Was Zidane honest or well-informed? How UEFA barely avoided a serious scandal

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the strategic incentives in UEFA Euro 1996 qualification, revealing how teams might manipulate efforts and outcomes to avoid risky play-offs, with France's actions exemplifying such behavior.

Contribution

It demonstrates that the qualification process was susceptible to strategic manipulation, highlighting a real-world case where a team had incentives to intentionally concede goals.

Findings

France had an incentive to score own goals to improve qualification chances.

The qualification system's design can be exploited for strategic manipulation.

Strategic effort exertion can lead to outcomes that undermine fairness.

Abstract

UEFA European Championship 1996 qualification is known to violate strategy-proofness. It has been proved recently that a team could be better off by exerting a lower effort: it might be optimal to concede some goals in order to achieve a better position among runners-up, and hence avoid a hazardous play-off. We show that it is not only an irrelevant scenario with a marginal probability since France had an incentive to kick two own goals on its last match against Israel.