So here’s the logic underlying soccer’s rules: the game is supposed to scale down, so that an ordinary youth or recreation-league game can be played under the exact same rules used by the pros. This means that the rules must be designed so that the game can be run by a single referee, without any special equipment such as a scoreboard.
G. Zschaler, A. Traulsen, and T. Gross. Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information, and Computing Systems, volume 87 of Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, chapter 50, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, (2012)