This brings to mind one of my favorite TV shows, One Outs. It's about the strategies that a clever and "unsportsmanlike" player brings to a baseball team, exploiting the rules while violating the spirit of the game.
As one example: in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings. If the weather is bad and teams are unable to continue due to rain, a <5 inning game is considered invalid and scheduled for a later date. If one team is behind and knows there's a high chance of rain later in the day, the pitcher can begin drawing out the length of innings by intentionally giving up hits. (After all, it doesn't matter how many runs he gives up if the game is canceled.) This, in turn, gives the opposite incentive to the opposing team's offense, who wants their runners to be declared "out" so that the inning can end faster. There's a real-time rules-gaming arms race as both teams test the bounds of what's legally permissible, driven by incentives that lead to a very unusual game of baseball.
MLB has added a pitch clock to speed up games. 30 seconds between batters, 15 seconds between pitches with the bases empty, 20 seconds with runners on. This has sped up games by an average of 26 minutes!
Sounds a lot like the episode of South Park where the kids don't want to stay in the little league playoffs so they can enjoy their summer break, so they're trying to intentionally lose. Unfortunately so are all the other teams in the playoffs.
> in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings ... if one team is behind and knows there's a high chance of rain later in the day, the pitcher can begin drawing out the length of innings by intentionally giving up hits.
There are two bigger strategic wrinkles here:
1. Both teams only need to complete five innings (which is stipulated in the rulebook as making 15 outs, because baseball) if the visitors have the lead. If the home team has the lead after the visitors make 15 outs, then it's considered a complete game with only 4.5 innings played.
2. The batter can refuse to take first base, even in the event of a walk, and be called out instead. In the past you could game this, but with the pitch clock and limits on pitcher substitutions and mound visits, there's now a hard upper bound on how long an inning could be intentionally drawn out.
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I'm actually more interested in how the teams might go about this without the umpires noticing, because the umpire crew chief has complete authority over the game. Once they realize what's happening they can just tell both teams to knock it off and, at their own discretion, suspend the game anyway.
Sports is one of the most fascinating and underexplored examples of Goodhart's law (collapsing correlation between the metric and a goal).
One of the most widely known examples of this is a London 2012 badminton scandal, when tournament design led to misaligned incentives for teams (it was beneficial for them to lose a game, to meet with less formidable opponent known beforehand). But there are dozens of such cases across many sports. One of the attempts to collect them can be found in a paper "When sports rules go awry" (DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2016.06.050).
UPD. Thanks to sibling comment, good find - youtube playlist from Secret Base "Weird Rules": https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUXSZMIiUfFSVTX8z2Xl5...
There was a period in world rally championship where it was beneficial not to win day one or day two of a 3 day championship.
This resulted in hilarious but rational situations where top racers would race like maniacs for the entire day, then 200meters before the end of the a last stage of the day slow down and crawl for say 12 seconds, so they would come a second behind somebody else and not lead the pack the next day (leading the pack effectively means clearing the path on gravel roads for the rest of the racers)
It was meant to even the field by handicapping the front runners (the Mario kart approach I suppose). But it backfired spectacularly.
I think they went back to randomization after that.
The game clock is one of the more common rules that tends to warp gameplay in this way, with teams that are ahead trying to avoid play and run out the clock rather than continue to engage in the contest. The other team, meanwhile, resorts to increasingly desperate tactics like pulling the goalie, intentionally committing fouls, or laterals and trying for the onside kick.
The meta-game of game design: how do you design a game whose mechanics lead to incentives that align with your intentions is a fascinating area. It also has deep connections to policy design in politics.
In the political arena, it gets so much more complex because you have disagreement on intentions and people deliberately obfuscating their intentions. So you've got people arguing over legislation who are trying to aiming the laws have different emergent properties.
Also interesting is how lots of rules have standard penalties - and this turns them into potential strategic components rather than something you aren't allowed to do. It's not cheating to break these rules, it's considered part of the game.
You find this in online games quite a bit - the have a qualifying round in a tournament which divides players into ten divisions. The top three out of ten in the top four divisions get a great prize, and the top one in the remaining get a slightly lesser version. So it makes sense to smurf yourself into a lower division and hope to win the one prize than compete with equal skill players for the three prizes.
One other weird thing: When a soccer player who is not a goalkeeper prevents a goal by catching the ball with their hands, they "just" get a red card and the attacking team a penalty, even if they would have certainly scored otherwise.
Luis Suarez successfully used this in the 2010 World Cup quarter-finals in the Uruguay vs Ghana game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM-29hy-Qyw - Ghana missed the penalty, which led to a penalty shootout, which Uruguay won.
Skimming through the laws of the game (https://downloads.theifab.com/downloads/laws-of-the-game-202...) I do wonder whether a trainer and up to 4 other players (because a team which can field less than 7 players forfeits the game) climbing on the crossbar until it breaks could be advantageous in some situation as well since
> If it cannot be repaired the match must be abandoned.
Very unsportsmanlike indeed.
Interestingly in rugby they have a concept called a "penalty try" - effectively when there's a particular infringement against a team in a scoring position, the referee awards the points to the attacking team as if they had gone ahead and scored.
See here for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAq-xp54j1w
The play gets repeated a couple of times and explained in some detail throughout but you can see what happens in the first few seconds of the video - blue is about to receive the ball in an incredibly advantageous position (a couple of steps away from scoring) white performs a deliberate foul in defending that play (they deliberately knock it forward and out of play, without trying to catch it). There's more to it than just "a very egregious foul against an attacker" but it's a good-enough simplification for our purposes.
People are already quite resistant to VAR in football already (got my own opinions on that) so I think there's virtually zero chance of football adopting this. But if ever there was an argument for it, it's definitely that Suarez case in 2010, Ghana were cheated out of an historic World Cup semifinal appearance.
> > Skimming through the laws of the game (https://downloads.theifab.com/downloads/laws-of-the-game-202...) I do wonder whether a trainer and up to 4 other players (because a team which can field less than 7 players forfeits the game) climbing on the crossbar until it breaks could be advantageous in some situation as well since If it cannot be repaired the match must be abandoned.
Most of these rules are there, but if somebody were to try and obviously abuse them (for example damaging the crossbar or the net) they'd be disqualified due to common sense.
For example, back in 1991 during the Quarter Final of the European Club Cup Marseille was winning 1-0 against AC Milan, they had the victory in their pocket but in stoppage time a blackout hit Marseille's Velodrome stadium and lights went out. After a few minutes the electricity returned but stadium lights would need 15-20 minutes to be ready again.
AC Milan board stormed onto the pitch and took the occasion to forcefully send their players in the locker-room and de-facto retire the team hoping to somehow avoid defeat and have some ground to protest for a repetition of the match. Their claim is that during the blackout TV crews and fans descended onto the pitch and there would be grounds for a disqualification of Marseille or at least a replay.
UEFA didn't like that at all and instead banned the club board and the whole A.C. Milan squad from European competition for 2 years.
http://tdifh.blogspot.com/2012/03/20-march-1991-night-lights...
the game would be abandoned, but almost certainly it would be a 3-0 forfeit win to the opposition. perhaps if 3-0 goal difference was advantageous?
