10 ms·

Own-goal football (2022)

228 points by colinprince 3y ago

barbazoo 3y ago
> 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
- paranoidxprod 3y ago
  He started not knowing a thing about soccer, but ended up knowing at least one thing about football.
- ghaff 3y ago
  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.
  - buildbot 3y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      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.
      - toast0 3y ago
        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.
    - glormph 3y ago
      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.
    - amatheus 3y ago
      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.
- linhns 3y ago
  My bet would be he hasn't fully understood it. Some of his sentences are clunky and messed up his football terms.
- waynecochran 3y ago
  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.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    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
  - locustous 3y ago
    > 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.
- smcl 3y ago
  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.
hn2017 3y ago
Wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados_4%E2%80%932_Grenada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados_4%E2%80%932_Grenada https://bleacherreport.com/articles/74831-barbados-vs-grenada-in-94-the-most-bizarre-match-ever https://bleacherreport.com/articles/74831-barbados-vs-grenad... Note this isn't possible in today's rules, afaik
- permo-w 3y ago
  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
- alkonaut 3y ago
  I think it's safe to say that there will never again be a high level competition where overtime goals count double.
arduinomancer 3y ago
> Any goal scored in extra time would count as two goals That seems like a really strange rule to have
- permo-w 3y ago
  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
  - kevinmchugh 3y ago
    And goal differential as tiebreaker creates an incentive where just winning isn't enough
    - permo-w 3y ago
      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
  - leni536 3y ago
    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.
    - permo-w 3y ago
      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
divan 3y ago
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=PLUXSZMIiUfFSVTX8z2Xl5vt-PV4Fi17w1 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUXSZMIiUfFSVTX8z2Xl5...
- furyofantares 3y ago
  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.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    This is what is known as a "tactical foul" or taking one for the team
  - divan 3y ago
    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.
yowzadave 3y ago
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?
- haunter 3y ago
  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]
  - CocaKoala 3y ago
    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.
    - haunter 3y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzN-ahqULc4
      - CocaKoala 3y ago
        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/laws/football-11-11/law-11---offside https://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/lawsandrules...
7373737373 3y ago
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 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-2022-23?l=en 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.
- permo-w 3y ago
  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?
  - dylan604 3y ago
    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.
    - smcl 3y ago
      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.
katamarimambo 3y ago
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
- steveylang 3y ago
  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.)
  - owlninja 3y ago
    Or taking an intentional safety!
  - bombcar 3y ago
    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-edition-book-by-john-t-reed 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.
- permo-w 3y ago
  is this because the bottom team gets the first draft pick?
  - jabroni_salad 3y ago
    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.
PaulHoule 3y ago
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.
- kevinmchugh 3y ago
  Relegation and promotion are just such good systems that all sports should have them
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    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.
    - iainmerrick 3y ago
      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.
gfunk911 3y ago
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.
- bowmessage 3y ago
  Why is that obvious? Why would a team want to allow their opposition to score any points at all?
  - jfengel 3y ago
    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.
    - manquer 3y ago
      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.
- thazework 3y ago
  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.
thazework 3y ago
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35289875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35289875
jefftk 3y ago
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 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-or-what-mucking-around-with-sports-rulebooks-has-to-do-with-math/ https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2014/06/11/playing-to-lose-o...
karmakurtisaani 3y ago
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.
- linhvn 3y ago
  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.
  - karmakurtisaani 3y ago
    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.
    - linhvn 3y ago
      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.
throwbadubadu 3y ago
> 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 :(
Kuiper 3y ago
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.
- chongli 3y ago
  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!
  - erhaetherth 3y ago
    Seems quite logical. I break out the egg-timer in board games when people are dilly-dallying.
- HideousKojima 3y ago
  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.
- culturestate 3y ago
  > 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. --- 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.
jaredhallen 3y ago
This makes me think of unforeseen consequences of legislation. The outcome doesn't always match the intent.
xg15 3y ago
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.

228 points by colinprince 3y ago

> 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

paranoidxprod 3y ago
He started not knowing a thing about soccer, but ended up knowing at least one thing about football.
ghaff 3y ago
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.
- buildbot 3y ago
  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.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    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.
    - toast0 3y ago
      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.
  - glormph 3y ago
    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.
  - amatheus 3y ago
    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.
linhns 3y ago
My bet would be he hasn't fully understood it. Some of his sentences are clunky and messed up his football terms.
waynecochran 3y ago
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.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  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
- locustous 3y ago
  > 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.
smcl 3y ago
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.

hn2017 3y ago

Wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados_4%E2%80%932_Grenada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados_4%E2%80%932_Grenada https://bleacherreport.com/articles/74831-barbados-vs-grenada-in-94-the-most-bizarre-match-ever https://bleacherreport.com/articles/74831-barbados-vs-grenad... Note this isn't possible in today's rules, afaik

permo-w 3y ago
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
alkonaut 3y ago
I think it's safe to say that there will never again be a high level competition where overtime goals count double.

arduinomancer 3y ago

> Any goal scored in extra time would count as two goals That seems like a really strange rule to have

permo-w 3y ago
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
- kevinmchugh 3y ago
  And goal differential as tiebreaker creates an incentive where just winning isn't enough
  - permo-w 3y ago
    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
- leni536 3y ago
  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.
  - permo-w 3y ago
    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

divan 3y ago

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=PLUXSZMIiUfFSVTX8z2Xl5vt-PV4Fi17w1 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUXSZMIiUfFSVTX8z2Xl5...

furyofantares 3y ago
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.
- dylan604 3y ago
  This is what is known as a "tactical foul" or taking one for the team
- divan 3y ago
  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.

yowzadave 3y ago

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?

haunter 3y ago
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]
- CocaKoala 3y ago
  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.
  - haunter 3y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzN-ahqULc4
    - CocaKoala 3y ago
      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/laws/football-11-11/law-11---offside https://www.thefa.com/football-rules-governance/lawsandrules...

7373737373 3y ago

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 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-2022-23?l=en 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.

permo-w 3y ago
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?
- dylan604 3y ago
  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.
  - smcl 3y ago
    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.

katamarimambo 3y ago

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

steveylang 3y ago
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.)
- owlninja 3y ago
  Or taking an intentional safety!
- bombcar 3y ago
  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-edition-book-by-john-t-reed 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.
permo-w 3y ago
is this because the bottom team gets the first draft pick?
- jabroni_salad 3y ago
  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.

PaulHoule 3y ago

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.

kevinmchugh 3y ago
Relegation and promotion are just such good systems that all sports should have them
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  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.
  - iainmerrick 3y ago
    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.

gfunk911 3y ago

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.

bowmessage 3y ago
Why is that obvious? Why would a team want to allow their opposition to score any points at all?
- jfengel 3y ago
  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.
  - manquer 3y ago
    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.
thazework 3y ago
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.

thazework 3y ago

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35289875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35289875

jefftk 3y ago

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 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-or-what-mucking-around-with-sports-rulebooks-has-to-do-with-math/ https://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2014/06/11/playing-to-lose-o...

karmakurtisaani 3y ago

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.

linhvn 3y ago
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.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  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.
  - linhvn 3y ago
    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.

throwbadubadu 3y ago

> 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 :(

Kuiper 3y ago

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.

chongli 3y ago
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!
- erhaetherth 3y ago
  Seems quite logical. I break out the egg-timer in board games when people are dilly-dallying.
HideousKojima 3y ago
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.
culturestate 3y ago
> 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. --- 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.

jaredhallen 3y ago

This makes me think of unforeseen consequences of legislation. The outcome doesn't always match the intent.

xg15 3y ago

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.