I’m not looking for “soccer is the only sport to end in a tie” answers. I’m asking WHY, through the gameplay or tactics is soccer much more likely to end in tie compared to other professional sports?
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Scores are lower in soccer than other sports. Ice hockey is close, and also has frequent ties in regulation.
I think it’s due to the player count on the field along with rules that requires strong teamwork and slip ups of the opposing team that creates scoring opportunities. So both teams being strong result in ties.
It’s just the nature of the game. It’s much more difficult to get opportunities to score in soccer compared to other sports, just due to the fact that the field is larger, passing is more difficult, and scoring takes a good amount of luck along with strategy. Some teams might only get 1 or 2 really good attempts to score per game. This all adds up to a very good chance of the game ending in a 0-0 tie, or other similarly low scoring tie.
In Hockey, Basketball, Football, Baseball, etc… you have quite a bit more opportunities to put points on the board and that makes it mathematically much less likely to end in a tie.
Sometimes they go to overtime or even multiple shootouts if the official game ends in a tie. Not sure what differentiates the choice for this.
In soccer you can only score one point at a time. This makes it difficult to build a multi-point lead, and makes it easier for a given scoring attempt to equalize the score. Contrast it to basketball, where you have 1, 2, or 3 point opportunities or American football, where you can score 1, 2, 3, or 6 points.
Most sports end after a particular time limit, when football (soccer) matches are getting towards the end many football teams (unlike other sports) don’t go all out for the win instead they try not to lose rather than try to win, when this is combined with the low scores and there only being a single point for any form of scoring.
Because fewer points are scored than in other sports. Premier League’s average for the last 30 years [is 2.66 goals per game](https://www.myfootballfacts.com/premier-league/all-time-premier-league/premier_league_goal_statistics/). Other major sports like american football, basketball, hockey, baseball have way more scoring events.
Let’s say only two goals are scored during a game. All things being equal, half of the outcomes are ties:
|First Goal|Second Goal|Score|
:–|:–|:–|
|Team A|Team A|2-0|
|Team A|Team B|1-1|
|Team B|Team A|1-1|
|Team B|Team B|0-2|
By the same principle, if four goals are scored, 37.5% of outcomes are ties; if six goals are scored, 31.3% of outcomes are ties, and so on. On an even total of goals, more goals means the likeliness of ties gets lower — obviously there is always a winner if the total number of goals is odd.
First of all, there are no tiebreaking rules for most matches (the exceptions being matches where someone has to win, like in knockout competitions or playoffs). In some other sports, most or all matches have tiebreakers to ensure that draws are impossible.
Secondly, it’s a low scoring sport. If teams only score around 0-3 goals per match, they’re far more likely to finish on the same score than in a sport where the teams typically get hundreds of points per match. There isn’t really a straightforward reason why it’s low scoring – there are lots of different rules that affect it. e.g. they would score more if the goalkeeper wasn’t allowed to handle the ball, or if the pitch was smaller, or if penalties were awarded in more situations.
Finally, most competitions are between evenly matched teams. In international competitions you sometimes get teams of wildly different quality playing each other – if, say, Germany play San Marino, you would expect Germany to win by several goals and a draw is very unlikely. But in most leagues the gap between the best and worst team isn’t that huge.
Having said that, there are sports where draws are more common. I think test cricket is slightly more likely to end in a draw, which happens if the end of the match is reached before all of the innings have been completed. At the higher levels of competition, a chess match is more likely than not to end in a draw, which can happen under several different circumstances, for example if both players have too few pieces left to checkmate or if they both agree to a draw because neither of them think they can win.
Soccer is less conductive ot high score since on equally skilled team actually achieving a goal is kinda difficult.
since there is s still a time limit this makes ties more frequent that on other sports with only the few matches where there must be a winner making use of the extensions the rules provide to find a winner(added time and penalty kicks).
this is especially noticeable in soccer also because its a very defensive game.
Large field size + number of players + size of goal + size of ball + rules (such as offsides). Basically the design of the game is such that it will be low scoring absent significant skill gaps between the two teams. There are numerous ways to fix this problem, but ironically the global appeal of soccer and resistance to any changes (they won’t even stop the clock even though they can) means that none of those changes are likely to happen.
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