Believe it or not, getting rid of draws in sports with penalty shootouts actually makes the games more likely to end in a tie.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
No Draws, New Incentives: League Design and Incentives in the Japanese J-League
SSRN · 6401058
The Takeaway
Leagues often remove draws to ensure a winner and excite fans, but this analysis shows that the points awarded for shootout wins actually encourage teams to play more conservatively. This 'weakened' effort results in more games being tied at the end of regulation and increases the likelihood of strategic manipulation or collusion between teams.
From the abstract
This paper provides the first contest-theoretic analysis of a league reform that eliminates draws and resolves tied matches through a stochastic penalty shootout. Motivated by the Japanese J-League's 2026 reform eliminating draws and introducing a three-two-one-zero points system with penalty shootouts, a match is modelled as a two-stage contest with discontinuous prizes in which regulation-time effort determines whether teams enter a stochastic tie-breaking stage. Holding match technology fixed