The longest penalty in the world

The surreal drama of a season-defining game between two Argentine football rivals dissolving into fiasco. A final match delicately poised until an outbreak of violence got the whole thing called off, rescheduled away from the huddled masses. The reader’s mind might jump to this season’s Copa Libertadores final, where a coordinated attack on the Boca Juniors team bus caused the match to be postponed, and postponed again, until the powers that be settled on the solution of exporting the whole thing across the Atlantic. But this story was written many years before. In fact, it was written in Argentina.

It was Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina’s greatest modern writer, who once argued that all literary works are repetitions of previous ones. Originality, he said, was an illusion. The same old stories were doomed to repeat themselves, over and over again. The dressing might be different, but we will ultimately revert to the same, finite number of narratives.

Argentine author Osvaldo Soriano’s 1993 short story, “El penal más largo del mundo” (The longest penalty in the world), about a football match abandoned when the referee awards a penalty, could hardly exemplify Borges’s point any better. The abandonment of title-deciding games in Argentina is one of those archetypal, self-recurring narratives that football can’t stop coming back to.

So, too, is the titular penalty. Football provides countless permutations and possibilities. Yet the penalty is always the same. Same point on the field, same distance from goal, same number of players involved. And any innovation is always followed by imitation. Ajax’s 1982 passed penalty between Johan Cruyff and Jesper Olsen spawned an unsuccessful copycat effort by Arsenal in 2005, as well as a more successful one by Lionel Messi and Luis Suarez in 2016. Antolin Panenka’s chip to win the European Championship for Czechoslovakia in 1976 passed from the cutting edge to the cliche. In fact, the repetitive nature of the penalty is the reason it’s of interest in fields far outside of football. Game theorists now use penalties to explain key ideas in their discipline. And some of them are turning to Soriano to do it.

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“The most amazing penalty I’ve ever heard of was taken in 1958 in some hidden corner of Valle de Rio Negro, in Argentina, one Sunday afternoon in a deserted stadium,” writes Soriano in “El penal más largo del mundo.” The story, which was made into a middling Spanish-language feature film in 2005, is a chronicle of the Libertadores final foretold. Two bitter rivals — Estrella Polar and Deportivo Belgrano — are going head-to-head in a league title decider. Polar are a snooker club who compete in the regional football championship for lack of anything else to do in their provincial backwater, and who have never finished higher than 10th. Yet against all expectations, they find themselves a mere point behind the perpetual champions in Belgrano when the two meet on the final day of the season.

Here’s where the surrealist tale of Belgrano and Polar converges with the real story of Boca and River. With the unfancied Polar 2-1 up and seconds away from their first ever title, referee Herminio Silva, risking his job selling raffle tickets for the home side if he doesn’t fix the match in their favor, sees a Belgrano full-back toss himself to the floor under no contact. Silva needs no further invitation. He puts the whistle to his lips. Penalty.

The referee hasn’t begun to count the 12 yards back to an imaginary penalty spot when a Polar defender knocks him out clean with a single punch. A brawl ensues that lasts well into the evening. The local militia declares a state of emergency, and the football authorities determine that the remaining 20 seconds of the game — just enough for the penalty to be taken — will be played behind closed doors seven days later. “So the penalty lasted a whole week and was, unless anyone can tell me otherwise, the longest penalty ever taken.”

Anyone who has read Soriano’s surrealist depiction of football in the Argentine backwaters would surely have noticed the parallels between his story and the 2018 Libertadores final. The endless deferrals of the second leg could easily have come from the pages of the author’s work. The first leg was deferred by an act of God, a diluvian rainfall which caused the pitch to be unplayable on Nov. 10, and was rescheduled for the day after.

Then came the ambush of the Boca team bus on Avenida Monroe on Nov. 24. Projectiles were thrown, windows were smashed, cans of pepper spray set off. The game was postponed, at first by a single hour. That hour came and went, and the match was postponed by another hour and a quarter.

