graph:

As you can see each position is named differently. That is one possible tactics to set positions. But trainers can decide a different tactics here. So there is even more freedom to change the tactics based on specific attributes of the players.

But be assured, a trainer who says all 10 field-players have the same assignment will fail in professional soccer.

No explanation at all why Mexico is better ranked than the US.

Interesting. I played as a child/adolescent in the US and all the teams had 1 Goalie, 2 Fullbacks (about where the Innen-verteidigers are), 3 half-backs (about where the Zentral Defensiver Mittelfeldspieler is but spread across the field) and 5 Forwards that almost exclusively stayed on the opposing side of the field.

Did that used to be a popular way to position or was it just a quirk of the youth league I played in?

I didn't read all the pages in this thread, so maybe someone already mentioned it, but: If you talk about the US and not the US + Canada soccer may already have reached or passed hockey according to various metrics:

1. Studies asking people about their favorite sports. Afair about 4-6% say that hockey is their favorite sport, while about 3-6% say it's (men's) soccer. The numbers for the latter depend on whether women's and men's soccer are grouped together and whether it's a World Cup year or not. The number of people saying they like/watch the sport is also very similar (I think about ~60% for both, but I really don't remember). But there's one similar metric where soccer is still far behind. About ~10% say that they are avid fans of soccer - meaning that they really follow the sport but it may still not be their favorite sport - and I think that number is about twice as high for hockey.

2. TV revenues: According to Wikipedia the TV revenue for the NHL in the US is around 200 million dollars per year (in the US+Canada it's 600 million dollars). For soccer we have to add the revenues of various leagues and events to get an accurate number, while that's not really important for hockey: The English Premier League TV revenues in the US are estimated to be ~100 million dollar per year. The MLS rights are ~90 million per year (the package also includes the rights to air some USMNT games). The TV rights for the next 2 men's World Cups are estimated to have sold for ~425 million dollars, making it ~50 million per year. I don't know how much revenue the women's World Cup and Mexican Liga MX TV rights add to this, but it's probably somewhere in the lower 8 digit numbers. So in total we are looking at national TV revenues of ~200 million dollars for hockey and about ~250 million dollars for soccer.

3. Attendance: The average attendance at MLS games this season currently stands at ~21.500, while the number is at only ~17.500 for the NHL. But of course NHL stadia are way more limited by their size. And due to the larger number of teams and games per team the total attendance in the NHL is way higher than the one of the MLS: About 22 million vs about 7.5 million. The difference gets smaller when you exclude the Canadian teams in both leagues, but is still very noticeable. Also a lot of US based soccer fans actually follow the English Premier League or the Mexican Liga MX and do not actually attend any games in person. The TV ratings for the EPL are about twice as high as the ones for MLS, and the Liga MX is also slighlty ahead afaik. This last point brings me to:

4. TV ratings: It's getting late here and I have to go to bed so I won't double check the numbers. But afaik the average NHL game is watched by ~350.000 on national TV. EPL draws ~400.000, MLS about ~200.000 and Liga MX somewhere in between. The NHL playoff ratings are way higher but so are the World Cup ratings. Both should cancel out somewhat.

Note: Sorry for me bad English. As I mentioned it's getting late and while I have no problem reading English writing it is way harder for me. That's why I usually don't post much in English language forums. Oh, and I have no idea how popular tennis and golf are. The same goes for NASCAR, which should also be popular in the US. It's just difficult to compare team sports to other sports.

As Ka-Pi already said five attackers seems quite unusual these days in professional soccer. But it seems in the past that was more common.

If you look at the positions for the players for the final game of the world championship 1954, you see a lot more players in frontal positions than is usual today:

As a comparison, the positions for the finals of the 2010 championship, where each team only has one direct front player and both teams concentrate on the midfield-players:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/NED-ESP_2010-07-11.svg