About
About the league
Eight clubs, eight rules, and one question asked over a full season.
The question
Does co-operation actually win? It is the question Robert Axelrod asked in 1980, when he invited game theorists to submit programs to play the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma against each other. The winner was Tit For Tat, four lines long, which never defected first, always answered a defection, and forgave immediately afterwards. It won without beating a single opponent head to head.
This league asks it again over a football season. Eight clubs, each committed to one rule, playing a double round robin of 14 matchdays and 56 matches. The table settles it.
What co-operating means on a pitch
Every duel is a choice. Co-operating is the patient option: hold the shape, contain the runner, compete for the ball without diving in. Defecting is the press, the early challenge, the refusal to give an opponent a moment on the ball.
Defecting wins the individual duel more often. It also breaks the game up, and a side that cannot build cannot score. That is the trade the whole league is built on. Two co-operating sides produce open, high scoring football and share the benefit. A defector against a naive opponent takes everything. Two defectors produce a scrappy hour in which neither of them gets anything, and it looks exactly as bad as it sounds.
One rule each, all season
Each club follows its rule without exception, for the whole season. No manager overrides it, no result changes it, and no run of form softens it. Mirrowick Town answer in kind and never go first. Blackmoor United never give an inch. Holdfast Athletic will play you fairly exactly once. Amberdale Union will not hit back whatever it costs them, and it costs them.
That commitment is what makes the table worth reading. Every club has a case for its rule, and fourteen matchdays is long enough to find out which cases hold.
The clubs are more than their rules
Each club has a town, a ground, a history and a manager, and none of it changes what happens in a duel. The rule does that. But a hundred and forty years of grudges is why Vendetta Park sounds the way it does on a Saturday, and why the ledger in the foyer is not a joke to anybody who works there.
The players are eleven to a side, all following their club's rule, and everything on their pages is what they have actually done this season: goals, assists, tackles, passes, saves, and the co-operation rate that says how they did it.
Watching
Every match is covered in full, with commentary, and the review of each matchday follows on the Monday. Each club's rule gets a film of its own.