When neither team wants to win: a flaw of recent UEFA qualification rules

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how certain UEFA qualification rules create incentives for teams to tank or collude by deliberately avoiding winning, highlighting the need for strategy-proof tournament designs to prevent such issues.

Contribution

It identifies the incentive incompatibility in UEFA qualification rules and demonstrates how they can lead to collusion and tanking in football matches.

Findings

A specific match was affected by collusion due to rule incentives.

Incentive incompatible rules can lead to goal discouragement.

Strategy-proof tournament designs can prevent collusion and tanking.

Abstract

Tanking, the act of deliberately dropping points or losing a game in order to gain some other advantage, is usually seen as being against the spirit of sports. It can be even more serious if playing a draw is a (weakly) dominant strategy for both teams in a match, since this may lead to collusion. We show that such a situation occurred in a particular football match. As our generalisation reveals, the root of the problem resides in the incentive incompatibility of certain UEFA qualification rules. The governing bodies of major sports should choose strategy-proof tournament designs because of several reasons. First, they may lead to the elimination of a third, innocent team. Second, incentive incompatible rules may discourage both teams from scoring goals, and the players could be interested in improving other match statistics than the number of goals.