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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 the last post I described why penalty shootouts defy the expectation that the better team will enjoy the advantage and win more often than not.  The pressure of the situation forces mistakes from otherwise dependable players.  The format of the shootout - the ease of scoring and the low number of penalties - guarantees that it is mistakes, not skill, that decide the winner.

The good news is that the fix for this is as simple as it is obvious.

If the penalty shot is too easy, then make it harder.  If there aren’t enough penalty kicks in the shootout, then add some more.

The simplest way to make the penalty shot harder is to move the penalty spot further away from the goal.  Nothing could be simpler and more effective.  My recommendation would be to make the average conversion rate drop from 80% to around 25%.  This might mean adding a second ’shootout’ spot maybe 15 or 18 yards from the goal.

This would immediately lift the pressure from the players.  The expectation now is that the players will miss more often than they score.  This is no shame in not scoring from that distance.

Other benefits include

• Turning the penalty shot into a game of skill.  Goalkeepers will no longer be forced to guess which way to dive.  They can wait to see which way the shot is going.  Goalkeepers will also have a chance to save a well-taken penalty, just like they save well-taken free-kicks.
• It puts the focus back onto players who score, rather than those who miss.  People will remember that superb penalty that won the shootout, rather than that dolt who slipped while they were taking the kick.

The second part of the magic formula is to increase the number of penalties taken - I think letting each team take 10 penalties is about right.

Wouldn’t this take a long time?  The current format of penalty kicks seems to take around 5-6 minutes to complete the five kicks, or around 30-35 seconds per kick.

I would deal with this by having each team take five penalties in succession, but to put a time limit on it - say 90 seconds.  If you start the clock after the first penalty, that leaves over 20 seconds to place the ball down and shoot - fairly reasonable I’d say.  I think we could finish 10 penalties in maybe eight minutes - not too crazy.

The final tweak I’d offer is to replace sudden death with another five penalties per team.  Once again, the goal here is to take the pressure off the individual to a degree.  I’d also use the same five players for all the kicks - let’s have the best players on the line for the tie-breaker.

A nice side effect of this format is that the number of shootouts decided by a single goal will be halved, according to my simulation.  The current format generally produces a single scapegoat who has to live with the ignominy of costing his team the trophy.  The new format will provide some heroes and some villains, but it won’t be so clear cut.

But most importantly, the better team will have a better chance of winning the game.  Pressure becomes less of a factor, penalty kicks become more skillful, and there are more chances for the better team to prove themselves.

Altogether, this format will address the problems that the current format has introduced.

• The weaker team is encouraged to play for penalties because that is there best chance of winning.
• The shootout doesn’t provide a legitimate winner because the result is random.

I’d love to read some comments on what you guys think of this - either comment below or send me an email - soccershout@gmail.com
Coming next: Why the other alternatives to the penalty shootout are fatally flawed, plus come closing thoughts.

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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]

======

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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By an amazing coincidence, yesterday (July 17th) was the anniversary of Roberto Baggio’s penalty miss in the final of the 1994 World Cup.

Says Baggio in his autobiography:

“Looking back I have to say that losing a World Cup final on penalties is something that I’ll never agree with. If you lose on the pitch, that’s fine, it’s right. Even if you deserved something different. But with penalties, no, that’s not right. Is it right that four years of sacrifice are decided by three minutes of penalties? I don’t think so. Losing that way isn’t right, and neither is winning that way.”

This pretty much echoes what I said in yesterday’s post on the problems with the penalty shootout.

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 first part of this series introduced the basic problem with penalty shootouts - that they are essentially random tie-breakers that don’t reward football skill.  The second part backed-up that statement with some hard numbers from the FA Cup.  Even teams in a higher league don’t enjoy an advantage in the shootout.

Now we will look at why this is a problem.

Firstly, it renders the ultimate result to be somewhat unsatisfactory, both for the winner and the loser. The winners don’t feel like they really won, and the losers feel like they were cheated out of a result.

Speaking as an England fan, I don’t consider their exits in several recent tournaments to be actual, proper defeats.

