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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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.
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.
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