The Endgame

Newsletter #4 - Penalty Shootout

This occasional newsletter looks at issues and events through the prism of the endgame. The endgame is a chess concept. In the endgame only a handful of pieces are left on the board. Few moves remain. Victory or defeat is close. Player options are limited and diminishing. The importance of the pieces still on the board has changed (e.g., the pawn has a new significance and the king may have to be used aggressively). Zugzwang is a particularly important aspect of the endgame. Zugzwang exists when a player’s only available move is one which will worsen his position.

Toronto, December 25, 2022

Penalty shootout

What could be more Endgame than the end of a game?

The Argentina/France 2022 FIFA World Cup final, played earlier this month, was professional sport at its best (if you forget about the first half). For most of the game, both teams showed extreme skill, extraordinary athleticism and ferocious determination. It was a battle of almost-equals. As many readers will know, the match was tied 2-2 at the end of regulation time and 3-3 at the end of extra-time. Then, under current rules, regrettably, it had to be decided by a penalty shootout. (Read a description of a penalty shootout here.) Argentina won the shootout 4-2.

What a rotten way to end a remarkable game! The result of a penalty shootout is largely accidental. Penalty goals don’t depend on the commitment and skill that regular goals require. Crucially, they’re not a team effort. A penalty shot is more like a point in singles tennis, one-on-one, a shooter and a goalie, lone player against lone player. Except that a point in singles tennis is seldom won by accident.

In fairness, some commentators defend shootouts. John Doyle, who knows a lot about soccer, writes, “the penalty shootout is soccer distilled. A goalkeeper faces a player from the opposing team who has the ball, trying to score, with the referee watching. That’s the essence of the game itself.” Most soccer aficionados reject this point of view. Shootouts are regularly and justifiably called a mockery, a crapshoot, a lottery. A penalty shootout in soccer subverts the very idea of the beautiful game. (By the way, there are alternatives.)

Metaphorical shootouts are as bad in life as real ones are in soccer. We don’t want our fate to be determined by accident and chance. Random discontinuity in life can be ugly and destructive. In my last newsletter, I quoted Atul Gawande: “All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story.” No one writing their own story would embrace penalty shootouts.

Sometimes, of course, life serves up an accident or misfortune beyond our control. In 1980 Roland Barthes, the great French literary and social critic, was mortally injured by a laundry van when he was crossing a street in Paris; he had just had lunch with French presidential candidate Francois Mitterand. This was an accident, not the result of a KGB plot or an intricately planned assassination as some have speculated (e.g., see Laurent Binet’s novel, The 7th Function of Language). Barthes’ death was une mort imbécile. Not even a penalty shootout.

Happy New Year to you! Avoid penalty shootouts in 2023...

P.S. My latest book is Antisemitism: An ancient hatred in the age of identity politics. It will be published on March 7 in Canada and on April 4 in the United States and the United Kingdom. You can pre-order here.