Meanwhile, Boca’s players were tested in hospital for suspected eye injuries, and Boca talisman Carlos Tevez declared his team unfit to play the match. Boca’s captain Pablo Perez, who had to be treated for injuries caused by broken glass, was inexplicably named in the starting lineup. With the match eventually suspended for another day, Boca called for yet another suspension, and with the River fans already in their seats CONMEBOL announced its decision to suspend once more, declaring two days later that the final would be played outside Argentina. The first leg of the final was played on Nov. 11. The second on Dec. 9. So the final lasted four weeks and was, unless anyone can tell me otherwise, the longest final ever played.

This isn’t just a straightforward case of life imitating art. “El penal” was, like all great surrealist works, based on reality. The presentation of real events in terms that are altogether unreal is at the heart of much of Latin America’s great literature. In 1953, a two-legged title decider in the Liga Confluencia, a regional championship in Argentina’s Rio Negro province, between Union de Allen and Cipolletti suffered a similar fate. Allen eased to a 5-2 first leg lead, but found themselves on the wrong end of a 4-1 scoreline in the second. With eight minutes to go, a Union defender handled in the box and the referee awarded a penalty. A pitch invasion ensued and the game was called off.

“El penal” actually tempers reality: The 1953 penalty was finally taken two weeks after the game was suspended. Riguetti, the Cipolletti striker, spent two weeks practising his penalties; Otto Benjamin, the Union goalie, spent two weeks practicing saving them. By the time the crucial moment came on Dec. 12, Riguetti could only blaze his penalty wide.

Soriano’s story was art imitating life, and now life has started to imitate the art once more. This summer, in a provincial league game between Defensores de Centeno and Atletico San Genaro in Patagonia’s Liga Totorense, the award of a last-minute penalty for San Genaro resulted in a brawl that caused the game to be called off. Rosario daily La Capital was quick to notice the similarities to Soriano’s work.

It’s funny, too, how surrealist stories about football often predict real developments in the game. In “El penal,” the Estrella Polar players gather in their clubhouse one evening after the aborted penalty, and Polar goalkeeper Gato Diaz discusses with the club president which way he’ll dive. For Belgrano have already named their taker: star player Constante Gauna.

“‘Constante always shoots right.’

‘Always,’ said the club president.

‘But he knows that I know.’

‘Then we’re screwed.’

‘Yeah, but I know that he knows,’ said Gato.

‘Then dive to your left and we’re sorted,’ said one of the lads at the table.

‘No. He knows that I know that he knows,’ said Gato Diaz before retiring to bed.”

Constante Gauna’s penalty record is a recurring narrative. He always goes right, says the club president, expecting history to repeat itself. But Constante, aware that his opponent has done his homework, now needs to decide. Will he choose right or left, order or chaos? These are questions recently tackled by applying game theory to football. It aims to stem the uncertainty of the penalty kick, to introduce unpredictability and chaos to a situation in which players usually act according to repetitive, predictable patterns.

“El penal” is in fact a go-to example for economists seeking to explain the role of game theory in deciding penalty strategies. I’m not the first to notice the link: Stefan Szymanski’s and Simon Kuper’s superb Soccernomics, now into its third edition, mentioned Soriano in 2009. In 2002, a study by economists P.A. Chiappori, Timothy Groseclose and Steven Levitt used penalties as the basis for an investigation into game theory strategies. They showed that all penalty strategies have an equal probability of success, which makes the process very difficult to optimize. They used the penalty kick to explore the relationship between pure strategies — where each player relies on a fixed, repetitive course of action — and mixed strategies — where each player randomizes their behavior.

The dizzying exchange, where the goalkeeper constantly changes his mind between diving left and right, is a perfect illustration of the distinction between a pure strategy and a mixed one. A penalty taker acting according to a pure strategy would always kick to the same side or sequence of sides. That kind of player wouldn’t be much good at penalties, because goalkeepers would be able to study their habits and dive accordingly.

So penalty takers have to vary their strategy in order to take into account what a goalkeeper might know. The goalkeeper, when deciding where to dive, must then consider the possibility that the opponent might choose a different side. At that point, the penalty hits what is known as a mixed-strategy equilibrium, where the best option for either player is to act randomly. The conversation between Gato Diaz and his club president is a literary definition of that equilibrium. Constante Gauna, whose very name suggests that he obeys a pure strategy, has been found out.

