After discussing the three players pitches/courts, it became clear that games involving tactics of 2 against 3 wouldn’t undermine the bipolar tension on the pitch, as it would lead to a dynamic that is the one of bullying.

From there the idea is to reflect on group behaviors by observing made-up games involving different levels of partnership.

The multi-teams football game is played on a round pitch, with only one neutral empty goal in the middle of the circle. It has no net, but a hole large enough for the ball to get in instead. A bit like golf, somehow.
For this example let’s imagine that 7 teams of 3 players each are playing. Obviously the winning team is the one that has marked more goals than any other, which implies that there iis one winner for many loosers (instead of 1 winner/1 looser).

The Octoball game is an 8 teams of 3 players (1 stricker, 1 defence, 1 goal). The bipolar tension is now within the team itself. The winning team is the one that marks the more goals, regardless of where they put the goal.

The Decaball game is played by 10 teams (sic) of 1 player and 1 goal each. I can imagine that this version would be highly competitive.

Triad Badminton court

Triad Badminton court

Triad Football pitch

In 1945, an Arsenal match against a Soviet football team called the Dynamos was organized in London with the naïve belief that it would warm up the frozen pre-cold war Anglo-Soviet relations.

In an article published at the time titled The Sporting Spirit,
George Orwell wrote about his disbelief when hearing “people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet on another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield”, and then add that “Nearly all the sports practised nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win (…) At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare (…) Serious sport
has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”

My idea was to compare the binary tension between 2 (= 1 winner + 1 looser) and the tension existing between 3 elements, and to make that tension a triangle instead of a bi-polar line.
A court or a pitch designed for 3 entities also engages questions of alliances and strategies: would 2 players spontaneously team up in order to win over a stronger third one? And then inverse the alliance system as the score evolves? Would the tension remain as a triangle shape, or should we then talk about a V shaped relationship among the players (2 against 1)?