Stuff like this is why I fell in love with soccer.
It didn't come quickly. I was not very engaged with youth soccer as a kid although looking back it was one of very few "safe spaces" for me as a kid where being bullied wasn't a problem. I came to see youth soccer as part of declining social mobility in the U.S. If you were playing little league maybe you could dream of being Babe Ruth but there just wasn't any ladder out of youth soccer at that time.
Last December I started working on a smart RSS reader that works a bit like TikTok or Stumbleupon and found that my first classification model struggled to tell that I liked the NFL and hated the Premier League and that got me to reading a lot of sports articles and developing a taxonomy to support feature engineering.
After reading articles about games lost by own goals, thinking about how I'd feel if it was my team in danger of relegation, etc. I found I really found soccer interesting after all.
Relegation and promotion are just such good systems that all sports should have them
> Football has a lot of strange rules – like Ted Lasso, I still don’t understand exactly how the offside rule works
Aw, come on, you cannot start a soccer article with that :(
Considering how 'tanking' for talent acquiring has become a strategy in american sports, I hope at least we get to see this scenario with both teams trying to score own-tds/baskets/etc and fiercily defending the opponents goal in a match
There's also the situation in American football where the team on defense purposely lets another team score a touchdown rather than stop them for a field goal, in order to have some time left to try to regain the lead. Also vice versa, where the player on offense will purposely fall before going into the end zone.
This one though is at least somewhat of a double-edged sword, as it's not a 100% given that the team's kicker will make a field goal (probably around 90-95% success rate.)
is this because the bottom team gets the first draft pick?
In the NHL, you get 2 points for winning, 0 points for losing in regulation, and 1 point for losing in overtime.
The obvious result (to everyone but the creators of the rule I guess) is that, if a game is tied near the end of regulation, it is best for both sides if the game goes to overtime. There are 2 points available for a game decided in regulation, but 3 if decided in overtime. I assume both teams would sit quietly and wait for overtime if it were tolerated.
Unless there is a scenerio where one team really doesn't want the other to get even a point?
Speaking of NHL and weird rules iirc there's an emergency goalie that can be pulled out of the crowd to fill in for either team.
Is there a reason for this difference compared to hockey everywhere else? As far as I'm aware both IIHF and most leagues do 3 points which are either split 3/0 or 2/1, withe same 5minute 3v3 followed by shootout as the NHL does. The only difference being the 2pt win thing which is really odd if you ask me. The idea that a fixed number of points exists (3 multiplied by the number of games played) in the table regardless of outcomes feels natural.
This one boggles my mind because broadcasters don't want games to go into overtime. A 3-point system where overtime win/losses are split 2/1 emphasizes winning in the final few minutes, which is exciting to both viewers and businessmen. Maybe one day they'll switch.
That's only the case if neither team feels like they have a decided advantage before OT to win. Otherwise, you don't want the other team to get a point, because you're competing against them in total points for playoff position.
Why is that obvious? Why would a team want to allow their opposition to score any points at all?
Adding to the discussion on the rules set in soccer, I've always found it bad design that the referee has only yellow and red cards for penalizing individual players. Especially the red card is a hard penalty, which leads to the referee having too much influence on the outcome, and to counter that, the referees don't like to give out cards too easily.
Now, the consequence of that is for example that players fake injuries constantly, as they can't be reasonably penalized, but the faking might yield a penalty kick or a red card to the other team. However, it makes the game incredibly cringeworthy to watch.
Contrast this to ice hockey, where the minimal penalty is a timeout of 2 minutes. It's enough to put your team in trouble, but you can recover by playing careful defence for 2 minutes. So if a player fakes injuries or otherwise behaves in a minor bad way, the referee can give them a 2 minute penalty - enough to punish, but not enough to skew the rest of the game.
If you fake injuries, or fall in the penalty area, you might get a yellow / red card. So no cheaties here, especially with VAR now in place.
Those who dive can be penalized though. In the Europa League Final just yesterday a player on Roma got a yellow card for simulation trying to get a penalty call. Can the refs do better at catching these? Yes. But to say there's no recourse or it's not penalized is just wrong.
> Any goal scored in extra time would count as two goals
That seems like a really strange rule to have
something similar could arise even without double goals in extra time. let’s say your opponents have a man sent off, and you’re up by 1 with minutes left to play, but you need 2 or 3 to qualify. an own-goal to give yourself 30 extra minutes to score those few goals against a weakened opposition is probably the best choice
it’s "no draws" rather than "double goals" that creates the unusual incentive. double goals just exacerbates it
Yeah, I can't think of a plausible rationale for this rule. FTA:
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No match could end in a draw; if the teams were tied at the end of regular time, they would go into sudden death extra time. But! Any goal scored in extra time would count as two goals. This was presumably done because this tournament, like many, used goal difference to break ties in the qualifying groups. (Goal difference = total number of goals they’ve scored minus the number of goals they’ve conceded.) So that extra time “golden goal” would give a team an edge in the overall competition. Little did the organisers know that it would also lead to one of the strangest football games ever seen.
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Such a rule has no impact within a game, it doesn't change the basic premise that a tie game goes to sudden death and next goal wins. But potentially weird scenarios are actually pretty easy to think of if you just consider the rule for a couple of minutes.
Sometimes you can find examples of metagaming even in the design of metagames itself.
For the largest part of the soccer world cup, the metagame is straightforward - win matches, don't lose - and casual viewers can easily follow by just concentrating on the match at hand and having some superficial knowledge of the rules.
Except for the final matchday of the group stage: That's when everyone suddenly becomes a master strategist and soccer expert and there are complex discussions everywhere about groups, tables, ranking criteria, tie breakers, victory pathways and hypotheticals as people are trying to keep track of the different ways how their team can make it out of the group stage.
Then the knockout stage begins and the game is suddenly very simple again.
Here's a list I made of how reversing incentives might look for a range of games, including Soccer/Football: https://www.jefftk.com/p/playing-to-lose
This was prompted by a conversation with Ben Orlin, who wrote up his version as https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2014/06/11/playing-to-lose-o...
Previous discussion 35289875
How do you defend against an opponent trying to score an own goal? Wouldn’t it be off-sides if you got between the player and their goal?
No, you'd be offside if your own team member passed you the ball while you were between the player and their goal. You wouldn't be offside if the other team had the ball.
Football would be a nightmare if players were hanging out in the other team's box, waiting for the ball to be hoofed upfield to them so they could tap it into the back of the net. Offside stops this from happening by making sure that the receiving player is not in front of the opposition's defensive line.
As long as a nominal defender (not counting the goalie) is in between you and the goal, I don't think you're off-side. So presumably it means you have to a) maintain possession of the ball or 2) clear the ball before all other defenders are able to make it past whoever currently has possession. A) sounds a lot easier than 2), though.
No. A player in an offside position is absolutely allowed to receive the ball from an opponent who deliberately plays the ball.
As others have said it would not be offside under current rules, but to answer your question the only realistic way to defend against an own goal would be time wasting, faking injury, geberally keeping the ball away from the 16 yard box.
No because they control the ball. You are only offside if your team is controling the ball + you are actively involved in the play [your team's attack]
This makes me think of unforeseen consequences of legislation. The outcome doesn't always match the intent.
