Soccer may get rid of penalty kicks to decide games

The Game Room
101

[QUOTE=mhendo]
Exactly. Sometimes 0-0 is a reasonable reflection of the way the game went. Of course, the soccer haters assume that 0-0 equals boring, and for them maybe it does, but that doesn’t mean that it’s boring for actual fans, or that actual fans want to get rid of the scoreless draw.

Just out of interest, what percentage of games do you think end at 0-0?

In the English Premier League, German Bundesliga, Spanish La Liga, and Italian Serie A combined, i just counted a total of 13,542 games over the past 10 years (7 years for the Bundesliga), and of those games 7.8 percent ended in a 0-0 draw.

The lowest was Germany, with 6.7%, and the highest was Italy, with 8.5%. That’s about 1 in 12. And most actual soccer fans don’t consider that a huge problem.

As i’ve said already in this thread, if there was a large and growing call from actual fans for changes in the rules, i’d be happy to consider the changes. But most people who whine about this stuff are people who wouldn’t watch soccer even if the rules were changed to suit their short attention span. When someone comes up to me and says, effectively…
Quote:

…then you’ll excuse me if i don’t rush out and take their advice. I’ll let soccer struggle along with it’s mere billion or so fans.

[/QUOTE]

like, +1, thumbs up, etc.

It’s like the football equivalent of highlighting the puck in hockey. The fans don’t need it and don’t like it, the non-fans need it because otherwise they don’t know what the hell is going on, but it’s not really going to convince them to watch more games because they’re not really too interested in the first place, or they’d be fans.

102

Who said the problem is 0-0 ties? Not me.

The problem is deciding championships based on a bogus method that is totally unlike the rest of the game . But I guess “a billion fans” are OK with that.

Maybe we could have Obama and Romney play best 2 of 3 checkers and skip the whole election in November. It would be a lot cheaper for one thing.

103

Thing is, even with a supposed “bogus method” I’m struggling to pick out many unarguably undeserved winners over the last 50 years of world cup and European Championships.

Multiple winners are Germany, Italy, Brazil Argentina…consistent top performers appear to consistently do well in the tournaments. And the single world-cup winners of France, Spain and England all had legitimate claims to be the best teams at that time.

And yet the structure still allows for the odd unfancied team such as Greece and Denmark to do well (though it should be pointed out that neither were flukes, Greece didn’t rely on penalties at any point though Denmark did)

104

A more accurate analogy would be to decide the election on the results of only one state, or on the results of a vote on a single issue. But anyway.

As was mentioned earlier, threads like this just show that penalties are as good a way as any to decide drawn games, any of the alternatives floated about sound just awful. In particular, the idea of people dribbling from the centre circle in on goal sounds just horrendous, if penalties are not reflective of the game then neither is that rubbish.

105

Solution: the defending team can score if it gets possession.

106

So when does ‘the play’ stop then? Or do we just play 5 minutes after the corner kick? This whole scenario is just gonna a take a long, long time with defence and attack setting themselves up alternatively and still is deciding the game on how good you are on a small part of what is ‘football’. In my opinion more so than penalty kicks.

107

Sounds just like letting them play until somebody scores… :slight_smile:

I’d actually be amenable to seeing a tie-breaking system with a regular (maybe shorter - 20 minutes instead of 30?) overtime, a chance to sub a few players, then “Golden Goal”, i.e, play (in 10 minute installments) until somebody scores a goal. Then it’s over.

108

As others have said, this thread seems to confirm that penalties in fact are a reasonable way of breaking the deadlock.

Not perfect, but adequate.

I think the best option is to have the game settled in real play, so I’d always go for 30 minutes of extra time. Still deadlocked? I’d then defer to the result of a penalty shoot-out carried out immediately after the normal 90.

It has the least drawbacks and the most benefits of anything suggested so far.

My second choice would be to establish some other metric that encourages the right behaviours. Perhaps number of corners or a disciplinary factors (reds/yellows/fouls) which could also be made public at the 90 minutes.

Simple solutions are the best ones.

109

What I said in the post you were responding to (I think): the whistle blows 30 seconds after the kick (or 45, or whatever).

110

Why not have knockout matches decided by the number of free kicks conceded in normal time? Still have the 30 minutes extra time, but in the knowledge that the team with fewer fouls after regualtion time would win if scores were still level.

111

Oh God, the diving…

I think the best thing to do is concede that if there is is no winner after 120 minutes then we are basically picking a winner at semi-random. Any relation to actual soccer is besides the point.

So sign me up for a short, quick penalty kick competition immediately following the 90 minutes. Make it three shooters per sides with the takers defined pre-game (so as to limit the down time). Reduce the time between kicks to make it as quick as possible with the main action being the inevitable “park the bus vs. all-out attack” spectacle that the final 30 minutes will be.

Or just keep it the way it is - it’s not all that bad really.

