I don't think they'd need to go so far as to actually eliminate the offside rule, but perhaps liberalizing it a bit would help ramp up the excitement (read: scoring chances). For example, now, a player is called offside if so much as his fingernail is ahead of the defender when the ball is played. I'd see it as quite an improvement if the rule was simply tweaked to consider a player onside if he has no more than, say, one full step on a defender (or is, say, within arm's reach of that defender) when the ball is played. American sporting tastes are not attuned to games where the most common scores for a team are 0 or 1. Ninety minutes of offensive futility, where your team may only generate two or three legitimate scoring chances in the entire hour and a half, just doesn't resonate well with a typical American sports fan. I enjoy watching soccer, especially the World Cup, but I don't have as much grasp of its nuances, i.e., formations, tactics, positioning, etc, as I'd like. When I watch a game, the main thing that stands out to me is legitimate, dangerous scoring chances . . . and IMO, the game would be considerably more attractive if there were a handful more of these per game. I like the ebb and flow of a game where a team could take, lose, and then retake the lead during the course of a game. That doesn't happen very often when there are only an average of about 2 1/2 total goals scored in the entire game. My guess is that if they were to ever figure out a set of rules that wouldn't mangle or make the game completely unrecognizable, and lead to average scores of about 4-3, the game's popularity in the US would take an appreciable turn for the better.