• Knocked-out by Germany in the 1990 World Cup.
• Knocked-out by Germany in the 1996 European Championships.
• Knocked-out by Argentina in the 1998 World Cup.
• Knocked-out by Portugal  in the 2004 European Championships and the 2006 World Cup.

By contrast, there was some perverse satisfaction to be beaten by Brazil in the 2002 World Cup.  It was a stand-up fight, they were the better team, Ronaldinho played a blinder, and they won.

Brazil didn’t just knock England out, they beat them.  And that’s what football should be about.

The problem is just as bad for the winners, especially when a shootout is needed to settle a final.  This seems to happen distressingly often.  Four out of the last eight Champions League finals have been settled by penalties.  So have two of the last four World Cup finals.

You’ll often find football fans questioning the legitimacy of such results.  The winner of the shoot-out isn’t recognized to be the better team and their glory is tainted because of this.

Liverpool’s victory over Milan is a case in point.  Despite their amazing comeback, I think few people actually considered Liverpool to be the better team.

It’s almost as if some tournaments end up with two winners - or no winners - which utterly defeats the point of the exercise.

The second major problem with the random nature of penalties is that they encourage the weaker team to play defensively, either in the closing stages of the game or even throughout the entire match.  If their best chance of winning the game is through the shoot-out, why not minimize the risk of losing the game in normal time?  It’s a ruthless approach but it has been used time and time again with success.

Red Star Belgrade defeated Marseille with penalties in the 1991 European Cup final after a goalless game.  Their manager later revealed that playing for penalties was a deliberate ploy.

“We realised we could not really beat Marseille unless they made a mistake, so I told my players to be patient and to wait for penalties,” said Ljupko Petrović. “We practised penalties a lot in our closed training session on Tuesday and it paid off.”

That is just one overt example.  We all know we have seen it happen, time and time again.  Maybe it’s not the entire match, but one reason why extra-time can be so dull is that usually at least one team has stopped trying to score.

The fans are the ultimate losers here.  They have taken time off work to attend the big final, spent money on flights and hotels, camped out for tickets, paid ticket touts…all to see a 4-5-1 formation and a team barely willing to venture out of their own half.

This isn’t how it was meant to be.  On the face of it, the shootout should be the ultimate test of football skill.  Mano-a-mano with nowhere to hide.  A duel to the death.

How did it end up ruining cup finals and encouraging negative football?  That will be the subject of the next post in the series.

[Link to Part 4]

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To receive the next post via email, please subscribe here.  You can back-out any time and you’ll never get any spam - it’s all handled by a reputable third party (Google, ultimately).  If you like to follow blogs using a reader, here is the link to the RSS feed.

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]

======

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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To receive the next post via email, please subscribe here.  You can back-out any time and you’ll never receive spam.  If you like to follow blogs using a reader, here is the link to the RSS feed.

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]

======

Some of the most memorable moments in recent football history have occurred during the penalty shootout.  Who can forget the Divine Ponytail, Roberto Baggio, sinking to his knees in ‘94?  Or David Trezeguet breaking French hearts by hitting the bar and the goal line in the last World Cup final?

England deserve a whole chapter in the story of the penalty shootout, starting with Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle, then on to David Batty and Gareth Southgate.  The biggest names in England’s current squad - David Beckham, Steven Gerrard, and Frank Lampard - have all missed crucial penalties in tournament shootouts.   Most recently, the 2008 Champions League final gave us the Cristiano Ronaldo’s unlikely miss, followed by the John Terry Slip.

But if the event is so memorable and dramatic, why is ‘dreaded’ the most common adjective applied to the penalty shootout?  It’s truly a car crash moment - nobody wants to see it, but you can’t look away.

To trot out a cliché, the form book goes out the window when it comes to penalties.  You can largely forget about the relative pedigrees of the players or the coach, the results leading into the match, and even the events of the preceding 120 minutes.

I can illustrate this with the help of the bookies.  The UK bookmaker Blue Square offered odds on the winner of each of the three Football League play-off finals in May 2008, as follows:

They gave Hull a 59% chance of beating Bristol City if there was a result inside of 90 minutes.

