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Own-goal football (2022)

generalist.academy

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Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#21

Post by ghaff »

buildbot wrote: post #12
ghaff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#22

Post by steveylang »

arduinomancer wrote: post #5

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

Yeah, I can't think of a plausible rationale for this rule. FTA:

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No match could end in a draw; if the teams were tied at the end of regular time, they would go into sudden death extra time. But! Any goal scored in extra time would count as two goals. This was presumably done because this tournament, like many, used goal difference to break ties in the qualifying groups. (Goal difference = total number of goals they’ve scored minus the number of goals they’ve conceded.) So that extra time “golden goal” would give a team an edge in the overall competition. Little did the organisers know that it would also lead to one of the strangest football games ever seen.

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Such a rule has no impact within a game, it doesn't change the basic premise that a tie game goes to sudden death and next goal wins. But potentially weird scenarios are actually pretty easy to think of if you just consider the rule for a couple of minutes.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#23

Post by haunter »

CocaKoala wrote: post #17
haunter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

Interfering with the ball is sufficient to be called for off-side - you need to be in active play, but you can do that when your team doesn't have possession.

What you are describing would make attacking the keeper pointless for example when they dropped the ball from hand for a kickoff, cause that would be offside which is not true.

By your description Mandzukic's WC final goal should be offside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzN-ahqULc4

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#24

Post by divan »

munificent wrote: post #13
divan wrote: post #7

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 a…

The meta-game of game design: how do you design a game whose mechanics lead to incentives that align with your intentions is a fascinating area. It also has deep connections to policy design in politics. In the political arena, it gets so much more complex because you have disagreement on intentions and people deliberately obfuscating their intentions. So you've got people arguing over legislation who are trying to a…

Right. Do you have any good recommendations to read on this matter?

Here are a couple of good papers on how metrics distort systems and what can be done to mitigate this. [1] [2].

And then a new post by Cedric Chin on practical examples of mitigating Goodhart's law in Amazon. Really good read: [3]

But generally, I feel like not many people or organizations care about this. The non-profit sports world is conservative and slow, organizations and corporations are also often slow, and there some psychological/social effects linked to the metrics-that-don't-work-anymore.

---

- [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_...

- [3] https://commoncog.com/goodharts-law-not-useful/

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#25

Post by PaulHoule »

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.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#26

Post by munificent »

divan wrote: post #24
munificent wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meta-game of game design: how do you design a game whose mechanics lead to incentives that align with your intentions is a fascinating area. It also has deep connections to policy design in politics. In the political arena, it gets so much more complex because you have disagreement on intentions and people deliberately obfuscating their intentions. So you've got people arguing over legislation who are trying to a…

Right. Do you have any good recommendations to read on this matter? Here are a couple of good papers on how metrics distort systems and what can be done to mitigate this. [1] [2]. And then a new post by Cedric Chin on practical examples of mitigating Goodhart's law in Amazon. Really good read: [3] But generally, I feel like not many people or organizations care about this. The non-profit sports world is conservative…

I don't but I'd love to read them if anyone else does.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#27

Post by glormph »

buildbot wrote: post #12
ghaff wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s always somewhat nonplussing (grammer?) when people say they are unclear on it. If you are past the last defender, on the opposing side of the field, when the ball is kicked to you, offsides. It’s hard to get right though, which is different. Having both ref’d and played soccer, you absolutely need lineman watching the field closely.

Still, I was surprised when someone told me the rule was "at least two opponent players between you and the goal line" instead of only one. I had never thought of the keeper.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#28

Post by permo-w »

7373737373 wrote: post #11

One other weird thing: When a soccer player who is not a goalkeeper prevents a goal by catching the ball with their hands, they "just" get a red card and the attacking team a penalty, even if they would have certainly scored otherwise. Luis Suarez successfully used this in the 2010 World Cup quarter-finals in the Uruguay vs Ghana game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM-29hy-Qyw - Ghana missed the penalty, which led…

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?

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#29

Post by steveylang »

katamarimambo wrote: post #14

Considering how 'tanking' for talent acquiring has become a strategy in american sports, I hope at least we get to see this scenario with both teams trying to score own-tds/baskets/etc and fiercily defending the opponents goal in a match

There's also the situation in American football where the team on defense purposely lets another team score a touchdown rather than stop them for a field goal, in order to have some time left to try to regain the lead. Also vice versa, where the player on offense will purposely fall before going into the end zone.

This one though is at least somewhat of a double-edged sword, as it's not a 100% given that the team's kicker will make a field goal (probably around 90-95% success rate.)

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#30

Post by permo-w »

katamarimambo wrote: post #14

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

is this because the bottom team gets the first draft pick?
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