> Football has a lot of strange rules – like Ted Lasso, I still don’t understand exactly how the offside rule works.
Spoiler alert, he did figure it out in the end
He started not knowing a thing about soccer, but ended up knowing at least one thing about football.
Every now and then, it seems as if some referees are a bit unclear on the details as well. (It is admittedly a bit squishier than when there is a hard and fast line on some field or court.
My bet would be he hasn't fully understood it. Some of his sentences are clunky and messed up his football terms.
The offside rule gets far more attention than it deserves and in my opinion it's happened due to the increased popularity and quality of live televised football over the last ~30 years.
To me the best place to start is to understand what the rule is trying to accomplish. It's designed to discourage a player hanging out by their opponents goal the entire game in the hopes that somehow their team can somehow get the ball to them and they'll have only the goalkeeper to beat (or whatever poor defender was tasked with tracking them) - "poaching" we'd call it in 5 or 7-aside games where there is no offside rule.
How do you do that? Well you just try to make a rule that says "if you're inside your opponents half your teammates can't pass you the ball unless there's at least two players between you and the opponents goal line".
It only becomes tricky to explain or understand because:
- it is encoded within the laws of the game in a very specific way that's a little tricky to digest in its entirety
- most people know some bits of it but only half-remember little details and try to explain all of that at once and confuse both themselves and the person they're explaining it to
- some people think that the ball needs to be passed in a given direction, leading to (rare) situations where they're unable to explain an offside call or to incorrectly describe it as wrong
- some try to explain it in terms of one attacking player being beyond one defender, forgetting that it's actually two players on the defending side, one of whom is usually-but-not-always the goalkeeper
- people try to include exceptions when they explain it (you can't be offside from a throw-in, for example)
- local football associations try to tweak it to be more fair or to appease fans (but inevitably make it more complex and piss off fans). They might change it so you're offside even if you didn't personally receive the ball for example.
- it is often explained to or by someone who has had a couple of beers and is attempting to demonstrate it by moving pint glasses or beermats around on a pub table
- if you want to be technically correct, it's not just "is a player in an offside position" it is "is any part of an attacking player's body that is allowed to play the ball offside" (i.e. you can technically be offside of your head, legs, chest, ass are offside .. but if it's only part of your arm that's in a given position you're not offside)
- etc
Each added detail or half-remembered corner-case can make any explanation more convoluted and hard to understand.
But for 99% of situations the sentence "if you're inside your opponents half your teammates can't pass you the ball unless there's at least two players between you and the opponents goal line" will suffice.
If you want to simplify it as "... at least one defender ..." that's fine in most cases. A player on the attack who is trying to avoid being offside will just look out for the last defender, assuming the goalkeeper will be stood near their goal. A player who is attacking will play the ball assuming their teammates were onside unless they're obviously not. A player who is defending will keep an eye on the furthest-back defender - there will be a loud member of the defense coordinating this, telling them to move up or down the field.
If you want to think about it in more detail, remember what parts of the body the attacker is allowed to touch the ball with.
If you're watching a match in person, you likely won't be in a position to make call it in any more detail than that anyway.
If you're watching on TV the commentators will break an offside call down in excruciating detail for you and show you lots of stupid graphics and slow-mo replays.
After years of watching my kids, I am not sure the refs always know what is offside either.
Growing up I always made fun of soccer and considered it a game for uncircumcised foreigners, but I have to like it now because my kids play. The worst thing about soccer is that no one, outside the ref, really knows how much time is left in the game. That and flopping in the box to get penalty shots.
Wiki article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados_4%E2%80%932_Grenada
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/74831-barbados-vs-grenad...
Note this isn't possible in today's rules, afaik
I think it's safe to say that there will never again be a high level competition where overtime goals count double.
each tournament has its own set of rules, so there’s no one "today's rules" for it not to be possible in; however, in all current major international tournaments, only zero-sum games ever go to extra time, which rules this out
Seems quite logical. I break out the egg-timer in board games when people are dilly-dallying.
why drive like maniacs only to slow down at the end ? might as well drive slower throughout the stage ? and be most aggressive on day 3 ?
It would still be important to rank high, just not win.
Because you wanted second place, not third or latter? Maybe because you didn’t want the track too chewed up?
Give a good show, keep sponsors happy?
The end of American Football games is so frustrating because of this, with a team just constantly taking a knee to run out the clock. It makes the last 2 minutes of the game useless.
Constant fouls in Basketball hoping the opposing team will miss a free throw is another frustrating tactic that drags the last 2 minutes on forever, in what is usually a forgone conclusion anyway.
I find clock management to be an interesting aspect of the game in American Football, because literally every second counts. It's one of the things that separates elite players and coaches from everyone else. Tom Brady, for example, was renowned for his ability to move the ball down the field and score in the last two minutes of a game.
Sure sometimes it means the game is effectively over 2 minutes early if the leading team gets possession and the trailing team has no timeouts remaining. But in that case it just has the effect of shifting the decisive moment a little bit earlier (if it's a close game). And the rare games that end with 0 seconds on the clock on a game winning touchdown or field goal are truly memorable.
On the contrary, the clock management makes American football games more exciting, because you know if your team can just get one first down you will win. The tension heightens because you see the finish line.
But it does lead to unsatisfying situations where a person layer intentionally goes down instead of scoring because he doesn’t want to give the ball back to the other team.
I agree with your basketball complaint. The worst is that a team up 3 also has incentive to foul the losing team because they can only score 2 at the line.
That's true for the team that's leading, but the other side of this is that if the team that's behind has the ball, they have the perverse incentive to draw a pass interference call even more than make a clean play, due to PI rules being so soft and in favor of the offense. Maybe not as much of a foregone conclusion as a kneel-down, but definitely the past few seasons it has begun to feel like the offense has a notable advantage.
You are allowed to go to the kitchen after 58minutes.
Right. Do you have any good recommendations to read on this matter?
Here are a couple of good papers on how metrics distort systems and what can be done to mitigate this. [1] [2].
And then a new post by Cedric Chin on practical examples of mitigating Goodhart's law in Amazon. Really good read: [3]
But generally, I feel like not many people or organizations care about this. The non-profit sports world is conservative and slow, organizations and corporations are also often slow, and there some psychological/social effects linked to the metrics-that-don't-work-anymore.
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- [1] Categorizing Variants of Goodhart's Law - https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585
- [2] Building Less Flawed Metrics: Dodging Goodhart and Campbell's Laws - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334478956_Building_...
Spiritually related: examples of RL algorithms exploiting glitches in the physics engine (clipping into the ground to shoot forward at incredible speed) or gaming the goal state: (Agent that's supposed to learn how to walk instead evolving a body with a single long leg that just falls forward-- getting a high speed score with low complexity penalty) https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03453 https://www.deepmind.com/blog/specification-gaming-the-flip-...
I don't but I'd love to read them if anyone else does.
A closely related question is: Should playing the fun way, and playing the optimal way be the same thing? I used to think think the answer was yes, but Spelunky 2 made me doubt; in Spelunky using a bomb or a rope is rarely optimal, but it can make things simpler and more fun. I think it's a well designed game, so the fact that optimal play and fun play are different is making me think.
