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Own-goal football (2022)

generalist.academy

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Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#81

Post by smcl »

LanceH wrote: post #78
Denvercoder9 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Throughout my life, I've been a player, coach, and referee. In each of those roles, I have been in tournaments where this was the way the tournament was scored. Where? I've never seen or heard of this scoring system being used in continental Europe (not even in the little kids leagues), and it's also not what's used in the professional tournaments (World Cup, Euros, Copa America, Champions League, etc).

He's not talking pro leagues, but the kinds of leagues where you make a team and sign up for a weekend tournament. That scoring system is very common.

GP mentioned this though:

> not even in the little kids leagues

It might just be something that is very common somewhere or at some level (dunno where), but it's pretty alien to the pair of us and would be for most/all of continental Europe at the very least.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#82

Post by WorldMaker »

PaulHoule wrote: post #63
kevinmchugh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relegation and promotion are just such good systems that all sports should have them

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 economic…

The US has second, third, and fourth tier leagues already, though those are all part of USL rather than MLS. MLS has a lot more money than USL and isn't interested in promotion/relegation concepts because it is built like MLB/NBA and likes the gatekeeping aspects of those because that influences investment money and helps keep MLS comparatively rich. But USL thinks promotion/relegation could work in the US, they just don't think it can work that well if they don't also control the top tier league. From my understanding USL has quietly been hoping that play in the USL Championship league (their top tier and comparatively in the US market the "second tier" overall) could get competitive and interesting enough to usurp the MLS and put USL in a place to have the top-tier and move to a "proper" European-style relegation/promotion system.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#83

Post by smcl »

kevinmchugh wrote: post #75
PaulHoule wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 economic…

I don't know that soccer in the US could support a promotion/relegation system but basketball, baseball, and football could. NCAA and MiLB are popular enough that lower leagues could be sustained.

I think the greater worry is that the gap in quality and finances between any second tier and the NBA or NFL would be so enormous that you're virtually guaranteed to bankrupt any relegated team (decreased TV money, sponsorship, merch, gate receipts) and to completely crush any newly promoted team. That is unless you dumped a huge amount of capital into building or subsidising the second tier for a few seasons at least.

I don't think an MLS second tier would be too far behind in terms of quality, and the defacto second tier - the USL Championship - currently has attendance roughly double that of the Scottish second tier[0] which is ample to sustain a professional league, and that'd surely improve if there was the possibility of promotion to the MLS on the line. But if I understand it correctly there's some weird system where the MLS organization itself owns the teams, so presumably they would be resistant to any of them being relegated, unless they also owned those in the second tier.

But in reality promotion and relegation isn't a thing in US professional sport, and it's not structured such that it's really feasible or desirable. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just different.

[0] - 5,061/game on average over the 27 USL teams in the regular season (rising to 7,841 in the post-season) vs 2,237/game in the mostly-pro Scottish Championship

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#84

Post by smcl »

WorldMaker wrote: post #82
PaulHoule wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 economic…

The US has second, third, and fourth tier leagues already, though those are all part of USL rather than MLS. MLS has a lot more money than USL and isn't interested in promotion/relegation concepts because it is built like MLB/NBA and likes the gatekeeping aspects of those because that influences investment money and helps keep MLS comparatively rich. But USL thinks promotion/relegation could work in the US, they just…

If they're not interested in promotion and relegation maybe a national cup competition, like the FA Cup in England, could be one fun way to have some level of integration with the other levels. The excitement of cup competitions would boost attendance across the board, and fun moments like cup upsets (a lower tier team defeating a top-tier one) raise the profile of the sport overall through media exposure.

It's maybe more tempting for MLS to focus on money-spinning continental competitions like the CONCACAF equivalent to the Champions League. But I think they'd be missing out if they didn't at least explore a "US FA Cup" as a means of growing interest in the domestic game itself, which indirectly benefits them.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#85

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

smcl wrote: post #43
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…

Interestingly in rugby they have a concept called a "penalty try" - effectively when there's a particular infringement against a team in a scoring position, the referee awards the points to the attacking team as if they had gone ahead and scored. See here for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAq-xp54j1w The play gets repeated a couple of times and explained in some detail throughout but you can see what ha…

Exactly the same concept exists in NHL hockey by the way. In particular, if a player attacking an empty net (because the goaltender has been pulled late in the game to add another skater) is interfered with from behind, or a thrown stick disrupts his shot, the goal is just awarded on the assumption that the attacker would have almost certainly scored.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#86

Post by dylan604 »

LanceH wrote: post #78
Denvercoder9 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Throughout my life, I've been a player, coach, and referee. In each of those roles, I have been in tournaments where this was the way the tournament was scored. Where? I've never seen or heard of this scoring system being used in continental Europe (not even in the little kids leagues), and it's also not what's used in the professional tournaments (World Cup, Euros, Copa America, Champions League, etc).

