These days, pro soccer in America plays by the same rules as everyone else in the world. That wasn't always the case, though — not in the old North American Soccer League, and not in the early days of Major League Soccer. Both leagues refused to trust Americans to enjoy soccer by its worldwide rules, so they tried to make a few tweaks.
Looking back, it's hard to believe that the changes ever got approved.
When MLS launched in 1996, it had borrowed some of the NASL's strangest rules, in the hopes of getting the attention of American fans. Chief among them was the penalty shootout at the end of every tied game, to ensure a winner. But not just a traditional penalty-kick shootout from a fixed spot. Instead, shooters lined up 35 yards from the goal, simulating a breakaway situation.
In practice, this led to goalkeepers and forwards running pell-mell at each other, followed by a brief moment of a player trying to shoot around the onrushing keeper. Its excitement was debatable; its potential for injuries wasn't, as the two players often careened into each other. The shootout was, thankfully, abandoned after the 1999 season.
Another rule change involved the clock, which counted down to zero rather than the traditional soccer clock, which counted up to 45:00. This mostly gave teams a renewed incentive to try to run out the clock if they were leading, since the referee couldn't punish time-wasting by adding stoppage time onto the end of the half or the game. Not surprisingly, giving teams a reason to slow down the game did not prove to be popular.
Perhaps the goofiest MLS-specific rule was a slight tweak to the rule that limits teams to three substitutions. MLS introduced a fourth substitution that was only allowed to be used for the goalkeeper. The rule died an ignominious death when coaches — chief among them current LAFC boss Bob Bradley — figured out that all they had to do was swap their keeper with another player who was already on the field, sub in a player for the new "goalkeeper," and then have the actual goalkeeper move back into the net.
There were other changes that some of the league's founding fathers wanted to make, such as introducing much bigger nets. By 2003, MLS had finally figured out that what American fans really wanted was the kind of soccer they saw on TV in Mexico and Europe, and in the World Cup.
The end of the goofy rules changes was the beginning of the modern era of MLS, when the league wasn't afraid of draws or stoppage time, and let the soccer sell itself. Hopefully, the league's success since has also put an end to the desire of American soccer executives to make wholesale changes to the sport as a whole.