> Should playing the fun way, and playing the optimal way be the same thing?
This is something that game designers, especially in roguelikes where there is a lot of procedural generation and combinatorial gameplay experiences, think about a lot.
There are all sorts of related questions:
* What should the space of optimal strategies look like? A single point that players should try to discover and optimize for? A region where there are a variety of equally valid ways?
* What are the discincentives for non-optimal play? Should it just be boring, or should the game actively punish the player for not following an expected strategy?
* What to do about strategies that are extremely effective but not fun? In roguelikes, that's things like "farming" where you find an easy to kill monster that breeds and just mow through hundreds of them to grind XP. Should the game try to avoid those scenarios so that players don't have to make an uncomfortable choice between maximizing versus fun, or should that be up to players?
It took me a decade to realize my best friend and I play friendly games differently. It was most obvious in magic the gathering - he would consistently optimize the same deck week after week, whereas I'd be bringing new decks with new and fairly general mechanics all the time. Similarly, he only ever played one character in smash bros or overwatch whereas I would heavily rotate.
Ultimately his goal was win percentage and optimal play - mastery of specific thing. I was going for fun and interesting wins and variety, and didn't care if I lost 90% of the time of that one win was AWESOME :-)
(Possibly relatedly - he brave a very very good Java specialist fter a decade of specific experience. I became a syaadmim then architect them ops manager type generalist :).
For games at least, attempting to be highly prescriptive in the rules risks strangling the game. Basketball was designed to be played without dribbling. By the time players started single-handed dribbling it was pretty clear what's the more interesting, exciting game to watch and play
It also changes the nature of the game.
If you can move with the ball, then a single highly competent player becomes very valuable. A superstar.
If you are forced to work as a team since you can’t move, the team has to setup formations to get the ball across the court.
That's how its close cousin netball is played.
What, it was supposed to be pass-only, like ultimate frisbee?
How meta can you go? I proposed a taxonomy here: https://alexshroyer.com/posts/2022-04-30-Fantasy-Fantasy-Foo...
I like the idea of a two-phase game, where for the first phase (most of the game), you're motivated to play your hardest for the entire duration, because the score imbalance wouldn't mean you win, but would just mean you have that much more of a relative advantage in the second phase.
And then the second phase could be evenly-matched, or it could be David and Goliath, but then still anything could happen.
It's bold to assume that politics is about policy design.
Politics is absolutely about policy design, but there are many many higher-order social emergent phenomena on top that obscure it.
Imagine you had an organization in Washington DC called "Other Congress". It has the same giant beautiful buildings as Congress. It has the same rules and and parliamentary procedure, the same number of members, the same election schedule. In other words, it is 100% identical to normal Congress. It even passes bills. Except... those bills have no force of law. It's all make believe.
That Other Congress would never attract any significant traction or participation.
Note that this sounds sort of like a shadow cabinet, but it's not. The whole point of a shadow cabinet is to act as a social mechanism for influencing the real cabinet.
It may be that an Other Congress would end up functioning sort of like a shadow cabinet. But even then, the only reason anyone would participate in it is to affect the real Congress, and the reason they do that is because real Congressional policy carries weight.
I've always felt basketball is the worst with this of the major sports. It is a standard strategy to foul at the end of games when losing (or even if winning by 3 in the final seconds). The punishment for fouling is to allow the fouled player to get free throws, but free throws are a skill and not all players are skilled at it. So if you can foul the right person you can often change the probability of the game.
A simple rule change could end this. For example, a foul in the last two minutes is a free throw and the ball.
Late game basketball fouls are good meta though. The strategic trade - a great chance at scoring, in exchange for the time the offense would have taken - is reasonable, and avoids the wasted last two-three minutes of American football. A team that’s down, but in contact isn’t totally dominated by the clock, but has the length of the game isn’t totally unbounded like baseball or tennis
Yeah, that's kinda expected. But what I'm more worried about in sports is when metrics(rules) become engrained in that sports culture and start shaping the sport itself.
Like, if an athletics high-jump champion has to jump over a fence with concrete ground – would s/he be still the best in the world? Probably not, because they're focusing on the Fosberry flop technique which works only in a competition setting with a soft landing mat.
Or in figure skating, where officials think that rules should reward "complex elements" and now everyone is chasing "complex" elements (quadruple jumps), skipping the "easy" elements (actual skating skills).
One of the problem with a metric substituting the original True Goal is also when this True Goal is not defined (or different people defined it differently). This type of Goodhart's law is hard to fix. I'm not sure how many sports really have shared understanding of what's a true goal in their sports.
I see it as a principal agent problem [0]. The agent being the sport players working according the game rules to maximize their gains. It could be pouring countless hours into mastering the sport, studying the rules to come up with best strategies [1], deliberately losing (e.g. for bribery), among others. The principal(s) are the perceived sportsmanship, while ill defined, of a particular sports
It also happens to software engineering. The value of your code is solely depends on how many times it is being willingly run. Be it people using it happily or another piece of code is calling it without caveats. But we come up with all sorts of metrics, DORA, SPACE, developer experience, what not. For most family/small business, like restaurants, groceries, builders, etc, the only thing that matters are customers willing to return. Somehow people think that by mimicking what big companies' management practice does can makes you one of the big companies. While the most important thing, making things that people want, is grossly overlooked. People used to make fun of MBAs parachuting into management right out of school. That trademark is certainly open to all titles now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
As far as I know, neither the high jump nor the pole vault ever had hard landing areas. I'm sure that foam rubber is a lot better than dried cow manure, but guys were still going way over 6' in the jump and 15' in the vault before foam rubber came along.
A good example of that is Australian Rules Football. Egregious fouls or non-play acts like time wasting or violence used to get a 15m penalty (you just get to walk 15m down the ground unimpeded). But one coach realised that the time gained in awarding and jogging the 15m allowed his team to set up defence which was a worthwhile tradeoff and instructed his players to regularly refuse to give the ball back and concede these penalties when it was necessary.
The league changed it to 50m to even it up. Funnily enough, in modern times the other rules have tightened so much that 50m is way overkill for most things it's awarded for.
Another example is pass interference in college football. It is a first down and 15 yards from the line of scrimmage.
Thus if you are getting beat on a play, rather than potentially allowing 40 or 50 yards and a touchdown, it is better to blatantly pass interfere (tackle the receiver before they get the ball, etc).
Or, you might just manage it without the ref spotting it, as late in a recent Super Bowl.
This is what is known as a "tactical foul" or taking one for the team
Exactly the same concept exists in NHL hockey by the way. In particular, if a player attacking an empty net (because the goaltender has been pulled late in the game to add another skater) is interfered with from behind, or a thrown stick disrupts his shot, the goal is just awarded on the assumption that the attacker would have almost certainly scored.
A similar concept exists in American football, but it is rarely invoked.
Good to get this cleared up. I had 5-0 in the back of my mind .. putting it down to too much SWOS back in the heyday
SWOS?
for those wondering why 3-0, it's based on tournament points scoring. you get 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw, a point for each goal (maximum of 3 points for goals) per game, and an additional point for the shutout. so, each game in tournament scoring is worth 7 points. after all of those points are added, goal differentials can come into consideration for tie breakers.
