A world record 51 red cards were shown during an Under-20 championship semi-final in Brazil, and the tie has since been settled without the second leg being played.
The first leg of the Minas Gerais Under-20 Championship match between Uberlandia and Mamore produced the dismissal of 43 players and eight members of coaching staff, BBC Sport reported.
The previous record was 36, set in 2011 in a fifth-division match in Argentina between Club Atletico Claypole and Victoriano Arenas.
The two are not quite alike in kind. The 2011 fixture was a fifth-division match between senior sides; this was the first leg of a state Under-20 championship semi-final in Minas Gerais.
According to the referee's report, a brawl broke out in the second half after a Mamore player taunted the opposition bench during celebrations when his side went 3-1 up. An Uberlandia goalkeeping coach ran on to the pitch to confront him, and the dismissals followed. Three players had already been sent off earlier in the match.
The game was paused for approximately 40 minutes and then abandoned by the referee, Fernando Patrick Drosghic Modesto.
That left the semi-final unfinished, with Mamore ahead and a second leg still to be played.
Uberlandia have since confirmed that they are conceding that second leg. Mamore, they noted, have only seven players available as a result of all the red cards. The club described its decision as a "gesture of fair play".
Mamore will therefore progress to the final. Uberlandia will instead focus on the third-place match.
The total of 51 divides into two categories. Forty-three of the dismissals were of players. The remaining eight were of members of coaching staff, who are not on the pitch to begin with.
It is worth following the arithmetic through, because it arrives somewhere unusual. The side that lost the greater part of its squad to the referee has been advanced to the final, and the reason given for advancing it is fairness.
Fairness is doing a specific job here. Uberlandia's position is that a second leg against seven players would not be a fair contest, which is almost certainly correct. The difficulty is that the shortage of players is the recorded output of the disciplinary process, and the disciplinary process is the one part of the evening that worked exactly as designed.
So the record and the result are the same event. Fifty-one dismissals produced a squad too small to field a team, and a squad too small to field a team produced a place in the final. By the standard applied, the most dependable route through a cup tie is to have enough of your players sent off that the fixture becomes unsporting.
Our analysts note the escalation involved. A single red card removes one player for the remainder of the match. Forty-three of them, properly recorded, removed the opposition from the competition.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has asked the Minas Gerais federation where the line now sits: if seven available players earns a place in the final, what six earns, and what five. On the reasoning applied here, a club with no players left at all could not be given a fair game by anybody, and would therefore be unbeatable.