Football- An Infinite Game?
Football- An Infinite Game?
Game Theory’s effect on football explained.
Football is one of, if not the most popular sport in the world however the popularity of football has led to its fair share of misconceptions. One of them is that the immediate success of teams is pivotal to their survival and growth. This may sound true with the example of Leicester’s league triumph in 2016, which helped them build the foundations to keep them competitive to this date, however those 5000/1 odds are highly unlikely.
Game theory is used to better understand rational decision making in competitive situations with there being two types of games, Finite and Infinite. Most people look at football as a finite game, which is when there are set rules and players with the objective to win. This may make sense however if we take a step back and look at football as a game there is no way for one team to ‘Win football’ as there is always a switch up whether it be who wins the league or the cups it never remains stagnant and changes with time. This shows how football is an infinite game with the goal being to keep playing.
Clubs have to understand that survival in the long run is much more important than immediate success. The perfect example of this is Aston Villa who spent $109 million from 13/14 to 15/16 and dropped from 15th to 20th getting relegated from the division for the first time in the process. This shows that thinking about football as a game with the only objective of winning is not rational.
The perfect example of a club thats understood the infinite nature of football is Manchester United under Alex Ferguson from 2004-2007. With increasing pressure from fans after not winning the title for 3 years the club still decided not to splurge cash but develop younger talents like Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo which would help improve the squad. This resulted in 3 back to back premier league titles and helped set up Man United for long term success however we see once again in recent times the increase is spending by Man United in the chase to end a silverware drought of over 5 years has seen no success with the closest they’ve come being the Europa League Finals and in comparison to how much they’ve spent, A staggering $1 billion in the last decade with their last premier league title just under a decade ago shows that playing the long game and developing talents to match with the infinite nature of football is the key to success.
There are a few anomalies such as in the case of Manchester City and Paris Saint German however even while looking at them you can see that they give chances to younger talents such as Phil Foden, Cole Palmer, Nuno Mendes etc to ensure that even without money to spend, the club will be able to sustain itself in the future and remain competitive in the infinite game of football.
In my next blog post I will go in depth into cooperative game theory and explain how it shows how much each player can contribute to a team
Hope you read again soon.
Very well explained!
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