Unless you're talking about some extremely niche tournament, that's not how it works at all, in football at least. In the majority of league systems you get 3 points for a win, 1 point for a draw and that's it. If you are level on points with another team in your group after all games are played then there will be strictly defined rules for that tournament to separate the teams, often a combination of the following in some order of precedence:
- head-to-head results between tied teams
- total goal difference, i.e. sum(goals_scored) - sum(goals_conceded) across all games
- total goals scored across all games
- disciplinary record (number of yellow/red cards awarded against players)
If teams still cannot be separated, it'll fall back on something as simple and cruel as a coin-toss - though maybe they could go to extra time and penalties if the tied teams are playing each other in the last game. Maybe you're thinking of situations like rugby where you can get a "bonus point" games in group stages by scoring 4 tries or keeping the losing margin down to a handful of points.
In any case, I can't give a good reason as to why 3-0 is usually the score given for a walkover - I think it's just generally considered to be a convincing win that isn't too over-the-top.
Frequently I get a bunch of free Giants gear around November because my friends who are Giants fans are disgusted with how they are playing and don't want to be seen in them. If the NFL had relegation this couldn't happen so chronically.
On the other hand, promotion/relegation needs a big enough market to support multiple tiers. Amazingly, the UK has several layers of leagues that attract fans and seem to be economically viable (in some sense) but MLS struggles to attract any attention at all in the U.S. and how second and third tier leagues could be viable is beyond me.
The US has second, third, and fourth tier leagues already, though those are all part of USL rather than MLS. MLS has a lot more money than USL and isn't interested in promotion/relegation concepts because it is built like MLB/NBA and likes the gatekeeping aspects of those because that influences investment money and helps keep MLS comparatively rich. But USL thinks promotion/relegation could work in the US, they just don't think it can work that well if they don't also control the top tier league. From my understanding USL has quietly been hoping that play in the USL Championship league (their top tier and comparatively in the US market the "second tier" overall) could get competitive and interesting enough to usurp the MLS and put USL in a place to have the top-tier and move to a "proper" European-style relegation/promotion system.
I don't know that soccer in the US could support a promotion/relegation system but basketball, baseball, and football could. NCAA and MiLB are popular enough that lower leagues could be sustained.
I think it’s somewhat analogous to both NFL and college football being popular in the US. It’s incredible to me that people are so keen to watch college students play, but I hear it’s a pretty big deal.
Realistically, you can't run a draft/salary cap with promotion/relegation though, and I think those systems are better at ensuring equalisation. In Europe, the Premier League is the "best" competition because realistically 5 teams have a chance of ever winning the league. In other leagues like France, Italy and Spain, they are duopolies (at best).
Yeah, so (almost) every league in the world has chosen the chance of promotion over artificial equality. But this isn't really a "choice" because the league isn't (just) a business and the teams aren't "franchises" they are clubs. Half the point of having a well-functioning club is having a good youth org/academy which might give you a cheaper way of getting talent than having to sign it at market value.
I'd much rather watch my team finish in the middle of the French League every year of my entire life without any realistic chance of winning than watch a closed league with artificial balancing.
Time management is a huge important part of American football; books have been written about the (often unintuitive) results: https://johntreed.com/products/football-clock-management-5th...
The clock acts as an impossibly powerful defense that only comes to play for you after a time, and that can be exploited.
Or taking an intentional safety!
Exactly. Look up 76ers "The Process" if you want to see a huge example of it. They spent 3 years losing to reel in embiid and simmons.
Here's a Youtube video about an emergency goalie helping win a game a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlBsR1WIT0U
> Feb 22, 2020 Zamboni driver for the Toronto Marlies and emergency backup goalie David Ayres makes his NHL debut at 42 years of age, stopping 8 of 10 shots to give the Carolina Hurricanes a 6-3 win, all while stealing the show in Toronto.
The NHL’s overtime is pretty efficient though. There’s a short commercial break, then 5 minutes of 3-3 which is exciting and has a high probability of goals. Then a well paced shootout if it is still tied. So perhaps broadcasters are ok with a little extra time if they keep a large audience.
Note for the casual hockey fan: The NHL overtime system is different in the playoffs, since the playoffs requires clear winners and losers.
(Game 1 of the 2023 Eastern Conference Finals featured four overtime periods; and the tie-breaking/game-winning goal was scored after 139 minutes and 47 seconds of total game time, at 1:54 am EDT.)
Because it could be you who gets the point.
If it's tied near the end of regulation, your expectation value is 1. But if you and the other team wait it out and let it go into overtime, your expectation value is 1.5.
If teams don't play to win, and collaborate instead of compete every sport will be boring while maximizing "points" but loosing viewership.
This is why all teams don't always play for a draw and only go for victory only on minimum risk. This kind of cooperative behavior is awfully close to match fixing and likely to get banned / fined by a competent league (one that wants to make money).
Soccer has its share of embarrassments like the CONCAF game in the article or the disgrace of Gijón in 1980, usually this happened in national games (not much money), modern clubs play to win like what FC Mainz did with Dortmund on Saturday, because playing to win is why crowds watch and that what makes money.
But that's my point exactly. Imagine the following situation: you're the referee of the world cup finals, 60 minutes left in the game, a key player of a team clearly fakes an injury and they already have a yellow card from before. What do you do? Let the harmless violation pass and silently approve of faking injuries, or punish the player harshly and potentially decide the result of the game there? With stakes this high, I bet you feel the pressure to let it go.
If you say you would give the red card, what if it wasn't an obvious faking of an injury? The problem clearly is that you can't give a slap on the wrist penalty, it's all or nothing.
You give the red card. Period.
Nowadays, thanks to VAR, the controversial cases can be reviewed on the replay and referees have ample of time to make the call.
See my reply on the other comment, where I clarify the issue.
This incentive would be eliminated if goals earned in extra time didn't count towards goal differential at all.
The perverse incentive is because the goal differential is comparing apples to oranges with comparing a score of A-B with a play time of 90 mins to a score of X-Y with a play time of 120 mins.
Counting the extra time goal as two makes this even worse.
under normal football tournament rules, the reason this doesn't happen is because only zero-sum games go to extra time and anything else simply ends in a draw (i.e. no goal difference change)
you are correct that if they simply didn't count extra time goals towards goal difference the problem would also be fixed, but that would feel artificial as counting extra time goals as normal goals is typical in football - for example, extra time goals always count towards aggregate scorelines, whether the previous legs had extra time or not. it is comparing apples to oranges, but that's the expected behaviour, whereas forcibly avoiding draws is equally at fault, but not the expected behaviour in football
And goal differential as tiebreaker creates an incentive where just winning isn't enough
I think as long as you can’t gain extra time by playing deliberately badly, this is largely okay? it’s good to want to teams to go out and try to hammer each other rather than narrowly shithouse a 1-0, as has been very common in recent major tournaments. even so, a lot of big tournaments have switched to head-to-head tiebreakers recently
> Football would be a nightmare if players were hanging out in the other team's box, waiting for the ball to be hoofed upfield to them so they could tap it into the back of the net
this is the commonly-held wisdom on offside, but I’m a little sceptical of it. 7-a-side, 5-a-side and futsal manage just fine without the offside rule (admittedly on smaller pitches). I suspect that 11-a-side would just look different without offside, it wouldn’t be a completely broken game. your best defenders would still have fair battles with your best attackers, and midfielders-midfielders etc
At least one forward would hang close to the opponent's goalkeeper, guarded by a defender. Teams would be spread in length over the pitch. There will probably be many special strategies. Maybe everybody would be in the box when the other goalkeeper kicks the ball. That's prevented by offside now. BTW offside works only in the opponent's half of the pitch.
