The Financial Times reported on Friday the dramatic drop in draws (or ‘ties’ to Americans) in England’s football Premier League – and it’s thanks to the application of maths.
English clubs seem to have finally realised that draws are not much use. That in turn suggests that English football is belatedly experiencing its own version of the Enlightenment: people in it are learning to reason and count.
Never mind the somewhat condescending tone of the piece – it looks at a genuinely interesting trend in football which has seen the lowest number of draws at this point in the season for 41 years.
This is thanks to a 28-year-old rule change which awarded three points for a win (up from 2) and one for a draw. It has taken nearly thirty years for teams to recognise that the additional point for a win makes a draw far less satisfactory.
Here’s how: if your team had three games that were looking like a draw in the last twenty minutes, you should push for a win, even if doing so is risky. If you won the first, held a draw in the second and lost the third, you would still gain 4 points, rather than 3 for all draws. Under the old rules you wouldn’t have earned any extra points for risk-taking.
Here’s to maths making football that little bit more exciting to watch! If football managers mugged up on their basic maths lessons, we might not have had to wait so long to see this change.