I regularly see soccer fans discuss in forums why they no longer find the game as exciting as they used to.

Is it just a normal part of getting older?

Is it the ridiculous levels of commercialization?

There is a different answer I find a lot more compelling: optimization.

The key change that sucked the magic out of soccer in the past two decades is personified by no one better than Pep Guardiola.

Watching a team coached by Pep Guardiola is as exciting as watching paint dry.

He took the idea that the opponents can’t score goals if your team has the ball to extreme levels. His teams keep passing the ball around with no attempt to create anything.

It’s not uncommon for his team to have the ball 70%+ of the time.

His team keeps passing the ball, minimizing errors, and waiting for statistically optimal opportunities to shoot on the goal.

When you practice little else but passing the ball around and remove any element of “play” from the equation it is impossible for the other team to steal the ball from you.

When his team scores a goal they could keep passing the ball around, back and forth, from left to right until the other team became too tired to keep chasing them.

This statistically-optimal strategy is undeniably efficient. The trophies keep piling up as his system grinds opponents into dust.

So of course coaches everywhere started copying Guardiolas’s methods.

But it’s neither fun to play like this, to play against a team playing like this, or to watch a team playing like this.

Elements that make soccer fun and exciting in the first place are removed from the game. No dribblings or risky passes allowed.

The position called “Number 10”, creative playmakers, has effectively become extinct.

There are few spots for creative mavericks like Ronaldinho, Zidane, or Maradona in modern soccer.

And that’s why soccer has become boring.

This optimization plague isn’t unique to soccer. It’s everywhere.

In the name of energy and cost optimization most modern buildings are soulless blocks of concrete.

Books, movies, Netflix shows, or Spotify playlists, YouTube Shorts are engineered to hit all the right triggers in the average consumers mind.

The TikTokification of social media algorithms flooded everyone’s timelines with soulless content optimized for maximum engagement.

Gone are the Mad Men days of risky campaigns built on big creative insights. Today marketing is all about incrementally optimizing CAC/LTV ratios.

The education system is no longer about curiosity and learning. It’s about optimizing test scores and gaming the system.

Fine-dining restaurants have become formulaic exercises in producing Michelin-optimal menus.

City centers all around the world contain the exact same profit-maximizing mix of the same brands.

Even games like poker and chess are now dominated by robot-like humans executing expected-outcome-optimal algorithms..

So much of modern life has been optimized to a point where not a single drop of soul is left.

Once you start dissecting something, put it under the brutal microscope of optimization, and start measuring and maximizing every little detail, you inevitably start creating soulless pieces of slop.

But the good news is that there is still plenty of soul out there.

It just takes some extra effort to find it.

For example, instead of listening to whatever slop Spotify pushes in their playlists, you can listen to whole albums recommended by people with taste.

Great artists still produce amazing albums all the time. But good luck trying to find them on the Spotify homepage. You have to put in the effort to discover them yourself and type in the actual album titles to find them.

The same is true for books and movies.

There is a German site run by movie crititics with taste that I trust.

I usually just watch whatever movie they recommend.

You never hear about these movies if you stick to whatever streaming providers are recommending.

You have to go to the cinema or pay to stream them or dig deep into streaming provider catalogues.

You can still run risky marketing campaigns.

You can play Short Deck poker and Fischer Random chess.

You can still let your kids roam freely and play. You can self-educate and hire an aristocratic tutor.

You can still subscribe to magazines run by editors with taste that are then neatly printed and delivered to your doorstep.

But the core issue is that on average all of these will suck a little bit more than your default optimized experience.

Albums typically contain not just great or even good songs.

Not every movie recommended by a movie critic will hook you right away.

Most risky marketing campaign will fail spectacularly.

But that’s precisely the point.

The imperfections, rough edges and unpredictability are where the soul lives.

It’s what makes the human experience human.

Everyone wants frictionless experiences these days. But smooth experiences are boring. Rough edges are where personality lives.

When you do find something with actual soul, the payoff is way bigger than optimized alternatives.