Does a sudden death liven up the game? Rules, incentives, and strategy in football (Q1424221)

This paper can be attractive particular for readers interested in football. The authors analyze the situation of this most popular sport after the recent rule change for games going into overtime. Their goal is to answer the question if the introduction by FIFA of the sudden death rule improves atractiveness of the football game. To this end, they construct an appriopriate two-person zero-sum game model where the players are equally powerful teams. Next, they discuss it in the two versions, when the two rules old and new have been adopted in the model, respectively. By a very detailed analysis, the authors come to the conclusion (in their main result) that the new rule will not change the behavior of equally powerful teams. This result would suggest that the recent change related to ``golden goal'' rule will not remarkably improve the attractiveness of the football games.