By: EFL Chief Executive Officer Phil Murton
Over the last few weeks, the junior committee along with Junior Manager Dyson Baker have been assessing clubs and looking at re-grading where appropriate.
It’s a difficult task as in any competitive sport where there is a ladder, there is always someone at the top and someone at the bottom.
In the modern world of constant gratification, it’s something people often seem to forget. We hope that over a period of a number of years, with promotion, relegation and regrading, teams and players experience all emotions in the game.
As a coach in junior sport myself, I know that players learn more and are more easily coached when you lose compared to when you win, so winning all the time isn’t ideal.
As teams are assessed, percentage is taken into consideration.
With only a few games played, sometimes it’s not the best measure as one bad game can have a significant impact.
It’s not only at times like this percentage is taken into consideration, as is history, we use percentage as tie breaker for finals qualification and or relegation, as we saw with Scoresby and East Burwood a few years ago.
An idea we are considering, particularly at junior level, as a fairer system for tie breakers and as a potential remedy to help address one sided results is the removal of percentage as a measure on ladder finishing positions.
Firstly, in competitions where teams play a different number of games against different opponents, is percentage a fair tie-breaker?
And secondly, it is argued, quite correctly, that the current system encourages clubs to win every game by as much as possible, something potentially not in the best spirit of the game and also unnecessary, in light of better ways to determine ladder finishing position.
This is in no way the fault of coaches or players on the winning team, they are merely playing to the rules and systems in place.
But we see it often, what becomes a race for percentage, where the opportunity to win by as much as possible must be taken to ensure it helps in finishing as high as possible on the final ladder.
If one teams beats the bottom team by 30 goals, the team near them on the ladder feels like they have to beat them by 40 goals. Is this in the long term best interests of the game?
In the systems being assessed, games won/points would still be the primary determinant of ladder finishing position, but instead of percentage being used as the tie breaker where two teams finished on the same points, the head to head results of games between the two teams would be used as the tie breaker.
If the teams had won one each, then the team with the highest winning margin would prevail.
In the rare circumstance the teams had only played once and it was a draw, or not played at all (juniors re-fixturing quirk), then a third level of tie-breaker would be used, such as results against teams nearby.
And if three or more teams were all tied, then results against each other would be used, a bit like a mini-ladder.
A quick look at last year’s junior ladders showed there were 10 cases where teams needed to be split, and using head-to-head vs. percentage would have provided for some differing ladder finishing positions.
It is similar to the systems used in most professional sports in America, such as the NBA, NFL and MLB. If it’s good enough for those sports, why not us?
The bias of percentage as a measure has been raised by EFL clubs before, particularly in competitions where teams don’t play each other twice, such as our 12 team competitions in senior Division 1 and 3, and many junior competitions.
The argument here has been if one or two teams are much weaker than the rest, and a club only plays these teams once compared with other teams playing them twice, they are at a disadvantage. It is a genuine argument.
Taking all this into consideration, using head-to-head results to split ladder finishing position on face value seems fairer for all, while also potentially achieving other competition and coaching benefits.
The premise is that the incentive of percentage “doesn’t promote good behaviors in football” and if removed may encourage coaches, who know a win is in the bag but with the final winning margin less important, to rest better players and give other players more of a go.
This in turn may lead to a better experience for players on both teams. It won’t change the result, but may change the way the game is played in a positive way, so has merit and is worth considering.
Challenging the status quo for systems and procedures that are currently in place with others that may improve the quality of competitions and the overall experience for all involved is something we continually look at. We’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
