Own-goal football (2022)
generalist.academy
generalist.academy
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.
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.
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...
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.
just giving more points for finishing in day 1 or 2 could have also solved the problem I think
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
https://youtu.be/_qLF1qFn6u8?t=6477
( WTF is AFL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_SqfNNfhmM )
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.
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_...
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?
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 :).
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.
And then some Yale players realized they could "pass it to themselves" by moving while it bounced off the floor.
And then the second phase could be evenly-matched, or it could be David and Goliath, but then still anything could happen.
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.
A simple rule change could end this. For example, a foul in the last two minutes is a free throw and the ball.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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...
- 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.
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".
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).
> 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.
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.
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...
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
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!
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.
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
good luck!
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
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/aug/08/celtic-rein...
In an individual game, the number of penalty corners is also considered if goals are even.
Also (I think) number of offsides.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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)
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).
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'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.
Aw, come on, you cannot start a soccer article with that :(
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.)
The clock acts as an impossibly powerful defense that only comes to play for you after a time, and that can be exploited.
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.
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.
> 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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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 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.
Nowadays, thanks to VAR, the controversial cases can be reviewed on the replay and referees have ample of time to make the call.
That seems like a really strange rule to have
it’s "no draws" rather than "double goals" that creates the unusual incentive. double goals just exacerbates it
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.
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
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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.
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.
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...
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.
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
By your description Mandzukic's WC final goal should be offside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzN-ahqULc4
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...
"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
Spoiler alert, he did figure it out in the end
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Growing up I always made fun of soccer and considered it a game for uncircumcised foreigners
This made me actually lol
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