Field size makes all the difference. Try to play on full-size football field for 90 minutes and you start to understand a lot of weird rules and tactics in football.
I don't think it would be completely broken, per se, but as a spectacle I think it would be ruined...Obviously not a big concern for 7-a-side, 5-a-side, etc.
It wouldn't be a broken game in that it'd still function, but I can't imagine it'd be an enjoyable one to watch.
Interfering with the ball is sufficient to be called for off-side - you need to be in active play, but you can do that when your team doesn't have possession.
What you are describing would make attacking the keeper pointless for example when they dropped the ball from hand for a kickoff, cause that would be offside which is not true.
By your description Mandzukic's WC final goal should be offside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzN-ahqULc4
The "active play" part is a recent addition I think; at the time of this match it wasn't part of the law.
It’s always somewhat nonplussing (grammer?) when people say they are unclear on it. If you are past the last defender, on the opposing side of the field, when the ball is kicked to you, offsides.
It’s hard to get right though, which is different. Having both ref’d and played soccer, you absolutely need lineman watching the field closely.
Still, I was surprised when someone told me the rule was "at least two opponent players between you and the goal line" instead of only one. I had never thought of the keeper.
I was being a bit sarcastic. Obviously the refs know the rules. But it's fairly easy to get a bit wrong at the margins. I've reffed ice hockey by comparison and, while you may miss a call here and there it's pretty clear at least if you look at a slo-mo replay whether a call was right or not based on puck and skates position.
The player must be past the line of the ball for it to be offside too; it the ball is passed backwards or at the same line is not offside even if there are no defenders.
> The worst thing about soccer is that no one, outside the ref, really knows how much time is left in the game
This is also kind of a feature. Different kind of suspense. I don't mind it.
> That and flopping in the box to get penalty shots.
I don't like diving, but I can understand it to some extent. The ref misses a lot of the illegal contact.
Grabbing, pushing, pretty much anything you do with your hands to manipulate another player is illegal contact. Shoulder contact is mostly fine and the generally allowed strength and positioning play.
If you have someone doing subtle tactical fouls in the box (very common). The ref will probably miss it because it's hard to see the finer technical contact at 30-40 yards away. Then there's the safety issue. If you're a forward and you get plowed by a defender, it can be quite dangerous. There tends to be a size mismatch favoring the defender.
So exaggerating contact to make sure the ref is aware that it's occurred is a counter to potential defender gamesmanship, or worse.
I've never been able to do it, I keep my feet at even egregious fouls (really good balance) and consequently, despite probably hundreds of fouls in the box, I never get awarded penalties.
But... I still retain a bit of appreciation for the divers as I know what defenders would be like if the threat of it wasn't there.
Another common problem is the huge license keepers are granted with physical contact.
They know the rule, the problem is just that it's sometimes hard to see where the players are relative to each other the moment the ball leaves someone's foot so there are false positives and false negatives. Tech and replays make it less and less of a problem but it takes away from the game in my opinion. It's becoming too techie.
> Growing up I always made fun of soccer and considered it a game for uncircumcised foreigners
This made me actually lol
You would still target the same time you want , just the way you are achieving will be achieve it differently .
just giving more points for finishing in day 1 or 2 could have also solved the problem I think
You don’t know what is going to be second or any other place , every one is going to be doing same thing . You would only know what the current leader board looks like .
Remember rally is raced against the clock not against other cars.
If you had a target time you should be be able pace yourself reasonably close to that time ?
Depending on your placement, you might. I.e. If my biggest competitor is ahead of me in order, the team will radio me their split times and finish times and tell me exactly the finish time I need to be second behind them. Again, the system intentionally put champions up front, so everybody behind them knew the champions finish time. It was a self reinforcing system :-/
Everyone wants to see the finish line in a race ? Better slow half way in where no one is watching and finish in style ?
>And the rare games that end with 0 seconds on the clock on a game winning touchdown or field goal are truly memorable.
Doesn't feel rare anymore, and I'd argue it's a manufactured phenomenon. Weather plays almost no role in games any longer, with the majority of stadiums indoors and played on perfectly consistent synthetic grass. The game has tilted notably in favor of the offense, with roughing the passer, pass interference, spearing, and other calls more strongly enforced or heightened in the same of player safety. To be clear I'm not arguing against player safety, but it has become almost impossible to sack a quarterback without drawing a penalty. Given these rules, the strategy becomes to keep the score close and use the clock to win the game in the last two minutes. Sure, it leads to the excitement of the last second win / loss, but when that becomes an almost pre-ordained scenario (barring the case of an overwhelming disparity in skills of the two teams), then it really isn't exciting anymore.
I don't believe the average sacks per game has changed much. Haven't crunched all the numbers but this has sacks back to the 2003 season [0]. I generally agree though, the NFL wants a consistent and exciting product; for a while now that seems to mean high scoring, offensive games.
https://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/stat/sacks-per-game?date=20...
> But it does lead to unsatisfying situations where a person layer intentionally goes down instead of scoring because he doesn’t want to give the ball back to the other team.
I even like this part because it shows situational awareness, and the willingness of a player to put team goals ahead of their own stats. But I could see how it would be disappointing for fantasy football players, for example.
I don't think anyone rooting for the losing team in that situation likes it though. They want them to go for a play and hope for the miracle turnover.
Having been in the situation of rooting for the losing team many times, it's fine with me. Fans understand how the clock works (and commentators also keep people informed) - and that if their team doesn't get a stop on the next play, the game is effectively over. And the rules are the rules - sometimes they work out in your favor, sometimes they work against you. As long as they are applied fairly, I'm happy.
Although sometimes it's wise come back 50 minutes later for the very last minutes of a tight Grand Final.
https://youtu.be/_qLF1qFn6u8?t=6477
( WTF is AFL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_SqfNNfhmM )
Wow that's a pretty heroic final mark!
Great work, thank you for sharing!
Sounds like he was a Spike and you were more of a Johnny or a Timmy: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/timmy-johnny-...
Absolutely! I ended up getting the "Timmy the power gamer" unglued card and put it on a landyard :-P - but in reality I'm a mix: I'm in it for fun like Timmy, but less with big creature and more with deck building and creative wins with unpopular cards that rarely pay off, like Johnny.
Yeah, reading the original rules, that's exactly how it sounds.
And then some Yale players realized they could "pass it to themselves" by moving while it bounced off the floor.
Right, but I can come up with an infinite number of examples. Take javelin throw – the essential skill is, well, throwing a javelin. There are many things that can theoretically be measured – distance, height, speed, jiggling, precision, throwing efficiency. For some reasons (historical, practical) distance was chosen. So now javelin throwers are good at distances but not at anything else. Like it's obvious that if you don't train to hit the target with a javelin, you are probably not going to be good at it.
