No offense, but I do wonder how many people who make the argument regarding possession in the opposing half as the tie breaker actually watch much soccer.
I find possession based soccer to be incredibly dull. Look at Spain when they were playing tiki-taka. It was dull as dirt. And it did seem they were playing a version of keep away so that when the opposing team feel asleep they could score one goal and win 1-0.
I am a fan of Atlanta United in MLS. Our first two seasons we played an attractive counter attacking style led by a South American manager and scored a ton of goals. When our manager left we replaced him with a possession minded European manager. We possessed the ball a lot and passed the ball in the opposing half a lot. We scored a lot less goals and it was really tough to watch most times.
If you insist on using some stat from the game so far, then the only one that would create an exciting game is shots on goal.
But if a game ends in a tie and then the refs huddle and announce “team A won because _____”, it might be a better indication of which team was stronger, but it’s terrible for the fans. I want to see a win, not be told.
Really, a sudden death overtime is one of the most exciting things in sports (well, OK, hockey). Do something to make it more likely that a score happens quickly - fewer players, designated offense, multiple balls* - and don’t make it even more boring.
*ok, not seriously, but I do love @Chingon and @Maserschmidt idea. The coach would do this at the end of some of my kid’s peewee soccer practices, and it is hilarious.
I wouldn’t replace penalties and a lot of the suggestions in this thread have been tried before or would result in dull gameplay.
Golden goal: been done
League system: been done (albeit with a final between the winners of two groups so you might still get penalties)
League/knock out hybrid: is the current system for international tournaments.
Possession stats: encourages dull possession football in the defensive half.
Corners: would discourage certain styles of play.
Disciplinary record: this is sometimes used to give club teams a place in a European competition that they otherwise wouldn’t be good enough to qualify for. Not a bad idea but hardly exciting.
Some combination of corner kicks and free kicks: convoluted, difficult to explain to new fans of the sport
I could get onboard with player taking on the keeper with a one on one.
But penalties are dramatic and simple. They are not a coin toss: they are basically kicking a ball really well. A good penalty kick should be unsaveable. But the pressure and the mental aspect play their part. And jeopardy under pressure makes for great sport.
For knockout games, teams should come with at least 12 extra players. After the 1st 30-minute Extra Time session, all of the original 11 starters must be off the field, and only the 2nd half subs and bench players play 15-minute periods until a winner is determined. In this scenario, I’m in favor of the “golden goal”. I actually still don’t understand why the “golden goal” was eliminated to begin with.
Because it has been tried out and didn’t work in the real world. Both teams decided not to push forward and would rather take their chances with penalties.
I don’t really understand why they wouldn’t do that with the current non-golden goal method also. Goals are hard to come by in football, and if they go down by one, it’s difficult to come back.
Okay, I don’t have the stats, but I remember a few famous actual golden goals scored in that period. But if ET corners, shots and shots-on-goal were even lower than usual, then it makes sense.
But if it’s like the NHL playoffs, a “golden goal” means that whoever scores that goal wins the game. Penalties are not used in this scenario. SOMEBODY will have to score a goal to win; both teams can’t sit back forever.
I was at both of the first 2 major cup finals in Scotland to be decided on penalties (and later I made it 3 cup final attendances out of 3 that went to penalties). I used to hate penalty shootouts and was interested in ways to decide the game without resorting to them. But I don’t hate them any more. I don’t believe they are a lottery, I think they are generally won by the team that has the more skilful players and that has best deployed its resources over the 120 minutes.
I believe that this hypothesis would be borne out if you were to look at shootouts in domestic cup competitions; I believe the team that has the higher league position would be significantly more likely to win the shootout. That would indicate that shootouts are not a lottery. If people within the game were talking seriously about replacing shootouts then I would do this research but I’m not going to bother at the moment since as far as I know, no one is talking about it.
