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Rethinking The Game (RTG) is a series of blog posts on changing minor aspects of the game of football.  You may wish to read the introduction to the series if you missed it.

Rethinking The Shootout Index: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] [Part 5]

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In part 1 of Rethinking the Shootout,  we suggested that penalties are crapshoot.   It may look like football, but it’s as random as a coin toss.  You may have doubts about this, so I’d like to give a bit more evidence to back up this statement.

The first bit of independent verification came from the bookies.  They gave Leeds a 50-50 chance of beating Doncaster Rovers in a penalty shootout (League One play-off final, 2008), even though they gave Leeds a 63% chance of winning if they game was settled inside of 90 minutes.

The bookies didn’t believe that Leeds’ superiority would translate into a better chance of winning the shootout.  This pattern was repeated in all three play-off finals - the better team was given no preference if the game went to a shoot-out.

The FA Cup provides another petri dish in which we can test our assertion.  The competition often pits teams from different leagues against each other - sometimes even professional teams against amateurs, or teams with more than one league between them.  If the better team has a better chance of winning the shootout, it should be evident in the FA Cup, where the difference in quality can be significant.

Looking at the results for the last seven years, a team in a higher division has no discernible advantage in the shootout.  The higher team have won 11 shootouts, and they have also lost 11.

Even if you isolate shootouts that feature professional teams versus amateurs, the honors are still even (3-3).  To show the difference in quality involved here, in games settled without the help of penalties the professional teams beat the amateurs 15 times in 18 games in the first round of the 2007-08 FA Cup.

Hopefully this will satisfy you that the shootout is no better than a coin toss when it comes to recognizing football accomplishment.

At this point you may be saying, “So what?”.  If two teams have slugged it out through 120 minutes of football (and even two tied games in the case of the FA Cup), we might as well just toss a coin.  The teams can’t be separated any other way.

In the next post, we’ll look at the consequences of this random tie-breaker, and how they negatively impact the game.

[Link to Part 3]

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