They gave Leeds a 63% chance of beating Doncaster if there was a result inside of 90 minutes.

They gave Stockport at 56% chance of  beating Rochdale  if there was a result inside of 90 minutes.

Yet in all three cases, they rated the result as a 50-50 lottery if it went to penalties.

The central issue here is that the result of a penalty shootout is utterly unpredictable - more unpredictable than the match itself.  While this provides excitement, it leads to a number of problems - as we’ll see in future posts.

You may be thinking about Germany’s envious record in shootouts as evidence that there is an element of skill involved.  It may be true that some teams possess an advantage, but if they do, it’s not football skill they’re displaying but nerve and temperament.  Is that what we want to use as a tie-breaker - as a way to settle a World Cup final?

On the other hand, you’ll find long streaks of heads and tails if you toss a coin just a few dozen times.  That doesn’t mean that you’ve mastered the coin.  It’s just statistically inevitable that this will occur.  The stereotype of the German personality provides a convenient explanation for their success, but it could also be attributed to dumb luck.  After all, Saudi Arabia have won all four of their penalty shootouts, but as national stereotypes go, they have little in common with the Germans.

So if penalty shootouts are so unpredictable - coin tosses with the veneer of football skill - why do we use them to pick a winner in a tight contest?  Could there be a better way?

[Link to Part 2]

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The great thing about football is that its rules have survived unchanged for over a century now.  If your great-great-grandfather was transported from the terraces of an early-1900’s football match to one of today’s Premier League grounds, while he would be taken aback by his surroundings, he would find comfort in the familiar action on the pitch.

Well, no, not really.

Football fans of that time were still reeling from such recent innovations as the referee’s whistle, goal nets, penalty kicks and two-handed throw-ins.  Confronted with modern-day football, your ancestor would be scratching his head about so many things, including:

• An unrecognizable offside law - down from three opponents in-front of the attacker, to one in-front and one level (unless they’re not interfering with play, or passive in the second phase,  or what-have-you).  The 1925 reduction from three players to two lead to a deluge of goals, followed by calls from purists for the change to be swiftly reversed.
• Shirts with names…and numbers for that matter.  Numbers were introduced in 1933, and in their first iteration, one team wore 1-11 and their opponents had 12-22.  No word on the confusion that reigned the next week, when presumably two sets of higher numbers faced off somewhere.  Numbers were finally made compulsory in 1939.
• Substitutes, which were first introduced in 1965…but only in the case of medical necessity.  This coming season will see the introduction of any-three-from-seven in the Premier League.
• The brandishing of red and yellow cards, which didn’t arrive until the late-60’s.  Driven by confusion between players and officials with no common language during the World Cup, former referee Ken Aston was inspired by the traffic lights on London’s Kensington High Street.
• References to “winning the three points” and a “relegation six-pointer” would have thrown the old fella, unless he cottened on to the 1981 rule inflating the award for a victory.
• Goalkeepers refusing to pick up backpasses.  The backpass law was introduced in 1992 - before that, defenders and keepers could play keep-ball indefinitely.

Another innovation, trialled in the Football League and Premiership in 2000, was a rule that instructed refs to march the position of a free-kick forward 10 yards in the event of dissent, including kicking the ball away, not retreating 10 yards and breaking from the wall prematurely.  It was hailed as a huge success, and then promptly killed by a FIFA committee.

All of this rule bending, tweaking and rewriting - including those of time and space to get the Old Man into a Premier League ground - just goes to show that the Laws of the Game are fluid entities.  They evolve from year to year, decade to decade.  And change is often resisted - I clearly remember that the backpass rule was not favorably anticipated, which seems ludicrous today.

So as I suggest a few tweaks to the Laws in an upcoming sequence of blog posts - Rethinking The Game - please suspend that initial instinct to dismiss them out of hand.  Who knows - maybe one day they’ll be familiar as white footballs (not permitted until 1951!)

To follow the series of posts, please consider subscribing to the RSS feed or subscribing by email.  Or just come back to this site every day for several weeks, whatever makes the most sense to you.  Thanks.