The reason no one in the game is talking about it is that none of the alternatives described above would be an improvement. I believe this discussion was triggered by the Spain v Italy match the other night. That game was majestic. Extra time was more cagey but it was still gripping. I ended up actually looking forward to the shootout for the last few minutes, the shootout was very exciting and involved some great skill, nerve and loss of nerve. I would not swap that for one of the over-complicated schemes advocated here for indefinite playing time with arbitrarily weakened teams.
There’s a saying in football about playing in or attending a league cup tie on a wet Tuesday night at Rochdale/Ross County or equivalent. I suspect that people making complicated sudden death suggestions have probably not been to many wet Tuesday night league cup games. The people who have have seen enough football to know why these suggestions would not be any more satisfactory than shootouts.
I would make it a Golden Goal, but institute NBA-style rules for extra time.
Possessing team has 20 seconds to cross the half-way line (this one can be optional).
Once the line is crossed, the ball cannot be deliberately passed back across it. Loss of possession results if it is, or perhaps a corner kick or penalty kick from the 35-yard line (or perhaps increasingly harsher penalties for each violation; penalty kick from the spot for the fifth offense, for example).
No one is going to agree to a system where the players may have to play another 90mins before someone gets a goal. The teams look completely exhausted after an extra 30 minutes of extra time. And there would be almost 100% opposition to substituted players coming back, even if you could get more subs. Not to mention the winning team in a 45min+ overtime extra time period would be far more tired than their opponents in the following game.
Which is why I am ok with those competitions that go straight to PKs after 90mins. I’d like those PKs to be more one on one than spot kicks, but I think almost all of the suggestions on this thread are worse than having PK
Has any league anywhere tried using shots on goal as a tie-breaker? I’m curious how this would play out in practice. It might seem anti-climactic to have a game end and just have one team win based on shot count, and it might in particular feel unfair to a star goalkeeper who is keeping their team in the game but whose team is getting badly out-gunned. On the other hand it might make keeping track of shots on goal more exciting for fans, and making plays that get shots on goal will feel like bigger accomplishments.
An unintended side effect is that some teams might have a strategy of just getting as many shots on target as opposed to trying to spend more time setting up higher-percentage scoring plays - “playing for Corsi” is what you’d see in hockey (Corsi is a metric tracking shot attempts). This may lead to a possibly less entertaining game if teams just try a bunch of long-range shots that really have no chance of going in as opposed to taking riskier but potentially more effective plays. It may also lead to scoring first being a bigger advantage, as a team that scores first can play it safe and run up the shot count, while the team behind has to score first before they can really worry about the tie-breaker. It might also help reduce those games where teams go up 1-0 then play keep away, as encouraging the leading team to just put more shots on goals probably results in more changes in possession.
Well as long as shot counts are shown on the scoreboard, then there’s not much difference in mechanics between “Team A won because it had more goals” and “Team A won because it had more shots (given that goals were tied)”. It does feel like a pretty big shift in objectives though. You could even make it a single metric if you really wanted by making a shot on goal being worth 1 point and actual goals being worth 100 points.
That’s paralleling the evolution of goals in other forms of football. That is, 3 for a field, 6 for a touchdown, in American football; whatever they do in Rugby, etc. The soccer purists would resist (it would be a major change in the game, after all) but it could resolve the tying situation.
The only study I could find quickly was this from 2020. It showed that being a full league above your domestic cup competition (e.g. a Premier League side against a Championship side) gave the better team about an 8% better chance of winning the shootout.
Whether that is “significantly” or not is up to you, I suppose. I personally expected it to be a bit higher.
ETA: By comparison, the numbers I’ve found show that going first is worth about a 20% advantage, so it’s better to be the worse side and go first than the better side and shoot second.
I don’t think that’s significant, and it’s for teams that should be pretty different in skill level. That tells me that PKs between closely matched teams is a coinflip.
Well done on finding that. I’m talking about statistical significance - glancing at that it isn’t immediately clear whether their results were statistically significant. But if they were then that does show that penalty shootouts are not a lottery. An 8% chance in favour of teams one division above sound plausible, given that it’s often not much of a shock when a team loses to one from a division down.