Losing to Win

Why the rules of sport sometimes induce some strange behaviours

It has been called the most extraordinary game of football ever played. Yet there was no global audience that comes with the World Cup Finals, there was no league title or famous trophy on the line and there was no fierce local rivalry to add an edge to the game. Instead, this extraordinary match was a round-robin game between Barbados and Grenada in qualifying for 1994’s Caribbean Cup.

Barbados looked to be cruising to a 2-0 until the 83rd minute when Grenada pulled one back. Upon the restart Barbados funnelled the ball to defender Terry Sealey, who passed it back and forth with goalkeeper Horace Stout until Sealey intentionally blasted the ball into his own net to make the score 2-2.

Then things got even weirder. The Grenadians tried to do the same thing. They attempted to score in their own net only to find the Barbadians blocking the way, so they went up the other end to try to score in the Barbadian’s goal only to find their way blocked again. They continued to try to score in both nets until the full-time whistle. In extra time the normal pattern of play seemed to resume, with the Barbadians eventually scoring the ‘golden goal’ which ended the game and saw them win the match.

So what was going on? In an attempt to make the qualification stage of the cup more exciting, the organisers had decreed that there would be no draws. If a match finished tied then it would go to extra time. A ‘golden goal’ was introduced which, if scored, would immediately end the game. The golden goal would be worth two normal goals - a quirk expected to make little difference. Only it made all the difference.

Having beaten Barbados 1-0, but lost to Grenada 2-0 and with only the top team going through to the cup proper, Puerto Rico were effectively eliminated. Barbados, however, had a slim chance. They would have to beat the table-toppers by two clear goals or more to make up the three goal deficit in goal difference and overtake Grenada.

At 2-0 in the 83rd minute they were sitting pretty, but when they conceded, the 2-1 scoreline would no longer cut it for them. Instead of trying to score in the remaining 7 minutes, the Barbadians reasoned it would make more sense to take the game to extra time by scoring an own goal, giving them 30 minutes to score the golden goal, which would be worth two. So they duly did.

When the Grenadians cottoned on to what their opposition were doing, they tried to score an own-goal themselves which would have seen them defeated, but not by a big enough margin to allow Barbados to overthrow them at the top of the group. Scoring in the Barbadian net would also have given them the victory, which is what led to the Barbadians having to defend both goals. Somehow they managed to achieve the remarkable feat, holding on for extra time, scoring the golden goal and finishing the match 4-2 winners: the two-goal margin they needed to top the group.

This is a stunning example of a perverse incentive: a tweak in the rules which causes behaviour that is the opposite of what was originally intended. Perverse incentives are sometimes known as the cobra effect. The name derives from a story which goes back to the era of the British Raj in India.

Bureaucrats in Delhi became concerned about the number of venomous cobras in the city. To resolve the problem, they placed a bounty on each cobra’s head. Soon after, thousands of dead cobras began to pour in. But rather than going out and catching cobras, some entrepreneurial individuals set up lucrative cobra-breeding programmes to cash in. As soon as the British got wind of the breeding ruse, they withdrew the bounty. With no viable income stream, the temporary serpent-breeders decided to release the cobras in huge numbers.

In a sporting context the cobra effect has reared its head on multiple occasions. At the 2012 Olympics, badminton players from China, South Korea and Indonesia deliberately attempted to lose matches to secure an easier draw in the knock out stages.

The England national football team had a similar incentive to lose their last group-stage game to Belgium in the 2018 World Cup, to ensure they were placed in the easier side of the knockout draw. England’s manager made eight changes and his side duly lost the game, securing a route which led them all the way to playing the lowest-ranked team in the semi-finals^[1].

In American sports, teams with a worse record one season get earlier picks in the draft (the process by which teams select new players for the next season). As a result, there has often been an incentive for teams who aren’t fighting to make it into the playoffs to ‘tank’ by losing games late in the season.

There is a branch of mathematics which potentially allows tournament organisers to avoid these perverse incentives. Game theory assumes that parties competing with one another are rational and act in their own self-interest, and provides a framework for understanding how rational participants will act under a given incentive structure.

Indeed, in Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, a mathematical ‘anti-tanking’ strategy was developed to prevent teams from deliberately losing matches towards the end of the season. Instead of the worst team getting the first pick in the draft, the teams that aren’t in the playoffs are entered into a lottery to determine who gets the first pick, dampening the incentive to finish bottom.

Ultimately, if you don’t think carefully about what your rules are incentivising, like the tweaks in the Caribbean Cup qualifying, then even rational actors can end up doing some seemingly strange things.

---

^[1] There is no suggestion that England deliberately played poorly in order to lose the game.

Title photo by Joakim Nådell on Unsplash

A version of this article was first published on the BBC.