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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Mostly because the scores are lower. It’s just probability.
In a huge majority of soccer games, both teams only have 0,1,2, or 3 goals. You should *expect* that two teams are going to have the same number fairly often when **there’s only like 4 possible outcomes for each team’s score**.
Compare with basketball: Teams commonly score as low as about 85 and as high as 125. That’s 40 outcomes per team, so the odds of both teams getting the exact same score is rare. And ties (at the end of regulation time) are indeed rare in basketball.
Compare with baseball: Teams typically score anywhere from about 1-10. Ten possible scores for each team. So you’d expect more ties in baseball (after 9 innings) than in basketball, but less ties in baseball than in soccer. And again that’s exactly what happens.
So I’m going to take a lot of answers here, and put them all together into one big answer. Full credit should go to everyone who answered before me, because I’m borrowing from their answers:
(quick side note: I will be calling it “association football”; and contrast “gridiron football” – American football)
The most obvious reason is the nature of the game. With a large number of people on the field, no easy way to control the ball (contrast: rugby, gridiron football, where holding the ball tightly is normal), and additional control given to the goalie (who can use their hands), it’s a lot easier to defend in association football than it is to be on the offense. For this reason, most goal-scoring attempts fail; and a lot of time is spent trading the offense rather than scoring. This leads to a game that generally has low scores – which means that a random score is more likely to be tied than other games.
The fact that points are scored one at a time is part of this. Gridiron football has points scored 2, 3, 6, 7, or 8 points at a time, which means that even if both sides score the same number of times, they might not tie.
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However, there’s also some rules in league play that are different from other sports. Many sports leagues avoid ties for various reasons, whereas association football leagues accept ties in the normal season. I can’t think of another game that will allow a game to finish as a tie: Gridiron football only allows for a tie only if there is a tie in normal play, and neither team is able to score a point in a ten-minute overtime period (that period is sudden death – any team scoring ends the period); and most games have a similar policy to break ties that apply to all games.
The only other game I was able to find in a search that employed a similar lack of tiebreaker is Cricket; which offers both a “tie” if both teams finish with the same score; or a “draw” if the time for the game expires before the game is completed.
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These two factors combine to form an interesting point of strategy: if you are a team going against a team you believe to be better than you, playing for a tie can be a strong strategy. For example, if you think playing for a win gives you a 10% chance of winning (3 points), a 30% chance of a draw (1 point), and a 60% chance of losing (0 points), that’s an expected .6 points – which means if you think you can play for a draw more than 60% of the time, it’s a good strategy.
And that goes double if your end-of-season score is your score differential – the number of points you scored minus the points scored against you. In such a system – which is much more common in association football than in other sports – trying to beat a better team might only have you finish at +1 (or +2 if you are very lucky); but losing will almost certainly be -2 or -3. And in contrast, playing for the tie means you will probably finish at 0, but even if you do badly, you can probably limit the other team to scoring one or two goals; which means you finish at -1 or -2, which is a better result than if you played to win and lost.
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Because of how the game works, the acceptance for ties, and the way league play is scored; the result is a lot more ties. Each individual factor contributes; but they also increase the impact of the others.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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