h*h
发帖数: 27852 | 1 http://www.cafefutebol.net/2013/09/11/why-three-points-for-a-win-is-a-loss-for-football-a-closer-look-into-one-of-the-most-important-rules-in-football-history/
Why ‘Three Points for a Win’ is a Loss for Football — A Closer Look Into
One of the Most Important Rule Changes in Football History
by NICK CHOLST on Sep 11, 2013 • 6:30 pm 7 Comments
An Introduction to Incentives
Ask an economist how to solve a problem, and he’ll tell you incentives are
the answer.1 He wouldn’t be wrong. Punishment and reward are fantastic
tools for exploiting self-interest in the service of the common good. In
football, they’re made up of red cards and penalties, trophies and
relegation, and always in the interest of preserving the ‘beautiful game’.
But incentives do not always respond the way we expect them to. Take, for
example, the infamous 1994 Caribbean Cup match between Barbados and Grenada.
In an effort to encourage attacking play during extra-time, tournament
officials decided that extra-time golden goals would be worth double for
goal difference purposes. A nice idea in theory, but by the end of the match
, Grenada found themselves frantically trying to score in either net while
Barbados defended both goals. An incredible series of events actually made
it in Barbados’ best interest to force an equalizer so that they could
score an extra-time goal. You can view a video of the incident below and
read about it here.
“I feel cheated […] I have never seen this happen before. In football, you
are supposed to score against the opponents to win, not for them” –
Grenada Manager James Clarkson.2
Even the slightest change to incentives can twist, shape, and decide games
in ways we may never anticipate. This is not to say it is an easy task to
predict the impact of new incentives – in fact is is often near impossible.
However, it is the duty of football officials to review historical data to
decide which rules have failed and need updating. In particular, the ‘three
points for a win’ rule stands out as a serious offender (from here on the
rule will be referred to as 3PW). Despite a growing stack of literature that
shows the rule has had the opposite effect from what was intended, it has
managed to almost completely fly under FIFA’s radar. It is high time to
review the evidence for one of the most important laws of the game. But
first let’s rewind.
“Football is not a circus”
In October 1980, Stoke City manager Alan Durban, angry at journalists’
criticisms of his tactics in a 0-0 draw against Arsenal, instructed them to
“go and watch a bunch of clowns” if they were looking for entertainment.
Durban, after all, was simply doing his job, and maybe not such a bad one at
that. The “win at home, draw away” philosophy was popular amongst
managers and defensive tactics were very much in vogue. Could Durban really
take the fall for inverting the pyramid? Perhaps if rapper-cum-actor Ice-T
had been present, he could have explained to the crowd of unruly reporters,
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
But this wasn’t the only problem. The early 1980s depression had taken its
toll on England, and rising ticket prices and television exposure saw match
attendance drop to nearly half of its 1950s record-setting numbers. Football
fans cried foul: this was not the first time they had felt the beautiful
game was under attack. A generation earlier Herbert Chapman, the legendary
former Arsenal manager, remarked:
“It is no longer only necessary for a team to play well. They must get
goals, no matter how, and the points. The measure of their skill is, in fact
, judged by their position in the League table.”
In comes Jimmy Hill, former chairman of the Professional Footballer’s
Association and legendary Coventry manager.3 Hill was not your conventional
chairman – in fact, he was a bit of a maverick, famous for leading the
charge to scrap the Football League’s ￡20 maximum wage. He was later known
for engineering the Sky Blue Revolution during his tenure as Coventry
manager, a club overhaul which would make Assem Allam’s efforts to rebrand
Hull City Tigers look amateurish and lazy.
Hill, who “had long thought that soccer had become too defensive and dull”
and was concerned that “goals had become rarer with every passing season,
”4 proposed a simple revision to the rules: change the reward for winning a
match from two points to three points. This would make wins more valuable
and incentivize teams to not settle for draws. In 1981, less than a year
after Durban’s speech, Hill convinced the FA to introduce his idea of ‘
three points for a win’ or 3PW. Thirteen years later, FIFA adopted the
system for the upcoming 1994 World Cup in the US, concerned that American
fans would be turned off by draws. Sepp Blater hailed the move as “the most
important sporting decision taken here, but it rewards attacking soccer”.
In 1995, every remaining major football league switched to a three point
system.
