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

http://news.nationalpost.com/2010/06/01/win-a-soccer-game-by-more-than-five-points-and-you-lose-ottawa-league-says/

by latch • 16 years ago

16 46 16 years ago

news.nationalpost.com

cperciva2• 16 years ago

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.

latch• 16 years ago

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

nevinera2• 16 years ago

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.

noelchurchill3• 16 years ago

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

noelchurchill3• 16 years ago

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...

foulmouthboy2• 16 years ago

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.

awa• 16 years ago

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

edw519• 16 years ago

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

raganwald5• 16 years ago

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.

mrkurt3• 16 years ago

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. :)

noelchurchill3• 16 years ago

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.

shade• 16 years ago

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.

mrkurt3• 16 years ago

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

amalcon2• 16 years ago

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.

superjared• 16 years ago

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

hristov• 16 years ago

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.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

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.)

jrmurad• 16 years ago

"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?

cperciva2• 16 years ago

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.

og1• 16 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj2• 16 years ago

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.

---

>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.

char• 16 years ago

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.

raganwald5• 16 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj2• 16 years ago

>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" ...

ajscherer• 16 years ago

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.

mistermann• 16 years ago

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.

tjpick• 16 years ago

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

ShabbyDoo• 16 years ago

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.

patrickk• 16 years ago

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?

stipes• 16 years ago

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.

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

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