The behavior in Bloodgate shares a few similarities with efforts to frame pitches (in baseball) and to simulate tackles (soccer) and charges (basketball). Players use the means at their disposal to convince a game official that what he or she is seeing is actually something else. A ball is a strike. A healthy player is injured. The similarities don’t go much further, however. The use of blood capsules was universally viewed as a form of gamesmanship that went too far, way too far. In fact, it went so far that it was no longer appropriate to call it gamesmanship. Instead, it was a clear-cut case of cheating. It was a violation of the constitutive rules of rugby, because it was judged to be “misconduct,” defined as “prejudicial to the interests of the Union or the Game.” The committee that reviewed the case concluded that “just like taking a banned substance to enhance one’s performance, fabricating a blood injury to alter the course of the game was also cheating.”g
Even though the sport of rugby had no specific rules against the use of blood capsules, gamesmanship deemed sufficiently unacceptable can be defined as cheating under the constitutive laws of the game. But a large gray area exists between pitch framing and blood capsules.
Ultimately, the decision to define an activity as against the rules of a game versus the rules for a game is the result of a negotiation among those who have a stake in the game, along with those with authority to make changes. Sport is a constant negotiation between fans, administrators, athletes, and others. We change rules all the time, both rules for sport and rules of sport. Sometimes we even move rules from one category to the other. Cheating is thus a moving target rather than something to be defined once and for all.
Rule Making and Its Limits
If rules are indeed the defining feature of sport and central to what it means to cheat or not, then there is nothing more important to the integrity of sport than the making and enforcing of rules. If you think about it, most discussion and debate over sports is about exactly these topics. Was the soccer player really offside? Did the football player really catch the ball? How should we deal with blood capsules? How should we deal with the player who scores on a soccer restart? If cheating is defined as a violation of the constitutive rules of sport, then it is important to understand how rules for the game and of the game change over time.
Rules are not fixed. We can change them. And we often do. For instance, the offside rule in soccer has been changed many times since the laws of “association football” were first drawn up in 1863.23 The offside rule was changed as recently as 2015.24 Changes have been introduced to clarify rules and to improve the perceived quality of the game, such as by giving a greater advantage to offenses rather than defenses. Changes in rules often face opposition from those who value the norms of consistency and tradition.
Sometimes, factors external to the game forces rules changes. The NFL has changed its definition of what it means to catch a ball multiple times in recent years. These changes have been motivated by the widespread availability of televised high-definition replays, which allow an unprecedented look at game play that far exceeds the ability of referees in real time. Instant replay was introduced to assist referees, but as the clarity of the replays has improved, the meaning of “catch the ball” has grown murkier, and the NFL has struggled to cope with this muddiness in its rule making, arguably making the job of referees much more difficult.
The scholarly literature on rules and norms is vast and spans many disciplines. In this section, I highlight three overarching lessons that will be helpful in thinking about rule making in sport (and indeed more broadly) when we turn to the five battlefields in the war against cheating in sports.
Lesson 1: People Respond to Incentives
In February 1994, two Caribbean nations were facing off in the preliminary group stages of the Caribbean Cup soccer tournament.25 The rules of the tournament meant that, based on the matches played previously, Barbados needed to defeat Grenada by at least two goals to advance to the final stage of the tournament.26 Otherwise Grenada would advance. Deep into the second half, Barbados was leading by 2–0 and looking set to advance.
But then Grenada scored in the eighty-third minute, making it 2–1 in favor of Barbados. Had the match ended with this score, Grenada would have advanced despite losing the match. Here is where things got tricky. The tournament rules specified that if a match were tied at the end of regular time, then the teams would play a sudden-death extra time, with the first team to score not just winning, but recorded as a two-goal winner. These rules created some unique incentives within the game.
Under these rules and with this score line, Barbados now had two chances to advance to the final. It could score another goal in regulation and win 3–1, restoring that necessary two-goal advantage, or it could score a single goal in an overtime period and secure a two-goal victory. Ian Preston and Stefan Szymanski explain what happened next: “The Barbados players realized with 3 minutes to play that they were unlikely to score again in the time remaining and deliberately kicked the ball into their own goal to tie the match at 2–2 and force an overtime period.”27 The thinking was that if they needed one goal to advance, they’d have better chances during extra time. But to get to overtime, they needed to score on themselves. So they did.
Under these tournament rules, Grenada would advance with a one-goal loss, so after Barbados tied up the match by scoring on themselves, the Grenada players immediately tried to do the same. For Grenada, losing by one goal meant winning. Preston and Szy-manski described the farcical results: “The two teams then spent the remaining few minutes with Barbados defending both ends of the field as Grenada tried to put the ball into either goal, but time expired with the score still tied.”h In the end, Barbados scored in extra time and advanced to the finals of the tournament, where perhaps Karma proved the ultimate winner. Barbados did not win any of their three games in the final group stage.28
After losing to Barbados, the Granada manager complained: “I feel cheated. The person who came up with these rules must be a candidate for a madhouse. . . . Our players did not even know which direction to attack: our goal or their goal. I have never seen this happen before. In football, you are supposed to score against the opponents to win, not for them.”29 The consequence of the scoring rules and tournament design changed the incentive structure for the players in the tournament and fundamentally changed the nature of the game.
The lesson here is that players will respond to incentives. Expecting athletes and others in sport not to respond to the incentives created for them goes against both human instinct and common sense. Tournament design is a particularly vexing problem in terms of aligning incentives with outcomes in a way that preserves the integrity of competition. For instance, in the 2012 London Olympics, eight badminton players were sent home for intentionally losing matches in order to be better positioned in later rounds. At the time, Andreas Selliaas observed that Usain Bolt rarely gave his best effort in early rounds of qualifying, much like the badminton players, yet he went unsanctioned: “Is this okay? Yes, because he wants to win and save his strength for when it really counts.”30
As the following chapters make abundantly clear, rules create incentives, and people respond to incentives. We need to think very carefully about situations where players respond to the incentives provided by rules. How can it be cheating when a player follows the rules of a game?
Lesson 2: Rules Have Unintended Consequences
One of the enduring realties of making decisions is the so-called law of unintended consequences.31 No matter how many experts we consult or how much analysis we devote to making decisions, the outcomes of those decisions often turn out to be unexpected, and sometimes undesired. Thus, how we respond to unintended consequences is just as important as what rules we established in the first place.
It is not clear how much thinking went into the design of the 1994 Caribbean Cup soccer tournament, but the spectacle of one team trying to score