The Drawing Game
Advocates of 3PW tend to fall back on the result easiest to observe: it
reduces the number of draws by increasing the incentives for breaking a draw
. Indeed, according to former Football League chairman Brian Mawhinney,
draws are still seen as a threat to football’s entertainment factor:
“I suggested that for drawn matches each team gets a point and then maybe
the team that wins a penalty shoot-out gets an extra point […] We cannot
afford to be complacent – people are always talking to be about how we can
get more goals and more excitement in football.”5
Some statistics indicate that the rule switch did indeed reduce the number
of draws. In the five English First Division seasons leading up to the
change, there was an average of 133.0 draws per season. This was twenty more
than the average of 113.4 in the first five seasons after.
Data from other countries yield similar results. Evidence from Turkish and
German leagues shows a decrease in the number of draws after controlling for
number of teams, games played, and cup matches.6,7
But is this a valid metric for measuring entertainment value? Does a
reduction in the number of league draws indicate an increase in attacking
play?
Scrutinizing England’s data may be the key to answering these questions.
The graph below illustrates the number of draws per game over time in
England first division football league (no cup games are counted). The value
on the left indicates the percentage of matches played that resulted in a
draw.
graph1
At a first glance, the number of draws per game (DPG) was already in the
process of decreasing right before 3PW took effect in 1980 (and has actually
been declining since 1970). In fact, it only takes five years for any
perceived effects of 3PW to wear off. The reason? Between 1986 and 1988, the
number of teams in the league was reduced from 22 to 20. The data indicates
that any benefit of 3PW in terms of reducing DPG was negated by the
formation of a more competitive league.
This reveals a fundamental problem with looking at draws: the DPG is
inversely correlated to league competitiveness. Think about it: if a league
is perfectly competitive, then all matches will result in a draw. Take the
spike in DPG in 1968, for example, which coincides with the introduction of
the substitution. The substitution rule change meant, among other things,
that a team would no longer have to play with ten men if one of their
players was injured on the pitch. This would naturally lead to fewer
unbalanced matches, more draws, and a higher DPG. Indeed, I find a
statistically significant inverse correlation between DPG and league
competitiveness.
Not only did the rule switch have no noticeable long-term impact on DPG, but
the reader must make a subjective judgment on whether they prefer fewer
draws, or a more competitive league. If you prefer fewer draws in return for
the same old winners and losers, then this rule change may be right for you
. I do not however believe this to be the intention of 3PW.
There are other, better metrics, for evaluating the rule’s success. Let us
consider them instead.
Sabotage
Regardless of the number of draws, if 3PW encourages attacking play, then it
may have served its purpose after all. After all, fans do not watch games
to find out the winner – there are plenty of live score feeds online –
they watch to see the beautiful game unfold. If the FA is looking to
increase stadium attendance, they need to make the experience worth it, most
noticeably through an increase in attacking play.
As it turns out, 3PW actually incentivizes defensive play and sabotage (a
punishable offence, e.g. purposefully negligent tackling). Researchers
looking at card data from England, Spain, and Germany show that teams in a
winning position were more likely to commit punishable offences under the
3PW system.8,9
At the core of this issue is the natural tradeoff of offensive play: by
increasing your chances of scoring, you are also increasing your chances of
conceding a goal. This means that, following the implementation of 3PW, if a
team scores and takes the lead, then the expected payoff of playing
defensively will increase relative to the expected payoff of playing
offensively. In other words, the stakes are so high that a team will not
risk giving up a goal. By making wins more valuable, the FA may have
succeeded actually made ‘unattractive’ football more common. To quote
football statisticians Chris Anderson and David Sally, “three points for a
win had not rewarded attacking soccer. It had rewarded cynical soccer”.
Most damning is evidence from a 2005 study by then-University of Chicago
economists Luis Garicano and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta. In a discussion paper
of theirs, the two analyzed Spanish league data from the 1994-1995 season (
when 2PW was last used) and compared it to the 1998-1999 season – the four
year gap is so that they do not have to assume an immediate response and
change in tactical development. They control league data against cup results
, which should remain largely unaffected by the change, to eliminate
potential external variables such as referee strictness, injuries, etc.10
Their study also provides evidence that 3PW is ineffective. They show a ~28%
increase in the use of starting forwards, but also an increase in the
number of defenders and a ~10% increase in both fouls and yellow cards as a
result of 3PW. However, despite the increase in forwards, number of goals
scored did not go up. This suggests that any attack-minded benefits of 3PW
were negated by its less appealing sabotage-effect. The study found that “
when ahead, teams became more conservative, increasing their defenders,
scoring less goals, and allowing fewer attempts to score by their opponents
”.
