In ascending order:
11.
Time-wasting. Extreme form of cheating. Not so common in the Premier league fortunately enough.
10.
Diving. Taken to extremes by so many players it has become endemic. Virtually every team has a few of them. Severe retroactive punishments should be introduced.
9.
Soft penalties, especially for ball-to-hand cases. A defender cannot make his arms disappear just because he is inside the box, and you cannot play football with your arms behind your back the whole time, you will just lose balance and fall over. Hell, we even have cases when a player pulls his arms towards his body, a very fast ball hits him and the ref points to the spot. Simply atrocious.
8.
"Allowing physical play" which many times means allowing a team to get away with persistent, deliberate and even dangerous fouling without the bookings demanded by the rules.
7.
The so-called "Champions Route" for CL qualification. It allows shitty teams, from minor leagues to play against each other and enter the GS of the CL, while on the other side, you have the so-called "League Route" which means that top teams, from top leagues will knock themselves out. The result of all this being the weakening of the competition at the GS.
6.
Statistics-mania. Football is not like other sports that can be almost entirely summed up in statistics. If "statistics" were the be all-end-all of football, then Zidane and Iniesta would have been crap players.
5.
Allusions to obscure or ancient precedents by fans/pundits. For example, "no European team has ever won the World Cup in South America." As if there have been 24 World Cups in South America and European teams have been utter dogshite in all 24 of them. 4 European nations made the quarters in 1970 (USSR, England, Italy and Germany) with Italy and Germany finishing 2nd and 3rd behind a mighty Brazil. In 1978, 5 European teams made the final 8 (Poland, Netherlands, Austria, Germany and Italy) In 1986, it was again 5 out of 8 (England, Spain, France, Belgium, Germany) and 3 of the final 4. More on this later.
4.
Absurd hyping of youngsters. Whenever this 17 or 18 year old does a couple of good moves in a few games, there will be an avalanche about the kid being the future Messi, or the future Drogba or the new "insert name of current or past great" Wake up people, the vast majority of youngsters never live up to the hype! Many stagnate, some even decline straight away, and others while managing to improve, never even remotely live up to the hype. Conversely, not every player remains good until 34/5. Some turn into shite well before that (Kaka anyone?) And not every player declines gently. A player may as well remain world class until age 32 and the following season be nowhere at all. It can almost happen overnight. Basically, when you keep hold of old players, you have ticking time-bombs on your hands.
3. The fact that so
many World Cups have been absolutely scandalous and very few seem to remember or mention that. The example are endless (Italy winning at home under Mussolini in the 30s, Germany on steroids in 1954, multiple scandalous decisions in 1966 designed to harm the socialist countries and even more crucially the South American ones. 1978 in Argentina under the Junta of the Generals. Phantom penalty for Germany in 1990. Daylight robbery against Italy, Portugal and Spain in 2002. And last but not least, Lampard's goal in South Africa
This shines light over point "5" as well.
2.
Retroactive punditry based solely on the scoreline. As an example, people saying that Bayern did not play well a couple of nights back because they lost 1-0 to Real Madrid in the Bernabeu, never occurring to said pundits/fans that when you are playing with a major rival away from home the possibility of defeat is necessarily always there, even if you do play well. It also never occurs to these people that if last year's Bayern were faced with the same tactics that this year's Bayern are being faced, they could very well have lost as well, which they almost did by the way (Arsenal, Dortmund) The examples for this are virtually without end.
1.
Money. Genuinely the source of all evil in this world. What a game it would have been if there was a universal cap on the pay of all football players on the planet, meaning they would largely be playing for glory/love for the club and its fans. This would mean that a club from Zagreb, or Lagos, or Nottingham or Bogota or whatever could be the best in the world. Now, the places that nurture the best players on the planet are hardly ever rewarded, while the best players end up wherever the hedge funds or petrodollars decided to flow.
