football, futurology, and the offside law
The future ain’t what it used to be (Yogi Berra?)
The ability to contemplate the future and adjust our behaviour accordingly might be unique to humans. Debating alternative futures must surely be only a human activity. Debates about sporting outcomes are in a special category. Results are discretely defined. Either one competitor wins or the other wins or, still in some cases, it’s a draw.
That is not to say that sports fans do not continue discussions long after the results are in. Usually, these involve speculation about what alternative result would have occurred had some event during the competition occurred or not occurred. When the conversation strays into this territory, it becomes heated and differing opinions are hard to reconcile.
I should have seen it coming!
The retrospective assessment of alternative outcomes is not limited to sports. We are continuously considering and making predictions, and trying to learn how different behaviours would have produced more favourable outcomes. This becomes especially fraught when the alternatives involve serious consequences.
I was reminded of this as the European Football Championships approach in the summer of 2024. It brought to mind a match between England and Ukraine in the Euro 2012 tournament. England played Ukraine in the last game of the group stage of the tournament. England needed only a draw to advance to the quarterfinals. Ukraine needed to win to have any hope of moving on. Early in the second half, England took the lead. Late in the match, Ukraine appeared to score a tying goal that looped over the goalkeeper and – seemingly – across the goal linebefore being cleared by an England defender. Ukraine’s players, their coach, and their fans were outraged when the goal was not given.
Isn’t it obvious?
In the end, England held on to win 1-0. Even if the goal had been allowed, a 1-1 tie would not have been enough for Ukraine, and they would have been eliminated from the tournament. But the goal decision was the source of much controversy. I was sympathetic to Ukraine’s plight until I saw a video of the “goal.” It showed that the ball had indeed crossed the line. But what it also showed was that the pass that began the attack was played to a Ukrainian forward who was clearly in an offside position. The referee and his assistants also missed this. If the officials had detected the infraction the Ukraine attack would have been halted. There would have been no goal controversy. Despite this, Ukrainian fans remained outraged and believed the team had been treated unfairly.
Had the goal been given, there would have been by definition a different outcome. But there are an infinite number of possibilities. For example, the initiative shifts to Ukraine, and they score again. Or perhaps, England increases its defensive efforts and the match ends in a tie. Alternatively, Ukraine takes risks to score the critical second goal and they are caught out by an England counterattack and lose 2 – 1. While Ukraine’s fans would likely argue for the first of these possibilities, there is no way to assign a probability to that outcome.
Be reasonable!
Excluding inconvenient truths is not exclusive to sports. It is a danger of any choice of future action. Business decision-making and government policy design face this challenge continuously. A similar problem faces us in our personal decisions. If I do A will I get B as a result? Or – stated more realistically – if I do A will I appreciably increase the probability of B occurring?
The complications expand by orders of magnitude when organizations attempt to plan future activities, or governments try to develop policy. To what extent do we make sensible, reasoned, realistic assumptions about future events? And to what extent are our expectations coloured by our desire for certain future events to occur? Perhaps the best we can do is to examine our decision-making process to determine where we have introduced wishful thinking in place of critical realism.