But more importantly, this study shows that 3PW is actually detrimental to
match attendance. They find the incentive change actually decreased
attendance for teams who played more defensively and committed more sabotage
. By controlling for team popularity and visiting/home factors, Garicano and
Palacios-Huerta show a negative correlation between ‘team dirtiness’ and
attendance, at a significance level of 1%. This means that, statistically
speaking, there’s a 99% chance that a correlation between dirty play and
attendance figures exists.
Relegationomics
One point that seems to be brought up consistently is that 3PW inspires more
league competition, and in particular gives lower-ranked teams a fighting
chance to avoid relegation.
The idea is that by increasing points for a win, teams facing relegation at
mid-season a given a fighting chance to turn everything around. If true,
this would make the league more exciting for supporters of lower-ranked
teams.
However, a look at the ten largest comebacks in the top flight of English
football tells a different story:
chart1
It is striking that only two of the top ten comebacks happened post-1980. In
particular, comparing the case of Fulham in 2010 to Ipswich in 1978 reveals
the counter-productive effects of 3PW. The Whites lost only one more game
during the second half the season than during the first. Their fantastic
comeback was due almost entirely to their ability to convert draws into wins
. Ipswich, on the other hand lost, only twice in the second half versus
eleven times in the first half of the 1978 season, yet managed to advance
only a similar number of spots on the league table. The Blues succeeded by
converting their losses into wins. It is telling that teams pre-1981 could
engineer a comeback by winning against those who beat them, while modern
teams can only hope to edge out a win over teams they have already drawn.
We then look at whether or not changing the points system affects which
teams are being relegated. If does, because 3PW rewards teams who win more
games, teams that win/lose would benefit more than teams that survive by
drawing. When the 1976-1980 season tables for the top three tiers of English
football are recalculated under 3PW, we get the following:
graph9
The evidence suggests that the impact of 3PW is in fact minimal. For teams
coming in last or second to last, how you count your points doesn’t change
the fact that you don’t have any. Teams in third to last place may
sometimes benefit from a new point system, but 80% of the time it would not
have made a difference. A fourth to last place team had a 60% chance of
staying relegated, but frankly, it’s the third tier of English football.
Whether or not the Tranmere Rovers stay up another season is of little
concern in this case. Teams that are relegated are not relegated for playing
less exciting football, they just aren’t good enough.
So far, it doesn’t look like 3PW has a strong effect on teams’ comeback
potential or their chances of being relegated. We still have one more metric
to consider, though: league competitiveness. To calculate this metric, we
consult a study penned by Kjetil K. Haugen, professor of Logistics and Sport
Management at Molde University college. Haugen’s analysis demonstrates
that decrease in league-competitiveness following the rule change in the
United Kingdom, Norway, and Romania.
By using a tweaked version of his formula, we can calculate the
competitiveness level of the bottom-6 teams under 3PW and 2PW systems. These
levels are represented on a scale of 0% to 100%, where 0% represents a
minimally competitive league, and 100% represents a maximally competitive
league.
You can find an explanation for my methodology and full access to my data
here.
graph3
This graph represents the competitiveness of the bottom six teams during the
second half of the season. All pre-1981 season data has been recalculated
under 3PW to avoid endogenous distortions (not doing this significantly
overestimates the competitiveness of pre-1981 teams). Note that the variance
index was able to exceed 100% – it’s because lower-tiered teams
consistently over-performed compared to their mid-season rankings. For
example, in 1977, the six second-flight teams ranked last in December
proceeded to win 186 combined points by June – they were only expected to
get 45. This rubric is meant to give us a visualization of competitiveness,
not a predictive figure.
At a first glance, it doesn’t look like there is any correlation between
3PW and bottom six. Top-flight competitiveness was already increasing before
the change, and data from the other flights doesn’t reveal anything either
. A subsequent statistical test shows two things: First, 3PW is a poor
indicator of a team’s performance during the second half of a season.
