Z is for Zero-sum game

In a sense, football is the ultimate zero-sum game. One team wins and one team loses, or neither win and the points are shared. I’ve heard youth coaches argue that everything about the game has to be competitive – you have to earn your place in the team by being better than the others in the squad – because that’s what kids will experience when they get out into the real world, where everything is about competition.

But there’s another way of looking at it. Two teams play a match, give their all and enjoy the contest; two teams walk off the pitch knowing that they’ve battled hard and competed right up to the final whistle. Does it really matter which one has come away with the points? As far as the league table is concerned, yes, but in every other sense? I’m not so sure it does. Some of the proudest performances my West Moors team ever put it were in games which were ultimately lost. Even several years later, there are games I remember fondly, and not all of them were wins. Hard fought triumphs against arch-rivals are always sweet (I can still visualise Fin, our captain and rock of a centre-back, rising to head home the only goal late in a close-fought encounter with Kings Park Dynamos), but there are also games where we exceeded expectations and came close to shocking the bigger teams. A game we lost 1-0 to a late goal having shared an end-to-end thriller with one of the fancied teams in the division (whose conduct on the day was far from admirable – some of their boys didn’t like the fact that we weren’t rolling over as expected); A game lost 3-1 having played the entire game either one or two players short due to injuries and illnesses. We were level at half time, and only lost to two goals in the last five minutes after tiredness started to tell midway through the second half. Games like that show something about character, and there’s no way you can tell me that my team weren’t winners on those occasions in every regard except the scoreline.

Life isn’t all about results. One of the messages of Foul and Fair is that how you do things matters just as much as the end result. Once we start recognising that that applies to football – particularly kids’ football – it soon becomes apparent that it doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. Sometimes co-operation is better than competition, and the world is better when we look for ways to make everyone win.