Win a soccer game by more than five points and you lose | Hacker News Reader

Win a soccer game by more than five points and you lose

news.nationalpost.com

16 pointslatch46 comments

Such a rule could be abused in really bad ways. If you're losing by 5 points, kick the ball into your own goal -- you're now down 6 points and win by default.

My dad's the sorta person who would have encouraged me to do that.

This was my first thought as well. Actually, my first thought was "Pass to keeper, own-goal, drop to my team, repeat". I can't see any way to lose.

Modify the rules so scoring in your own goal doesn't count?

Without modifying the rules, you could effectively reverse the game into a race to score goals in your own goal. Goal keepers would be the strikers (much more effective strikers since they can use their hands). Most players would be just trying to control the ball and move it towards their goalie/striker

Awesome. I wish more opportunities for exploits like this would open in sports, the games would take some interesting intellectual twists. Oh wait, we're playing calvinball.

Ultimate frisbee captains can, I believe, agree on any subset of rules before a game begins. The inclusion and use of dodgeballs on the field was one modification of note.

There are lots of them. One enterprising swim coach figured out that you could swim breaststroke much faster if you brought your hands forward above the water instead of under it. This'hack' gave birth to the Butterfly Stroke.

Another figured out that swimming upside-down under water was faster than back-stroking above the water. Alas, this innovation was banned. And so it goes.

Politics gets into it, as anyone who followed the UCI's wars with Graeme Obree would remember:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Obree

Slight technicality--goalkeepers can't use their hands if the ball is passed back to them by their own team.

This league would be better off modifying the rules so that every team finishes undefeated by default.

It would turn into a game of defending your opponents goal to prevent them from scoring on themselves. Actually if you think about it, it could add a whole new element to the game and maybe even be exciting, if not more confusing...

It would turn into a game of defending your opponents' goal to keep them from scoring and attempting to score in your own goal. It's like real soccer, only goalies can only pick the ball up when they're trying to score.

The "suicide" strategy is much harder to pull off effectively. The team to go to that strategy would need to "win" by more than five goals. If the other team can score only enough to keep the difference less than five, then they win by the regular rules.

This would mean that a team attempting the "suicide" strategy from the outset would need to be much better in that paradigm than the other team. If we assume that the skills involved are similar, this would mean that they could probably win anyway using the normal rules. Adopting the strategy partway through the game -- say, when behind by three goals -- could be effective, but if the other team knows about this, they would keep the difference to only two goals.

It would result in either a heavy emphasis on defense, or a strategy of scoring one goal and then passing the ball around for the rest of the game.

There is one problem with your analysis. The team that gets scored 'on' is the one that gets the ball for the kick-off.

Since different teams get the initial and half-time kick-offs, it boils down to which team is capable of scoring the most own-goals in the same (lengthy) amount of time. The second team has a huge advantage, because they win by scoring 4 less own-goals than the leading team.

ah, the misere game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misère

From the strange but true files: the Caribbean Cup once had a rule that awarded a two goal victory to teams that won in overtime, so Barbados scored an own-goal against themselves to create a tie that would force overtime. Once their opponent figured out what had happened there was three minutes of football in which one team was trying to defend both goals against another team that was just trying to make sure the game did not end in a tie.

That's assuming it's sudden death. It sounds like the rule goes into effect at the end of regulation. That would make it so that the team that goes up by six would be encouraged to then take the ball back and score on themselves to make the score 6-1 and therefore keep the victory.

That would make a entertaining game of soccer won't it. Everybody trying to score on their own goal.

And it's happened in the past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Caribbean_Cup_1994#Anomal...

They you'd suck at soccer but be good at game theory. Maybe that was their plan all along :-)

If you're in a youth soccer league and you spend your time trying to think of ways to game the rules to win... you would be far better off studying for your LSATs than playing soccer.

