Outcomes with asymmetric payoffs: The case of the Soviet Football League

Economists are interested in outcomes - the results of decisions made regarding scarce resources by agents acting within environments that they must take as given. Sport, and football in particular, offers insight into a wide range of measurable outcomes, and provides vast amounts of data on the decision making that surrounded such outcomes. Usually in the context of individual footballing contexts, the immediate rewards are symmetric in that they apply equally to each team: a team that wins will progress in a competition, or in a league structure will gain three points, and a single point if the match is drawn. Despite this, there have been variations over the years in terms of the rewards on offer, usually as an attempt to encourage more exciting play, to discourage attempts at cheating, and thus to attract more spectator demand. Indeed, it is only since the 1980s that three points for a win became commonplace across football, and before that a range of different incentive systems have been experimented with. In France in the 1970s, bonus points were offered for teams scoring three or more goals. In other sports, bonus points are regularly awarded for attacking play. In this paper we investigate a particular experiment in Soviet football in the late 1970s and 1980s. In response to an increasing number of drawn outcomes, and concerns regarding corruption, a draw limit was introduced. Teams that had already drawn a particular number of matches in a given season would not gain a point for drawing any further matches. This led to an asymmetry in rewards, in particular if a team that had reached the draw limit faced a team that had not. We investigate whether this system had any impact on match outcomes. We find some evidence that it reduced the number of goals, and that as teams neared and exceeded the draw limit, they draw fewer matches. The experiment was, nonetheless, abandoned in 1988.