What Is a Draw? The Result Some Sports Treasure and Others Abolished

Test cricket is the clearest case, since a match can run five days and end with no result, and that outcome is a legitimate and sometimes celebrated one, because a side batting out the final day to avoid defeat has achieved something that requires skill and endurance. The draw shapes the entire tactical structure of the format, since a captain must weigh pushing for victory against exposing the side to defeat, and a match in which both sides have a chance of winning and losing on the final afternoon is regarded as the format's ideal. Chess treats a draw as a normal result and a substantial proportion of games between strong players end that way, with draw offers and threefold repetition built into the rules, and at the very top level the frequency of draws has driven repeated changes to tournament formats and tie-break rules. Association football treats it as ordinary in league play, with a point each, which is central to how leagues are scored.

The treatment varies widely and each choice has consequences:

• •League football, where a draw yields one point and three are awarded for a win, a change from two points introduced specifically to reward attacking play
• •Knockout football, where a level result triggers extra time and then penalties, since a winner must be produced
• •American sports, most of which have eliminated ties entirely through overtime formats, with the reasoning that spectators expect a resolution
• •Baseball, which historically played indefinitely and now uses runner-on-base rules to shorten extra innings
• •Boxing, which permits a draw and where a contentious one can provoke more anger than a defeat
• •Rugby and many others, which accept level results in league play and force a resolution in knockout stages

Changing the reward for a win from two points to three is one of the best documented deliberate attempts to change behaviour through scoring, introduced in English league football in 1981 and adopted worldwide from the 1990s. The intention was to make attacking play more rewarding, since under two points a draw was worth half a win and under three it is worth a third, which should reduce the attractiveness of playing for a level result. Analyses of the effect are mixed and mostly modest. Studies have found small increases in attacking behaviour late in matches, some evidence of teams that are level pushing harder, and also evidence that teams leading are more defensive because the additional point is worth protecting, which partially cancels the intended effect. Goals per game did not rise dramatically. What the change did achieve unambiguously is a different distribution of league points, which affects how quickly gaps open between teams and how much a single result matters.

Eliminating level results is popular with broadcasters and audiences and carries genuine costs. Penalty shootouts resolve a team contest by an individual skill only loosely related to the game just played, which is widely acknowledged and tolerated because nothing better has been agreed, and proposed alternatives including counting corners or continuing with fewer players have been tried and abandoned. Overtime formats extend fatigue and increase injury risk in contact sports. Rules introduced to shorten extra play, including placing a runner on base in baseball, are criticised for changing the nature of the contest to serve the clock. And a forced result destroys information, since a match in which two sides were genuinely equal reports a winner, which is a less accurate description of what happened than a draw would be. That last point is the substantive argument for keeping them, and it explains why sports that treat their competitions as measurements rather than as entertainment, including chess and test cricket, have kept the draw and shown no sign of abandoning it.

A level result is a legitimate and sometimes admired outcome in test cricket and chess, ordinary in league football, and eliminated entirely in most American sports. Moving from two points to three for a win was a deliberate attempt to discourage playing for the draw, and its measured effects are modest because leading teams also defend harder. Forcing a result discards the information that two sides were equal.