The formidable columnist Simon Jenkins has an idea for a football reform — he wants to expand the size of the goalmouth. He believes that it would make it more likely that the better side would win and thus reduce hooligan behaviour. There would be no violence from fans who feel cheated, you see. The reform would, I can confirm, have the impact that he expects, at least on the chances of winning (the hooligan bit is eccentric speculation, I fear).

I used to reply, in my Fink Tank way, that if we extended the gap between the goalposts to a mile we could be virtually certain that the best team would win. We could then forget about having a match and just write in the points. I don’t think Simon would grieve if this were the outcome.

But this could be his big moment. The Football League is clearly ready to contemplate big reforms, so maybe wider goalposts could be on their way. At the moment, the big candidate is a penalty shoot-out for an extra point if the 90 minutes ends in a draw. Dr Henry Stott and Dr Ian Graham have been modelling the impact that the proposed new rule would make.

In 1981 there was a move from two points for a win and one for a draw to three points for a win and one for a draw. The impact wasn’t dramatic, but, comparing the decade before the change with the decade after it, you see a small increase in the number of goals scored and a small reduction in the number of draws.

The new proposal involves granting a point for a draw and a point to the winner of the shoot-out. If these split 50-50, the expected number of points you would get on average from a draw would be 1.5. Three points for a win, 1.5 for a draw, what does that sound like? Ah, yes, it is the same as two for a win and one for a draw. It’s back to 1980. If you give more points for a draw than before, you will get more of them.

The Fink Tank also looked at whether the proposal would make the Championship much more a matter of luck. Take the twelfth best Coca-Cola Championship side, Colchester United. Would they be more or less likely to finish twelfth? The answer is that the impact is negligible. The new rules would hardly change the spread of points or positions teams may get.

But there’s an interesting reason for this: there’s so much luck already. Even now, Colchester could finish in twelfth place, plus or minus seven places.

Eli Ben-Naim at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in the United States, has estimated the number of league matches it takes to choose a champion with an extremely high chance that the winner will be the best team. The answer? A 552-game season for each team with 24 matches against each opponent.

To ensure that one of the top three Championship sides wins the title, Fink Tank reckons you need a 368-game season. Fancy that idea, Simon?

finktank@thetimes.co.uk