The Consequences of the Three-Point Rule in Argentine Professional Soccer

This paper investigates the effect of the three-point rule on the average number of goals scored per match and the prevalence of ties in Argentine professional soccer. We review the existing theoretical models to analyze the impact of the three-point rule on the offensive and defensive strategies of a team and on average scoring. We then use a dataset of more than 3,500 observations. We exploit the variability in the application of the three-point rule in the Argentine league. In particular, we take advantage of the fact that the three-point rule was not effectively employed in the construction of the ranking used to decide which teams will be relegated to the second-division tournament. Indeed, we use the teams facing relegation as our control group, and the other teams, not facing relegation, as our treatment group. Our identifying assumption is that the behavior of teams in risk of relegation continued to be governed by the two-point rule and was not influenced by the three-point rule. We include fixed effects for each team in each tournament and control for the quality of the rival.. Our results indicate that the three-point rule had a statistically-significant negative effect on the number of goals scored while increasing the prevalence of ties. We relate our findings to the existing literature and draw some preliminary conclusions.