The Hockey vs. Soccer Debate and Why a Mashup Is the Only Way to Answer It

The debate rages on forums around the Internet: is hockey or soccer (aka football) harder to play?  Which requires tougher players?  Who would win in a fight: David Beckham or Derek Boogaard?  The comparisons are endless and, until now, unanswerable.

Using a new piece of technology called imagination, I did a mashup of hockey and soccer players, using random samplings of players in key positions from various teams in both sports.  Pulling those together, I ran games in various scenarios with players from each sport in different positions in each game.  The results were nothing short of astounding.

In the first game, for simplicity, I merely replaced both goalies in a soccer game with their hockey counterparts.  Long story short, every ball went in but one.  That one caught on the tip of a skate and punctured, leading to a penalty from the referee who apparently didn’t understand the point of the exercise.  Something about “unauthorized equipment” or some such.

I then reversed the situation and did the same for a hockey game featuring two soccer goalies.  Again, every shot went in, but in this case, both goalies required replacement at least once due to injury.  In one instance, the goalie was hit directly in the forehead by a flying puck which should have blocked the goal, except the goalie then managed to push it into the net during his seizure.  I guess they wear facemasks for a reason.

In the next few scenarios, various players were substituted throughout the playing field/ice for each game in a random fashion.  This resulted in a lot of hockey players being near-useless on the field and a lot of soccer players being shipped from the ice to the hospital.

Finally, to get a real quantified comparison of the sports, I decided some equipment switching would be in order.  While not exactly acting as a control, I thought that swapping footwear would further enhance the findings by putting the players on a more level-playing surface, as it were.  Then I re-ran the randomized player switching for a like number of games as in the previous set of scenarios and saw marked differences in the outcomes.

Fewer hockey players were dead weight to their teammates in game, once they were wearing cleats, but the number of penalties for violent behavior skyrocketed by 240%.  On the ice, fewer injuries resulted with more soccer players able to participate more fully in the game while on skates.  However, the proportion of injuries due to body-on-body contact vs. falling due to uncontrolled movement (slipping, over-speeds, inability to maneuver) rose sharply with many more injuries due to accident happening at the expense of fewer from player-to-player interaction.

Other interesting data also emerged from the study.  First, soccer players were less likely to last through a single quarter (average was 2 minutes 18 seconds) of a hockey game while most hockey players were usually unable to complete more than 30 minutes of soccer play.  Physical conditioning played a key role in this relationship as soccer players were clearly prone to injury on the ice and hockey players were definitely not built for continual running across several acres of grass.

It became apparent that the comparison of the two sports to answer the question of which sport itself is harder to play was quite impossible.  Comparisons of player toughness and fortitude were, however, easily made.  Hockey players definitely take the cake for sheer toughness and strength, able to dish out and receive more punishment than soccer players.  On the other hand, soccer players had much more stamina and expended energy to play time ratios than their counterparts.

All told, I think I’d rather get in a fistfight with Beckham.  Boogard is already missing most of his teeth, so he has little to lose.

Craig Agranoff is an entrepreneur and national social media consultant, as well as a noted specialist in online reputation management and monitoring.

His first book, Do It Yourself Online Reputation Management, was recently published and is available on Amazon.