So it's unlikely our javelin throw champion can outperform the average ancient human in hunting mammoths, for example.
I see "mastering javelin throwing skill" as a True Goal and "distance" as a metric. True Goal probably includes many aspects of the skill (let's say "distance" and "precision"), but as we measured only distance, others got neglected. The end result is far from True Goal because we disincentivize athletes to practice other aspects of that basic athletic skill. If the correlation between "being a truly great javelin thrower" (i.e. great at all aspects of the skill) and a "distance" existed, using it for competition resulted in the collapse of the correlation. Classic Goodhart's effect.
There are lots of real world examples of this same phenomenon and they usually result in ridiculous losses combined with minor gains on one parameter. Balance is the key but we tend to reward the specialists (records, finances). People always want to know who is 'best' at something. Triathlon is one attempt to break this but even there it is all quite physical. Chessboxing is another :)
Mammoths travel in herd, so accuracy isn't very important.
Sensible World of Soccer would be my guess.
Throughout my life, I've been a player, coach, and referee. In each of those roles, I have been in tournaments where this was the way the tournament was scored.
Edit: >though maybe they could go to extra time and penalties
As a referee, when a tournament is on the last day, it is not uncommon to hear various tournament officials saying within earshot of the refs "we need winners". This is of course a plausible deniability way of saying "be generous with penalties".
> Throughout my life, I've been a player, coach, and referee. In each of those roles, I have been in tournaments where this was the way the tournament was scored.
Where? I've never seen or heard of this scoring system being used in continental Europe (not even in the little kids leagues), and it's also not what's used in the professional tournaments (World Cup, Euros, Copa America, Champions League, etc).
In what country and in what sport? Was it younger kids, maybe? I'm not doubting you, I'm genuinely curious because this is incredibly bizarre to me. I dug around on wikipedia and found a couple of dozen examples of some unusual points scoring given[0] but only a handful of smaller US leagues long in the past featured this bonus-points-per-goal system, and seemingly only ever for a short period (experiment?)
Thinking about it, bonus points are maybe a fun way to spice up small-sided games. I think there'd be uproar if it was considered for anything beyond that though :)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_tournament_ranking_syste...
That must be very US-specific, it just sounds American. But the 3 point thing definitely has nothing to do with this oddity of scoring
It's absolutely the case for football / soccer "carnivals" in Australia to have modified scoring to ensure a decision.
In an individual game, the number of penalty corners is also considered if goals are even.
Also (I think) number of offsides.
If they're not interested in promotion and relegation maybe a national cup competition, like the FA Cup in England, could be one fun way to have some level of integration with the other levels. The excitement of cup competitions would boost attendance across the board, and fun moments like cup upsets (a lower tier team defeating a top-tier one) raise the profile of the sport overall through media exposure.
It's maybe more tempting for MLS to focus on money-spinning continental competitions like the CONCACAF equivalent to the Champions League. But I think they'd be missing out if they didn't at least explore a "US FA Cup" as a means of growing interest in the domestic game itself, which indirectly benefits them.
Such a tournament already exists, called the U.S. Open Cup[1]
American sports have very strange rules compared to most of the world. Salary caps, drafts, players are signed to the league rather than clubs, franchising ownership.
The results are that there isn't much room to grow the sports. Youth development also suffers, teams have no incentive to develop youth talent, and youth teams are generally pay-to-play, meaning it is hard for the poor to join.
I guess if the sports is not popular in US, this may be the only way of survival though
I think the greater worry is that the gap in quality and finances between any second tier and the NBA or NFL would be so enormous that you're virtually guaranteed to bankrupt any relegated team (decreased TV money, sponsorship, merch, gate receipts) and to completely crush any newly promoted team. That is unless you dumped a huge amount of capital into building or subsidising the second tier for a few seasons at least.
I don't think an MLS second tier would be too far behind in terms of quality, and the defacto second tier - the USL Championship - currently has attendance roughly double that of the Scottish second tier[0] which is ample to sustain a professional league, and that'd surely improve if there was the possibility of promotion to the MLS on the line. But if I understand it correctly there's some weird system where the MLS organization itself owns the teams, so presumably they would be resistant to any of them being relegated, unless they also owned those in the second tier.
But in reality promotion and relegation isn't a thing in US professional sport, and it's not structured such that it's really feasible or desirable. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just different.
[0] - 5,061/game on average over the 27 USL teams in the regular season (rising to 7,841 in the post-season) vs 2,237/game in the mostly-pro Scottish Championship
Where I think the American system breaks down is that the value of teams is in the branding and the exclusive status. Just being in the league means the franchise is worth single digit billion dollars, and that floor will hold no matter how long a team is bad.
It can't happen because that floor is useful to the owners, I imagine if by some miracle it did the NFL would split into two leagues. There's a bunch of non NFL football that could also fit into that lower tier, arena, cfl, fcf.
The NCAA is the other force keeping this from happening. The Sooners saturate the need for an Oklahoma football team, there doesn't need to be a second or third tier team there. But it'd be more interesting and competitive if these leagues were integrated together.
I also would hope promotion/relegation would help with the tanking that's so noticable in the NHL and NBA but don't know enough about drafting/recruiting in European football (and there's probably much simpler solutions there)
There's big swathes of the US that aren't dense enough to attract an NFL team but have plenty of people who like football. The urban/rural divide and state rivalries in the US also makes it an awkward fit sometimes for a person to root for their nearest team.
University teams may also be less anchored to an individual star since they age out so quickly, and could have a coherent identity for decades under a single coach
I’m saying this from a position of having played plenty of 11-a-side football in my life
why do you think the spectacle would be ruined?
Taking things to the extreme...because you'd effectively have a group of players in one box, a group of players in another box and not a whole lot in between. You'd remove the need for midfielders almost entirely and The game would become much more about who can hoof the ball furthest downfield and much less about strategy, which is what makes football beautiful. I guess the tldr version is the game would be simplified so much as to remove any nuance, thereby removing most of what makes it beautiful to watch.
why not?
Ball is rolling towards the goal - if the attacking player touches it, it will be offsides: A player in an offside position has entered active play by "interfering with play by playing or touching a ball passed or touched by a team-mate".
Goalkeeper makes a save, since the ball is rolling towards the goal. If the attacking player touches it, it will be offsides: A player in an offside position has entered active play by "challenging an opponent for the ball" or "gaining an advantage by playing the ball or interfering with an opponent when it has [...] been deliberately saved by any opponent".
The goalkeeper deliberately plays the ball. Immediately afterwards, the attacking player receives the ball played by the goalkeeper - this is not offsides, since "a player in an offside position receiving the ball from an opponent who deliberately plays the ball, including by deliberate handball, is not considered to have gained an advantage, unless it was a deliberate save by any opponent."
https://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/lawsandrules...