My daughter's second grade team would come to the own-goal conclusion within about 3 minutes of being told this rule. Winning within the confines of the rules is a very big part of sports. :)

Well, I imagine this view is unpopular in a community devoted to hacking, but winning has very little to do with the value of sports. As a referee, I would yellow-card a youth who deliberately scored an own-goal to attempt to circumvent a rule designed to encourage fair play. It isn't, well, sporting.

Of course, I prefer Ultimate, where "SOTG" is part of the basic ethos and the game is played without referees. I don't play organized hockey and I'm in no hurry to introduce my kids to it. I've heard too many horror stories about parents and coaches who believe that winning is the only reason to play.

This may be just me but I've found Ultimate players to be by far the most competitive. It is almost as if people who know they have a problem are self selecting for a sport that is the most restraining in that particular way.

Winning is important. It's why I go to the field. It is what gives sport value. Without the opportunity to prove I'm the best, I might as well go for a quiet walk.

That doesn't mean 'win at all costs,' but it does mean you need to teach kids why a level playing field is important. I don't think a 5 point auto-win rule is the right way to do this.

Referrers are coming to Ultimate. It turns out than in practice, you need them in top games. There's too much room for abuse. Look at the recent College championship for an example. The winning team did it by calling 'cheap' fouls. SOTG is still valid with referees -- there are no punishments in ultimate for breaking the rules (except for offsides). Everyone is supposed to be playing without the intent of breaking the rules and that's the difference between ultimate and other sports right now.

> Winning is important. It's why I go to the field. It is what gives sport value. Without the opportunity to prove I'm the best, I might as well go for a quiet walk.

Winning is important to you. But not to others. many of us find other reasons to train, to suffer, to strive, and to enjoy a unique camaraderie with our fellow players.

> The winning team did it by calling 'cheap' fouls.

In what sense did they "win?" Why stop at cheap calls, why not trash your opponent's sleeping bags so they can't sleep the night before the finals? How about trash talking them so that they're too upset to play their best? Maybe 'accidentally' stomp a downed player's throwing hand?

All of these things value the score above proving you are the best at anything except being able to limbo lower and lower under the minimum bar of civility. Such actions cheat everyone, including the people who 'won.' Now they'll never enjoy what you say you value, proving they are the best. Maybe they were the best, maybe they weren't. They'll never know.

Back to youth soccer.

In this particular case, we aren't even really talking about winning, we're talking about a rule that you aren't to win by more than five goals and a team choosing to score on their own net to "win." Honestly, if I took the field and someone did that, I would join you on a quiet walk and leave them to enjoy their "win" alone.

That is neither winning nor losing soccer, it's something from a parallel universe where all that matters are some little black marks on a white piece of paper that gets tacked up on a bulletin board somewhere.

"If winning is not important, then Commander, why keep score?" --Lt. Worf

I don't see what the big deal is. I should note that in professional soccer coaches also try not to win games by more than five points because that can cause fights, injuries, your players being suspended, or even in some cases riots.

It's so hard to score goals at that level that, frankly, once a team is up 2 or 3 goals they usually stop trying. In the rare cases where the disparity between teams is great enough that a blowout is even possible (early stage cup matches, for instance), you rest some of your starters and get some match experience to some of your reserve players.

On top of all of that, though, you're absolutely right--piling on is a dick move and will definitely provoke the hooligans, depending on where you are. (Soccer is serious business--in most of the world, supporters of opposing teams are actually seated in segregated parts of the stadium just as a security measure.)

"The registration fee, rergardless [sic] of the sport, does not give a parent the right to insult or belittle the organization,” he said."

I know their country has severely limited free speech but surely Canadians still have the right to criticize any organization regardless of membership?

Yes, everybody has the right to criticize the soccer league. And the soccer league has the right to not accept the children of troublesome parents.

To me, this is the most important statement from the article:

Mr. Cale said the league’s 12-person board of directors is not trying to take the fun out of the game, they are simply trying to make it fair.

