Being American, your ignorance over GAA, Rugby, Australian rules, Cricket, and I am sure dozens of other team sports that allow draws is unsurprising.
How about the NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE??? They allow ties.
I plead absolutely 100% guilty to that! 
Those are just foreign novelty acts, not actual sports. 
Ties are possible in regular-season NFL football games.
That’s the disconnect. Why have a winner-take-all tournament in a tie-friendly sport? Seems like cramming a square peg in a round hole.
You can’t say how ties are fine and natural and normal when the signature event of your sport is a winner-take-all tournament. It doesn’t compute. At the very least, don’t condescend to Americans about how we’re obssessed with winning and losing when your signature event goes to a skills competition to force a winner out of a natural tie.
Because it’s more exciting.
It’s the same tradeoff that lots of leagues make when setting up their knockout playoffs. Baseball goes from a grueling 162-game season to a best of 5 in the first round. Sure, best of 13 would be more fair, and more befitting the nature of baseball, but the fewer games there are, the more important each game is, so they carry more drama.
The problem with doing a “league-style” World Cup is that the time commitment would be onerous. There’s no way to have a 20 or 40 game season when the players have commitments to private clubs. So if you can’t have a true league season, you’re forced to make some tweaks, which include having knockout rounds and penalties.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate penalties. I basically refuse to watch them because they’re nervewracking and a radical departure from the rest of the game. But I also understand why they are necessary, and the purpose they serve.
I know. Hell, I mentioned cricket just a few posts ago when I wrote that I come from a culture that will happily play a sport for five days and call it a draw.
Indeed, looking at the Men’s World Cup an additional problem is the growth of the sport. In 1982 only 24 teams took part in the finals and so the second round was also a group that allowed draws. In 1982 the knockout stage consisted of only four matches, two semi finals, a final and and 3rd/4th place playoff.
Note that the same format existed in 1978 but with only 16 teams playing.
This changed in 1986. By 2010 the finals had extended to 32 teams. A second round group stage rather than knockout would have meant many more matches, so instead it is a knockout tournament. The post-round one knockout stage in 2010 consisted of sixteen matches, the exact same amount of post round-one games that there had been in 1982, when they had a group-based second round.
Simply put, to have so many teams without a knockout stage would be unmanageable. Too many matches. In Europe, for example, the World Cup is played in the off season (apart from the nordic countries, where football is a summer sport due to the weather). The clubs would not accept their players playing that much off season. The amount of international games played by top players is currently an issue with top clubs often not releasing players for games they see as non-essential
Cricket also has a tacked-on style of tie breaker as well.
Which isn’t used in the form of cricket that I was talking about.
To be clear, the bowl out is largely only used in Twenty20, the validity of which as a form of cricket is a debate that just never ends.
Holy crap! This is not that difficult, is it? And yet, it seems utterly beyond human thought to some American sports fans in this thread.
Here it is, very plainly:
“Ties” (properly called “draws”–remember, a “tie” in football is something entirely different–it’s a bit like a “home-and-home” in American sports) are fine and dandy during the normal course of a season or in the opening round(s) of a tournament. This is because individual football matches are only smaller parts of a greater campaign. (Think of it as: battles are parts of an overall war, and those battles sometimes end in a draw.)
Draws are perfectly acceptable, as they advance a team a point (or hold a team back two points, depending on how one evaluates the circumstances of a particular match) in the overall campaign. However, once the campaign reaches the knock-out rounds, a draw can not stand because one side must advance to the next round. Therefore, there are means to determine who advances, but the match still stands as a draw.
This can not really be that hard to comprehend, can it?
Of course it is. And we’re no doubt “doing it wrong” too.
Should I start a thread about why many Americans apparently can’t handle the concept of a draw?
I agree with the rest of your post, but calling it a “tie” is proper here in the U.S. Just like calling it “soccer” is.
Which is why tie-friendly sports should not have winner-take-all tournaments in the first place.
Point noted. I’ll inform the relevant authorities and we’ll get on that.
“should not”?? That seems a singularly strange thing to say.
The football leagues around the world manage perfectly well to hold “winner takes all” competitions every season and produce a single winner, even when draws are being recorded regularly.
Football certainly produces a lot of draws but the structure of the competition is always agreed in advance and includes a means for deciding between teams that cannot be separated in normal play.
I really do think that the USA in particular does have a blind spot when it comes to draws. Not “wrong” or “bad” or “stupid” but the culture of sport there is unfamiliar with it.
Ignoring the inaccuracy behind calling them tie-friendly sports, you have just basically said that:
- Football should not have the World Cup, Uefa cup, FA cup, European cup, Olympics or even the charity shield
- Cricket should not have the Cricket world cup or even ANY Test matches at all.
- Rugby Union? No world cup for the egg chasers.
Whats retarded about this statement is that you seem happy to ignore that sports like Football, cricket, and Rugby arent actually all that different from American football, baseball, Basketball or Ice hockey, when it comes to dealing with ties.
In the World cup, if a last eight match ends in a draw, we play extra time then have penalties until we have a winner
In the World series, if a match ends in a tie, you play an extra innings until you have a winner.
In the rugby world cup knockout rounds, if the match ends in a tie, they play extra periods, then have a “kick-off” to determine a winner.
In American football if the match ends in a tie, they play sudden death until there is a winner.
In Basketball, in the event of a tie, they play extra periods until there is a winner.
Every sport has similar plans in the event of a game ending in a tie. Soccer could easily dump the penalties and just use sudden death like American football does (The 1996 European cup was actually won by a sudden death Golden goal). The only differences are the exact methods, and some differences in opinion as to when to use those methods.
The Super bowl going into sudden death overtime is functionally little different to the World cup final going into extra-time with penalties. I guess we should cancel the Superbowl, have some more advertisements on instead.
Don’t worry about it. It is simply threads like these that remind me that some Americans get so high and mighty when it comes to sports, as if somehow they invented them (when only one of their big four is even close to being original). We should think ourselves lucky that this was about women’s football, otherwise we’d have had someone coming in on page one telling us that they’re all pussies and informing us what “real football” is.
Keep telling yourself that. When it comes down to it, continuing to play the sport until a winner is deteremined is clearly different than stopping the contest and going to a skills competition to declare a winner. From the latest responses, it would appear that all American sports keep playing to determine a winner, while everywhere else they go to a skills competition. I’ll grant that the skills competition is a marked improvement over the previous system of flipping a coin, so I guess that’s progress.
Why do you need to determine a tournament champion so badly that you have to resort to a skills competition? Why can’t you just have a draw and declare co-champions? Why are you Europeans so obessessed with winning and losing?