112

I thought of that, but that is why this idea is different from other ideas such as tie-breaking according to corners conceded or what have you - teams already try to win free kicks by underhand means, and indeed free kicks are very common. So it shouldn’t distort the normal play of the game too much. Tie-breaking mechanisms based on less common incidents such as corners run the risk of distorting the strategy of the game itself.

And, I repeat, the count of free kicks would not include extra time, so teams could not affect it by excess diving in extra time. You could even the move the tie-breaking threshold back earlier in the game, say 80 minutes, to avoid teams deliberately playing for the tie-break.

113

'60s levels seem about right. One of the things that makes sports exciting are lead changes and comebacks. If scoring gets too low, these things dry up. And be honest, wouldn’t you rather watch a 3-2 match than a 0-0 match? Yeah, I’ve seen exciting goalless draws too…blah blah blah.

How you get there without fundamentally changing the game is the is the question though.

Are you arguing that this is low? That seems a pretty high percentage of goalless matches.

I’d phrase this that they are the least unreasonable way. Just because there might not be a better way doesn’t mean that they are a good way.

FIFA seems to be an accurate reflection of its fans.

114

If this method is so good, why don’t other major sports adopt it?

Baseball could have a home run derby to decide tie games.

BB could play HORSE to decide tie games.

FB could have a FG kicking contest.

NHL could have fights decide a game.

Golf could move to a miniature golf course to decide a match.

Tennis could use a fastest serve contest.

115

High compared to what? Other sports? If that’s your criteria, then the debate ends before it begins, because i (and most soccer fans) readily concede that soccer is different from other sports.

I was not really making an argument about whether it was high or low. I was simply responding to the asinine emphasis on 0-0 draws by Jackmannii, and noting that actual soccer fans (of which Jackmannii is not one) don’t really have much of a problem with the general level of scoring in the game.

Even if i concede, as many soccer fans have done in this thread, that penalty shoot-outs are a less-than-ideal way to settle a drawn match in a competition, it still doesn’t mean that i find the overall level of scoring in the game to be a problem.

116

Because the natures of those sports are completely different. Not that I should really need to point that out.

117

what is different about them?

Other than the fact that they all use normal game play to determine a winner during the playoffs.

118

They all involve much faster scoring, except golf which isn’t really comparable. Again, not that I should have to say it.

119

Why in the world is this so complicated? Why would opinions on either side matter at all when discussing a possible flaw in a game? A flaw is an objective problem. It means that the game is accomplishing its goal.

And what is the goal of a game? Competition. To see who is the best. That’s the goal of every game. Soccer is not special in this regard. If that were not the goal, there would be no point.

So taking this as the goal, while the exact scores matter little, it does matter entirely if the results are actually accurate. The claim about penalty kicks is that they produce an inaccurate score, taking the best team at playing soccer and then having the winner decided by a completely different game. So the problem is that the game is inaccurate.

There are two ways of combatting this unfairness: change the tiebreaker strategy, or try to eliminate ties. That is why higher scoring enters into the picture. The fact that one or the other side likes high scoring or not is 100% irrelevant to the discussion. The only question is whether it will fix the problem–the problem even soccer fans admit is there. The references to other games is to show whether higher scoring works.

So this all boils down to one thing: looking at other sports, does soccer have a higher number of ties in games where ties matter? And, if you use other metrics to decide which team is best besides scoring, do the winners match up?

If soccer is not doing worse, then you can say soccer needs to stay the same. If it is doing worse, then your admitted goal of making the game more fair comes into play, and it’s irrelevant that increasing scoring is not something you would like.

That is, assuming the other method of fixing the tie breaker really is the best you can do, which everyone keeps claiming.

And, BTW, my status as not being a fan of any professional or even college sports (unless someone I know personally is playing) is completely irrelevant to the analysis. I ask that your fandom or lack thereof also be made irrelevant, if we are actually going to get to the bottom of this problem.

I will, in closing, point out one thing: psychologist who study testing have found that, the more questions on a test, the more accurate the results. I’ll leave it to you to figure out whether scoring or games is analogous to a test question.

120

You are missing one point in your analysis, BigT. You assume, if I am reading you correctly, that the purpose of sports is to accurately determine an objectively superior team. If that is the goal, then obviously the whole concept of a knock-out tournament is ridiculous. Just play a massive round-robin schedule and award points (like, say, baseball prior to the World Series or domestic soccer leagues). There is little doubt that the Cardinals (my favorite baseball team) were not the best baseball team during the 2011 season - but that didn’t make August or the post-season any less exciting.

Once you have abandoned any pretense of attempting to determine objectively the best team, the accurate metric becomes entertainment. And there is an argument to be made that upsets create a more entertaining spectacle. And lower scoring generates more upsets - in fact, I believe I’ve seen studies that indicate that soccer has the highest upset rate of the major sports.