Game Theory in The Fifa World Cup
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/world-cup-football-and-game-theory
The idea of throwing a match is often frowned upon but is a viable strategy to make sure a different team proceeds through to the next stage of elimination. However, when a team needs to tie vs win, this is when it gets complicated. More often than not, tieing an opponent is always better than losing to a said opponent. However, in the rare case where two teams have the same amount of points earned from winning and tieing a match, the goal difference is taken into account before head-to-head results. Depending on what other countries place first and second in their respective group, purposefully losing/tieing a final game in the group stage would benefit a country more than placing first despite the benefits.
This scenario turns into what each country deems more important and a question of game theory develops. Each game in the single-round elimination stage is held at different stadiums, where a country may prefer the atmosphere more so than another. If coming in second vs first, in the group stage, means playing a relatively easier team to them but playing in a less than ideal stadium, then the odds are meant to be equal but in reality, are not. But of course, this is all dependent on what a country may value more than what another country might. Taking this all into consideration, it evolves from simply placing first to receive the easier opponent, into placing second might mean all of their other factors are perfect except that the opponent is negligible. If we were to break down the odds, it might be something along the lines of first(good), first(bad), second(good), and second(bad), where first and second refer to the placement in the group stage, and (good), and (bad) refer to the other factors such as stadium preferences. A team’s preference in terms of who they want their opponent will often lead to them throwing a match to face off with them if they have to place second vs first in the group. Even once a team has played all their games it is still possible for them to be knocked out in the case of South Korea beating Germany, thus meaning Mexico advances to the elimination round instead of Germany in the Fifa 2018 World Cup Group stage. Mexico had played all their games and was originally not supposed to move on to the next round, but because Germany lost, Mexico moved on because of their goal difference. It will be interesting to see how teams will try to strategize on what teams they should tie and what teams they absolutely need to beat to move on to the next round in the World Cup being held in Qatar in the fall of this year, 2022.