Some may consider this minor, but I think it is this type of thinking that has caused so many things to be screwed up in western politics and society. People literally do not understand the real meaning of concepts such as fairness or equality.

I can understand this rule for elementary school ages. To have it for the entire league which goes up through high school age sounds like a little much to me though.

Why does the age of the children matter? Surely the lessons you're trying to teach with sport are the same no matter what age the pupils.

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>Without the opportunity to prove I'm the best, I might as well go for a quiet walk.

I've played quite a bit of [association] football in the past in Sunday leagues in the UK including my Uni's league and was in school teams too - a good game for me was one where I played well and managed to do my part well and have fun; those games were not always ones in which our team scored more points.

I stopped watching football many years ago when the professional foul became rife and I felt that top players were there to win at all costs, including the cost of playing a decent game of football.

This reminds me of the effect computerized ranking schemes for playoff berths had on the sportsmanship of high school coaches. When it became possible for a team with an N-0 record to miss making the playoffs because it had not beaten its opponents by a sufficiently high score, winning coaches had an incentive to keep their starting players in blowout games in an attempt to maximize the score differential. Without this rule, there was a tacit agreement that, after some threshold, lesser players would be substituted by both sides. As I'm no athlete, I don't know what the convention (or signaling mechanism) was, but the result was usually a swapping out of players on both sides within just a few plays.

I personally believe that coddling youth can potentially do more damage than good. Learning to overcome challenges and deal with defeat is part of being human and growing up and it builds a sense of confidence and self reliance.

I'm concerned about that as well.

On the one hand, I can understand that you don't want to grind kids down and completely humiliate them. On the other hand, I don't see how they can learn to handle adversity if we constantly shelter them from anything that might hurt their feelings. Sure, it sucks to lose (the soccer and basketball teams I played on were terrible) but sometimes life works out that way, unfortunately.

Granted, I'm talking out of my rear end here since I don't have kids, but several of my friends do and most of them agree that kids aren't that fragile.

I don't understand why this is perceived as being about self-esteem rather than sportsmanship. It isn't like kids are so dumb they aren't going to know when they are getting their asses kicked, or that they will take pride in a win achieved by losing too severely.

I don't think this rule is going to have the intended effect at all, but I also don't think it is going to have any effect on these kids' ability to compete as adults.

I do think it's a bit sad that parents and coaches are doing such a poor job of instilling sportsmanship that the league felt a silly rule like this was necessary.

My initial reaction to the title was that winning a professional level soccer game by more than five points does cause a loss of sorts: the physiological taxation that such effort causes could easily decrease the chances of winning games in the near future. Taking this physical side effect of over-effort into account in finding the optimal strategy would be interesting.

This is a terrible idea. All it does is teach the talented kids that they shouldn't exert themselves to the best of their abilities because they might make others feel bad, and the not-so-talented kids that they don't need to try hard to improve themselves because their competition will always have a limit.

What about the other suggestions: Once you get up three goals, switch positions. Play with your weak foot. try different setups, like eight defenders and two strikers.

Sounds like fun to me.

>Sounds like fun to me.

Sounds more like humiliation. Like the stronger team are rubbing your nose in it and saying "we can beat you left-footed wearing our shirts over our eyes" ...

I've heard of rules similar to this, except that the coach is reprimanded in lieu of handing out a loss. All that happens is that the best players are only permitted to play defense.

I suppose that's better than providing an exploitable victory condition, but it doesn't really help anyway.

When I was a little leaguer, we had a rule where any run above opposing team's score + 5 didn't count.

God forbid that other kids on the winning team (who may not score often) get a chance to score.

Isn't this just the sports version of the EU or the DOJ slapping fines on Microsoft or other big companies for anti-competitive practices? i.e. you are so far ahead that we are going to use the rules to cripple you in some way?

why don't they just mix the players into more evenly matched teams?

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