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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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The story so far: Penalty shootouts are random.  Utterly random.  And random tie-breakers cause problems, the two biggest being that they encourage negative play and don’t provide a legitimate winner.

The lack of predictability is counter-intuitive. It feels like the shootout should reward the better team with a better chance of winning the shootout.  If you or I were faced with either scoring a penalty past Petr Cech or saving a penalty from Cristiano Ronaldo, we’d probably fail miserably - because they are much, much better then we are.

So with that in mind, why do penalty shootouts defy expectation?

There is little opportunity to display skill in the penalty shootout - the kind of ‘extreme’ skill that scores goals or prevents goals during the course of a game. The vast majority of times, the reason a penalty is not converted is the fault of the striker.  The instances where a well-taken penalty kick is kept out by an even better display of goalkeeping skill are almost non-existent.

The goalkeeper is largely involved in a guessing game. If they guess wrong, they have no chance of saving the ball. If they guess correctly, they’ll only save the shot if it was badly taken - too weak to too central. The goalie, for the most part, is a passenger on this ride. The striker either makes a mistake (and still scores most of the time) or doesn’t (and scores all of the time).

Pressure is the major ‘random factor’ that generates the mistakes that throw results all over the map. Apart from the unavoidable sources of pressure - the game is on the line and all that entails - the format of the shootout is a critical factor.

Firstly, the penalty shot is too easy. It is converted over 80% of the time in professional football. The prospect of fouling up such a routine task is enough to make some players wilt.

The other major factor is that the shootout calls for just five penalties each before deciding a winner. This format, combined with the ease of converting a penalty, means that almost 80% of all shootouts are settled by a single goal.

The format of the shootout - a handful of easy kicks - virtually guarantees that it is the pressure-induced mistakes, rather than skillful play, that settle games that go to penalties.

It bears repeating that some footballing ability is required to score a penalty kick. But once you reach a basic level of competence, any skill advantage is negated by the format.

The shootout format would be a fine method to separate teams of completely different calibers. If it was Manchester United versus Manchester Schoolboys XI, I’d back United every time. But two teams entered in the same competition are going to be quite close in skill level, even if you compare the best team in the World Cup versus the worst, or the best team in the Champions League against the worst.

If you think about it, the shootout format is more like a game of basketball than football. The default assumption is that a team will score with its next turn. It’s the number of misses that decide the game, not the number of goals. And with such an easy task to complete, every miss is a mistake. The mistakes decide the game. Talk about pressure!

Is this the method we want to use to decide the World Cup or the Champions League final every other time it is played? A test of nerve with almost no place for skillful football to shine through and win the day?

It’s time for a change my friends - and my changes are coming in the next post.

[Link to Part 5]

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