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Comment by RiderOfGiraffes | Hacker News Reader

People seem to be assuming that the point of the game is to determine which is the better team. It isn't. The point of the game is to get the fans interested, excited, vocal and voluble.

The best teams tend to float to the top over the course of a season, and the best teams are more likely to win, but the excitement would be lessened if the result became more predictable. If I play Kasparov at chess I'll lose and the game will be completely uninteresting, but if I play backgammon against the world's best there is a chance I'll win. That creates more interest.

I agree that howlers such as the "ghost goal" from England, and the offside goal for Argentina are blots and shouldn't happen, and I don't argue that technology should remain prohibited, but I do think that meddling with the rules to try to make the game less "chancey" are mis-guided.

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I completely agree. I made pretty much the same point on the last "change Soccer's rules" thread:

"One of the reasons Poker is so popular is that even a terrible player can beat a pro by chance, some of the time.

I've always suspected the same is true of Football. Any attempt to "fix" the game by making refereeing better makes the game more fair. While that might seem like a good thing, I don't think anyone is qualified to decide whether that will make the game more or less popular. And considering it's the world's most popular sport, tinkering with the games in unpredictable ways is stupid."

There would still be a comparatively huge variance in soccer if refereeing were perfect. Would chess be better if a random piece is removed at the start of the game? Perhaps it would if a grandmaster is playing against a newbie. But in a match between two top players? I don't think so.

I may be misunderstanding something, but isn't Chess exactly the opposite of what we're talking about? Take two players, one ranked extremely well, and one a little below him. Chances are, the higher ranked player will beat the lower ranked player almost every time.

That's exactly the opposite of what I think makes soccer so appealing: almost no one can predict which team will take a World Cup, and every World Cup has its own team which does far better than predicted. This rarely happens in Chess.

That depends on how big the difference between the two chess players is. But the question is, would it make grandmaster chess matches more interesting if we removed a random piece from the board? This is essentially what the current refereeing system is doing with soccer.

I am baffled that anyone could think that introducing random unfair judgement by a referee improves a sport.

I think I haven't explained myself properly. It's not that I think the bad refereeing makes the sport better. I don't, and I wish it were fixed.

What I do think is that, with something so obviously successful, it's pretty hard to know what kind of changes might break it.

To use a simple analogy, assume you're a new programmer going over some very old financial software at a bank. The thing is written in 30-year-old COBOL code (and written badly at that). I'm guessing most programmers would cringe at such a system, not understanding why it isn't being "improved" by rewriting it in a better language (and there are good reasons too, like being able to easily add new features, etc.).

But as you and I both know, it's probably not a good idea to change it. Not because COBOL doesn't suck, not because there are good reasons to rewrite (there are some good reasons), but because it already works, and no one wants to mess with that.

P.S. Having said that, I personally do wish they'll change something to make the refereeing more solid. I don't think it will make Soccer any worse, even though I can't be sure. More importantly, I'm pretty sure that Fifa is going to cave on this issue withing 10-20 years, because of public pressure, and allow some form of instant replay.

Yes, but what's happening in soccer right now, is that the dealer saw a full house, but decided to only count it as a high-card 5.

I don't disagree, but that's not the point. There are two things being debated. One is that the errors by the officials are unaccaptable and they must introduce technology to reduce them. I'm not discussing that. The other is that somehow the game is flawed because there aren't enough goals, and hence chance plays a large part. I'm arguing that such claims are misguided.

In some sense the two are not entirely orthogonal because a single error by an official that leads to, or prevents, a goal has an enormous effect on the game. Nevertheless, there are two issues, I'm talking about one, and you are talking about the other.

I'm discussing the point raised in the original submission. You aren't, except insofar as they are not entirely unrelated, as I remark above.

> I'm talking about one, and you are talking about the other. I'm discussing the point raised in the original submission. You aren't, except insofar as they are not entirely unrelated, as I remark above.

He is not responding to your comment. He is responding to edanm, who is discussing exactly what jpd is discussing.

Noted - you are right - I should've read more carefully. Mea Culpa

Funny analogy. And you've got a point.

But it doesn't really matter what the method is that makes soccer so unpredictable. Part of it is that there are few goals, so tiny mistakes are often decisive. Part of it is that referees often make mistakes. Should it be this way? I don't know. I'm sure that part of the appeal of Soccer is the randomness. I'm also pretty sure that part of the appeal is the frustration people feel towards referees. It makes everyone upset, but it keeps people talking, keeps people caring.

At the end of the day, what matters (to Fifa, at least) is to keep Soccer as popular as it is now. And since no one really knows if "fixing" the refereeing will help or hurt Soccer, I don't think anyone is willing to risk the change (and rightfully so).

> But it doesn't really matter what the method is that makes soccer so unpredictable.

Of course it does. I suggest we flip a coin and decide the match based on the outcome.

My point was it doesn't matter, cause it works (in that it's popular) the way it is now. Changing the rules to make it more random is also unwise.

Most things already work. Most things can be improved.

I think there's just too much luck. With basketball or American football, any team can still beat any other team on any given day, and the Celtics made it to the finals instead of Orlando or Cleveland, but LA still won the championship (but still needed 7 games to do it). It's a good blend of giving you hope for your small-market team, but also making wins actually mean something.

I watched all the US games in the World Cup this year, and I never came away thinking that the US was actually better (or as good, yay ties!) as the teams they played. And, in fact, they seemed to be the better team against Ghana.

"And, in fact, they seemed to be the better team against Ghana."

Hardly. The US was utterly out-classed in the first half. They didn't push their attacks as hard as the Ghanans, and they couldn't get their defense in place reliably. Things evened up in the second half and overtimes, but it never felt to me like there was a point where the US dominated the game.

And not to forget that today's referee errors are tomorrow's legends. I mean, people are still agonizing about the "Wembley Goal", a referee error that made England win a world cup game against Germany (in 1966). So in the long run, the law of large numbers does still apply...

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