something similar could arise even without double goals in extra time. let’s say your opponents have a man sent off, and you’re up by 1 with minutes left to play, but you need 2 or 3 to qualify. an own-goal to give yourself 30 extra minutes to score those few goals against a weakened opposition is probably the best choice
it’s "no draws" rather than "double goals" that creates the unusual incentive. double goals just exacerbates it
This incentive would be eliminated if goals earned in extra time didn't count towards goal differential at all.
The perverse incentive is because the goal differential is comparing apples to oranges with comparing a score of A-B with a play time of 90 mins to a score of X-Y with a play time of 120 mins.
Counting the extra time goal as two makes this even worse.
under normal football tournament rules, the reason this doesn't happen is because only zero-sum games go to extra time and anything else simply ends in a draw (i.e. no goal difference change)
you are correct that if they simply didn't count extra time goals towards goal difference the problem would also be fixed, but that would feel artificial as counting extra time goals as normal goals is typical in football - for example, extra time goals always count towards aggregate scorelines, whether the previous legs had extra time or not. it is comparing apples to oranges, but that's the expected behaviour, whereas forcibly avoiding draws is equally at fault, but not the expected behaviour in football
I think as long as you can’t gain extra time by playing deliberately badly, this is largely okay? it’s good to want to teams to go out and try to hammer each other rather than narrowly shithouse a 1-0, as has been very common in recent major tournaments. even so, a lot of big tournaments have switched to head-to-head tiebreakers recently
Yeah, I can't think of a plausible rationale for this rule. FTA:
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No match could end in a draw; if the teams were tied at the end of regular time, they would go into sudden death extra time. But! Any goal scored in extra time would count as two goals. This was presumably done because this tournament, like many, used goal difference to break ties in the qualifying groups. (Goal difference = total number of goals they’ve scored minus the number of goals they’ve conceded.) So that extra time “golden goal” would give a team an edge in the overall competition. Little did the organisers know that it would also lead to one of the strangest football games ever seen.
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Such a rule has no impact within a game, it doesn't change the basic premise that a tie game goes to sudden death and next goal wins. But potentially weird scenarios are actually pretty easy to think of if you just consider the rule for a couple of minutes.
That seems like a really strange rule to have