Santiago Bilinkis l Risk and Reward - Trying to live a life out of the comfort zone

Those who know me well, know that one of my biggest passions is Football… Yes, that is not a typo for Futbol (Soccer). I mean American Football. This blog would not be a true reflection of who I am without some space devoted to that.

All of you reading this outside of the USA must be thinking: “Ugh! That boring game that lasts three hours and stops for commercials all the time?!”. Well, I want to make a bet here: Without knowing anything about you, if you like business, economics or finance, the day you give Football a chance you will never leave it.

And, believe it or not, the reason why it is so captivating is precisely because it stops so much. Let’s see…

Futbol (Soccer) is an Analog game. It is continuous. Even when the ball goes out the field, the clock does not stop and what players are doing is not significantly affected. The game flows…

Football is Digital! It is a long succession of confrontations, with a begging and an end, as if they were zeros and ones.

The fact that every confrontation has a beginning and an end with a brief pause in between allows and mandates that before squaring off again each team has to make strategic choices: are we going to run or pass? Will we make a short or long play? And many more subtler things.

That makes every play important, not only because of the potential gain it may generate, but for the impact it may have in the mind and strategy of our rival in all future plays. That is, many times a play a particular play seems to fail. The pass falls incomplete or the run is stuffed for no gain. But the goal was not limited to that.

It was to set up the defense (or attack) so that whenever they see that formation again before a play, they believe we are going to do what we did before while we plan to do something totally different.

The fact that Futbol (Soccer) is Analog drastically limits the ability to come up with complex strategies, as anyone who has studied Game Theory well knows. In Game Theory, the games with more interesting strategies are iterative. That is, games where the same players interact many times more than one (even if that one lasts for 90 minutes).

The subject is a long one, so I will revisit it in future posts.

I invite all of you to get to know Football!

photo bybulldogsrule