Sure, but that doesn't apply here. If you watch the video, the defender passes back to the goalkeeper. Backpasses by the defending team that are intercepted by the attacking player (even if they are in an offside position) are not considered offside, regardless of whether the attacker touches the ball first or the goalkeeper. From your link, this is the pertinent line:
"A player in an offside position at the moment the ball is played or touched by a team-mate is only penalised on becoming involved in active play by:
...
gaining an advantage by playing the ball or interfering with an opponent when it has:
- rebounded or been deflected off the goalpost, crossbar or an opponent
- been deliberately saved by any opponent
A player in an offside position receiving the ball from an opponent who deliberately plays the ball, including by deliberate handball, is not considered to have gained an advantage, unless it was a deliberate save by any opponent."Being somewhat familiar with ice hockey cause my kid plays, and having read the description of this offsides, ice hockey is much easier because you check position of the skaters relative to the line at the same time as the puck crosses the line. My kid's league has instant offsides, so you don't have to keep track of potential offsides, but you do have to allow otherwise offsides if the defenders put the puck in.
Under IFAB law, you have to keep track of where the potentially offside player relative to other players is at the time that the ball is kicked elsewhere, which means having eyes focused in more than one place at once. Not an easy job.
He's not talking pro leagues, but the kinds of leagues where you make a team and sign up for a weekend tournament. That scoring system is very common.
GP mentioned this though:
> not even in the little kids leagues
It might just be something that is very common somewhere or at some level (dunno where), but it's pretty alien to the pair of us and would be for most/all of continental Europe at the very least.
Too right. You think if I played, coached, and refereed in a professional league, I'd be spending my time reading HN? ha!
Is it? I'm Brazilian and I never heard of it.
Between actually getting work done and looking for a way to provide an answer, I've had a hard time getting a link to send.
The closest I've come is a scoring method called 10 Point System where it's slight different in W=6 points, D=3 points, bonus point per goal (max 3), bonus point for shut out. So I could have mis-remembered the points I initially stated. It's been 10+ years since I've participated in those tourneys.
The world is a much bigger place than central Europe and people do things differently in those other places. Not everyone plays with the exact rules like those house rules in Monopoly. In UIL soccer (governing body for Texas High School sports), the rules get totally goofy. First, the center referee has to make hand signals similar to American Football refs by winding the clock to indicate to the clock operator to start the clock, crossing the arms above their head to indicate to STOP the clock (WTF!!), free substitution so a player can be brought back onto the field after being subbed off, players must be subbed when issued a yellow card and allowed to come back on at a later time (thought to allow teenagers to cool down before escalating hormones get the better of them), indirect free kicks awarded to team in possession in lieu of drop ball restarts. Those are the main ones that I remember. Oh, and in UIL, there is a referee system called Duals where you have 2 officials on the field and both have whistles. They each run a diagonal system in their respective half. This is used when not enough officials are available to do the traditional center + 2 assistants
That's cool, I had absolutely no idea! So while I may have suggested in other comments that I didn't love European FAs fiddling with the offside rule and VAR, I do appreciate a bit of innovation and creativity and it sounds like the US is willing to experiment which is great to see. I happily retract my earlier confident assertion about how points work in groups/leagues :)
On another note, I've really enjoyed seeing the game over there going from strength to strength, I hope you're enjoying it too and continue to stay involved at some level!
I think the lesson here is just "American-specific rules", not "Central Europe specific rules". In Latin America I never heard of it either
then why not 1-0 scores?
It's a good question but I don't think there's any good answer other than "1-0 or 2-0 doesn't feel like punishment enough". Interesingly, for two-legged cup competitions a forfeit likely won't result in a 3-0 loss, but a disqualification instead. So if you're winning 4-0 or 5-0 and can't be bothered showing up for the return fixture, you can't just forfeit and win 4-3 or 5-3 on aggregate, you have to fulfil the fixture.
And additionally, not showing up for a game might not even cause you to forfeit. Estonia didn't turn up to a European Qualifier against my national team, we didn't get a walkover and had to replay (which we won 1-0): https://twitter.com/90sfootball/status/1297216969326780416
Oh amazing! Shows my ignorance of the game outside my little bubble, but I'm delighted to learn of its existence!
Yeah if finishing bottom caused you to be relegated rather than rewarding you with better draft prospects it'd definitely cause a more exciting end-season for lower-ranked teams. I don't think a single team has ever wanted to finish poorly in any league I've known about here.
Though on the flipside failure is punished and that punishment can be brutal. Teams can enter death spirals on being relegated - important players may have release clauses on their contracts stipulating that they can leave on relegation, and the reduced budget from playing at a lower level could make recruiting replacements harder. Some teams handle it well, while others enter multi-year collapses. So while Norwich City appear to be quite happy bouncing between the top two English leagues, back in 2017 Sunderland were relegated from the English premier league to the Championship and the next season were relegated to League One where they got stuck for a couple of seasons (there's a Netflix series that happened to start around this time called "Sunderland 'til I die" which covers this period, it's really interesting and actually a couple of my friends briefly appear in it by coincidence).
Come to think of it, I haven't seen it since the 90's -- all in the US. But I haven't played weekend tournaments since then.
I’m English and I haven’t either.
I’ve also played in UK, Middle East, Spain, France, USA and Canada.
From organized leagues to games with mates and pub type tournaments and have never come across that convoluted system.
Just to tack on more as I've knocked some cobwebs loose, the UIL also did their penalty shoot outs similar to hockey where the ball was put in play some 20 yards out and the attacker allowed to dribble the ball and the keeper was allowed to challenge. In the early days of the MLS, they did this as well. When MLS did away with that non-sense, the UIL followed as well.
US Soccer (official FIFA member) was apparently so concerned that soccer would not be accepted that they were willing to experiment with rules to make things more "exciting". UIL did things because Texas is just so entrenched with Friday Night Lights football, that things had to be brought into alignment with their understanding (tongue planted firmly in cheek). After all, it is using their field! Also, the organization of officials in UIL sports (Texas Association of Sports Officials - TASO) is kind of weird. Once you become an official of one sport, you can easily become an official of another sport with no experience necessary. Naturally, a lot of the throwball referees crossed over to football officiating in the early days. As the UIL game garnered more respect, better officials started to make their way, but the rules are still some mishmash hybrid gene spliced 100% GMO'd version.
Ahhh I see, so some of the experiments might have not even been deliberate in the end. Either way that's an interesting bit of history, I'm glad to have learned about it!
I'm about to re-enter the game aged 37 years old (not played in ~1.5 yrs) this weekend with trials for a little local very-very minor team here. No idea how it'll go but I'm curious to see if my legs can carry me for one more season :D
The user also made another comment detailing some interesting reasons why some rules may have come about. Definitely some interesting stuff, even if I don't think it'd be too palatable back home.
I've officiated games where the weather was lousy (our leagues are pretty fair weathered) and one team was heading for state championship and the opposing team was just getting slaughtered (double digit to nil at half). League rules say if the game was abandoned in the first half, the game must be replayed. NOBODY wanted that (plus there was no room left in schedule), so as agreed by both teams immediately after bringing the first half to an end, the teams switched sides, the second half was started and immediately abandoned due to inclement weather. Since it was in the second half, the score stood as final.
Not really disqualified. 3-0. And sometimes it matters a lot whether it's 3-0 or 2-0.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/aug/08/celtic-rein...
it was never the legs that failed, but it was always the gut/diaphragm. as a defender, i'd make sure that the run we're about to make when that ball comes over the top was done at my pace using all of the dark arts i could muster.
good luck!
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