He's not talking pro leagues, but the kinds of leagues where you make a team and sign up for a weekend tournament. That scoring system is very common.

Too right. You think if I played, coached, and refereed in a professional league, I'd be spending my time reading HN? ha!

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#87

Post by dylan604 »

smcl wrote: post #65
dylan604 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout my life, I've been a player, coach, and referee. In each of those roles, I have been in tournaments where this was the way the tournament was scored. Edit: >though maybe they could go to extra time and penalties As a referee, when a tournament is on the last day, it is not uncommon to hear various tournament officials saying within earshot of the refs "we need winners". This is of course a plausible deniab…

In what country and in what sport? Was it younger kids, maybe? I'm not doubting you, I'm genuinely curious because this is incredibly bizarre to me. I dug around on wikipedia and found a couple of dozen examples of some unusual points scoring given[0] but only a handful of smaller US leagues long in the past featured this bonus-points-per-goal system, and seemingly only ever for a short period (experiment?) Thinking…

Between actually getting work done and looking for a way to provide an answer, I've had a hard time getting a link to send.

The closest I've come is a scoring method called 10 Point System where it's slight different in W=6 points, D=3 points, bonus point per goal (max 3), bonus point for shut out. So I could have mis-remembered the points I initially stated. It's been 10+ years since I've participated in those tourneys.

The world is a much bigger place than central Europe and people do things differently in those other places. Not everyone plays with the exact rules like those house rules in Monopoly. In UIL soccer (governing body for Texas High School sports), the rules get totally goofy. First, the center referee has to make hand signals similar to American Football refs by winding the clock to indicate to the clock operator to start the clock, crossing the arms above their head to indicate to STOP the clock (WTF!!), free substitution so a player can be brought back onto the field after being subbed off, players must be subbed when issued a yellow card and allowed to come back on at a later time (thought to allow teenagers to cool down before escalating hormones get the better of them), indirect free kicks awarded to team in possession in lieu of drop ball restarts. Those are the main ones that I remember. Oh, and in UIL, there is a referee system called Duals where you have 2 officials on the field and both have whistles. They each run a diagonal system in their respective half. This is used when not enough officials are available to do the traditional center + 2 assistants

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#88

Post by kodt »

soldarnal wrote: post #56
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 game clock is one of the more common rules that tends to warp gameplay in this way, with teams that are ahead trying to avoid play and run out the clock rather than continue to engage in the contest. The other team, meanwhile, resorts to increasingly desperate tactics like pulling the goalie, intentionally committing fouls, or laterals and trying for the onside kick. Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elam_En…

The end of American Football games is so frustrating because of this, with a team just constantly taking a knee to run out the clock. It makes the last 2 minutes of the game useless.

Constant fouls in Basketball hoping the opposing team will miss a free throw is another frustrating tactic that drags the last 2 minutes on forever, in what is usually a forgone conclusion anyway.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#89

Post by brycekahle »

smcl wrote: post #84
WorldMaker wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has second, third, and fourth tier leagues already, though those are all part of USL rather than MLS. MLS has a lot more money than USL and isn't interested in promotion/relegation concepts because it is built like MLB/NBA and likes the gatekeeping aspects of those because that influences investment money and helps keep MLS comparatively rich. But USL thinks promotion/relegation could work in the US, they just…

If they're not interested in promotion and relegation maybe a national cup competition, like the FA Cup in England, could be one fun way to have some level of integration with the other levels. The excitement of cup competitions would boost attendance across the board, and fun moments like cup upsets (a lower tier team defeating a top-tier one) raise the profile of the sport overall through media exposure. It's maybe…

Such a tournament already exists, called the U.S. Open Cup[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Open_Cup

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#90

Post by divan »

cafard wrote: post #73
divan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As far as I know, neither the high jump nor the pole vault ever had hard landing areas. I'm sure that foam rubber is a lot better than dried cow manure, but guys were still going way over 6' in the jump and 15' in the vault before foam rubber came along.

Right, but I can come up with an infinite number of examples. Take javelin throw – the essential skill is, well, throwing a javelin. There are many things that can theoretically be measured – distance, height, speed, jiggling, precision, throwing efficiency. For some reasons (historical, practical) distance was chosen. So now javelin throwers are good at distances but not at anything else. Like it's obvious that if you don't train to hit the target with a javelin, you are probably not going to be good at it.

So it's unlikely our javelin throw champion can outperform the average ancient human in hunting mammoths, for example.

I see "mastering javelin throwing skill" as a True Goal and "distance" as a metric. True Goal probably includes many aspects of the skill (let's say "distance" and "precision"), but as we measured only distance, others got neglected. The end result is far from True Goal because we disincentivize athletes to practice other aspects of that basic athletic skill. If the correlation between "being a truly great javelin thrower" (i.e. great at all aspects of the skill) and a "distance" existed, using it for competition resulted in the collapse of the correlation. Classic Goodhart's effect.

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