Game Theory

"The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton” (attributed to the Duke of Wellington)

How do the games we Americans play influence us? The most popular game in the world is “football”, which Americans call soccer. One of the most popular games in America is “football”, a different game in which the foot rarely touches the ball. Let's compare these games.

• Attention: Soccer has very few interruptions. Football is mostly interruptions. There are only about 5 seconds of activity in every 30 seconds of game time. There are also as many as 12 time-outs per game. A 90 minute soccer game takes about 2 hours. A 60 minute football game takes about 3 hours. Football cheerleaders may help regain flagging attention. The other great American pastime, baseball, is even worse in this respect. A baseball game is an eternity of near-perfect inactivity, interrupted with brief spasms of action by only a few of the players.
• Identity: You can see the faces and bodies of the soccer players. Football players are helmeted and padded to such an extent that they can only be identified by their numbers.
• Initiative: Soccer is free flowing, so individual improvisation and spontaneous cooperation are essential. In contrast, football is highly scripted. The responsibility for a football “play” is distributed among coordinators, coaches, and players.
• Winning: Soccer is low scoring. There is no way to score more than 1 point at a time and even a single score can be crucial. There is no way to score only 1 point in football. Football scores are more than 10 times higher than soccer scores. Most important, soccer accepts a tie score while football goes to great lengths to avoid ties.

Soccer is better training for real life than is football. We need diligence, improvisation, cooperation, and personal responsibility to succeed in life. And success is often really just a battle to a draw against similarly motivated and inspired colleagues and competitors. Americans are trained to engage the world with the goal of winning, quickly, in a discrete round of negotiations or warfare. Instead, a long term, flexible engagement and accepting ties might be more appropriate and productive. And where are the cheerleaders in real life? Football is a great game but it may be poor preparation for life.