Second, on average, a bottom-six team’s performance during the first half
of a season is not a great indicator of its performance during the second
half.
These results show that, in fact, 3PW doesn’t give losing teams a second
wind.
Conclusion
Jimmy Hill’s role in launching 3PW ultimately won him the Contribution to
League Football Award at the 2009 Football League Awards. Perhaps if the FLA
administrators had done their research, they would have given it to someone
else. In most regards, 3PW has been ineffective in accomplishing its goals
and, as several studies report, has actually encouraged sabotage and
decreased stadium attendance. Further analysis shows that leagues actually
become less competitive due to the rule change. This is not to say 3PW
affects a league’s inherent quality, but rather that it makes teams’
differences more noticeable in table rankings. If the FA really wants to
avoid the same winners and losers each year, then they’ll need to
reconsider 3PW.
Points of Interest
It is worth nothing that if 3PW encourages team to shed the “win at home,
draw away” mentality, then it may have value. Indeed, analysis of
Portuguese league data reveals a reduction in home field advantage, albeit
at the cost of league competitiveness12. Similar results were obtained by
looking at German league data.11, 13 It’s not a bad metric, but if home
field advantage is how we gauge entertainment, then Barcelona is the most
boring team in the world.14
My analysis, despite its strong results, sometimes comes from a relatively
small sample size, ranging from 30 to over 1000 observations depending on
the calculations. It would be worth reviewing my conclusions from a larger
database, preferably of leagues from outside the UK.
All my data is organized and available for download here. Part of the reason
I decided to start a blog was to make football data access easier for the
general public. It took me months to download everything and organize it, so
please don’t waste your time doing the same thing. I highly encourage
anyone who found this post interesting to check out my data and see what
they can do with it.
You can find a more in-depth explanation for my methodology here, along with
some cool graphs to consider.
Please let me know if you find any mistakes in my approach or if you feel
additional data would be of particular value in analyzing the impact of 3PW.
You can reach me at [email protected]/* */
Special thanks to Jonathan Wilson of the Guardian for inspiring this post.
Footnotes
1 Ask a FIFA executive how to solve a problem, and he’ll give you
previously discredited answer.
2 Gardiner, Simon (2005). Sports Law. London: Routledge Cavendish. pp. 73–
74. ISBN 1-85941-894-5.
3 http://www.fulhamfc.com/news/2009/april/01/jimmy-hill-awarded
4 Chris Anderson, David Sally, The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know
About Soccer Is Wrong, 2013
5 http://espnfc.com/news/story?id=414630&cc=5901
6 Bas¸ levent, C., & Tunal (2001). Incentives and outcomes in football
Retrieved Febuary 21, 2008, from http://smye2002.univ-paris1.fr/program/paper/e5_bas.doc.
7 Dilger, A.,&Geyer, H. (2009). Are three points for a win really better
than two? A comparison of german soccer league and cup games. Journal of
Sports Economics, 10, 305-318.
8 Julio del Corral & Juan Prieto-Rodriguez & Rob Simmons, 2010. “The
Effect of Incentives on Sabotage: The Case of Spanish Football,” Journal of
Sports Economics, , vol. 11(3), pages 243-260, June.
9 Dilger, A.,&Geyer, H. (2009). Are three points for a win really better
than two? A comparison of german soccer league and cup games. Journal of
Sports Economics, 10, 305-318.
10 Garicano, Luis and Palacios-Huerta, Ignacio, Sabotage in Tournaments:
Making the Beautiful Game a Bit Less Beautiful (September 2005). CEPR
Discussion Paper No. 5231. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=831964
11 Dewenter, R. (2003). Raising the scores? Empirical evidence on the
introduction of the three-point rule in Portuguese football. Discussion
Paper, Institute of Economic Policy, University of the Federal Armed Forces,
Hamburg.
12 Guedes, J. C., & Machado, F. S. (2002). Changing rewards in contests:
Has the three-point-rule brought more offense to soccer? Empirical Economics
, 27, 607-630.
13 Amann, E., Dewenter, R., & Namini, J. E. (2004). The Home-Bias Paradox
in Football. Discussion Paper, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen. Dilger,
Geyer / A Comparison of German Soccer League and Cup Games
14 http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1219908-11-best-home-field-advantages-in-world-football/page/2 | h*h
发帖数: 27852 | |
|