The seven-day hiatus, coupled with the fact Constante has been named the penalty taker, gives Gato Diaz time to study Constante’s habits. The fact the taker is known severely reduces Belgrano’s chances of scoring. A pure strategy might not be a bad option against a goalkeeper who doesn’t know the first thing about you. Then, kicking to your most comfortable side probably gives you the best chance of scoring. Now that Gato Diaz has done his homework, the two opponents have to settle on a mixed strategy. In other words, they have to do something original.

The penalty is finally taken in a scene of sheer farce. In a situation not a million miles removed from CONMEBOL taking its showpiece to Madrid, the fans have been locked out of the stadium for the match to be seen by practically no one. And as there are no local media, updates on the game are passed by word of mouth from a fan who has climbed onto the stadium roof all the way back through a group of supporters who are waiting in single file to hear of the outcome.

The teams take to the field in the usual way, and the referee blows his whistle for Constante to take his chance. Unexpectedly to everyone, Constante goes down the middle. Gato Diaz dives to his right, but his trailing leg is still able to deflect the ball away for a defender to kick it into touch. Kicking into the middle was, from a game theory point of view, a very good strategy. Diaz was surely expecting the ball to hit one of the corners. But the right strategy only wins some of the time. Penalties are rarely hit into the middle. A penalty missed that way, which represents the same lost value as a penalty missed in any other way, is considered to be the most humiliating. The court of public opinion dissuades strikers from choosing that option more often. The social media reaction to Raheem Sterling’s recent penalty miss against Leicester, for example, consisted of various value judgements on his character. Had he blazed it over aiming for one of the corners, there surely wouldn’t have been so much outcry.

Another moment of surrealism allows Soriano to add another layer to this game-theoretical thought experiment. Referee Herminio Silva falls victim to an epileptic fit just before Diaz saves Constante’s penalty. Miraculously recovering as soon as the ball goes out, Silva orders the penalty to be retaken, given that the game can’t legally be played without a fit referee. Even a club-sponsored referee can’t get the ball into the net, however, as Gato Diaz guesses right this time, plucking the ball from the air after diving to his left.

What Gato Diaz was doing was making complex decisions of game theory on the turn. Constante was unlikely to shoot to the middle again. Assuming that the penalty is likely to be saved down the middle whichever way the goalkeeper dives, shooting down the middle a second time around has even less chance of going in. Now the goalkeeper might be encouraged not to dive and save the penalty again. So Constante is likely to choose one of the sides. Constante will have falsely extrapolated that Diaz tends to dive to his right. Had Constante shot to Diaz’s right and seen his spot kick saved, he would have been criticized for not learning from the goalkeeper’s tendency to choose that side. In the court of public opinion, Constante’s only choice is to go to Diaz’s left. And Diaz knows it.

The story is cruel on Constante. He randomizes his strategy as a good game theorist would tell him to. Going down the middle was the solution to the problem — he did something the goalkeeper could never have expected him to. But the best strategy doesn’t always win. The fact that a good decision still fails to gain an advantage shows that, no matter how much theory can game the system, there’s a much more powerful principle at work, one that can never fully be tamed. Sheer dumb luck. As Borges said, the same works will always be repeated, so will the same scenarios emerge in the same places, the same chances taken and missed.

And so we’re back where we started. The Libertadores final took us back to all of the real debacles fictionalized in Soriano’s story. And game theory, which attempted to solve Gato Diaz’s problem about which way to dive, has taken the penalty back where it always was, from the chaotic, to the ordered, to the chaotic again. From a game of certainties, to an exercise in sheer dumb luck.

The Unexamined Game is a series exploring the intersection of philosophy and football. You can find the previous articles in the series here: 

Toward a philosophy of football

Pep Guardiola, tiki-taka and the end of football

Ball don’t lie: Football’s problem of other minds

How Isaac Newton ruined football

Stefano Pioli, and the power of mindfulness

Raheem Sterling, Michel Foucault and football’s racist discourse