I’ve noticed that many people here say that using kicks is bad, but there is no good way to avoid it.
What would you do to avoid the problem?
To me the simple solution is add more subs and keep playing. Same as baseball, basketball, and hockey. I was at a NHL finals game that went almost 120 minutes. Yes, they were tired but the level of play was OK , at least to me.
(BTW if you are OK with kicks then you don’t need to reply here)
Sudden death?
Pull the keepers for both sides and let them play for X amount of time, most goals wins?
For finals, I favor attrition. Let them play 15 minutes of added time until there is a winner. I don’t like sudden death, as much as specified time periods but that would be a second choice. For semi finals I favor a rematch the following day.
There are all sorts of problems with these solutions, but I think they are better than the problems caused by kicks.
For those that don’t know, the NHL had regular season ties for many years. They moved to a shootout after OT in 2005.
For a semi-serious solution:
Sudden Death overtime, BUT: every five minutes each team has to pull a player. When they are down to one player each, then it gets exciting.
Incidentally, I think this would be good for hockey too. Having the two goalies lumbering down the ice to try and score would be hilarious.
No. Player health is at issue. There is already little or no offseason for many of the top players. There is also nothing wrong with PKs. Its actually one of thr most exciting spectacles in sport. Messis miss last night was memorable. The final of World Cup 1994…
I would suggest going the other way with hockey/soccor. Make the game 90 minutes of nothing BUT shootouts.
Player health ??? Well, yeah, the unhealthy player is going to lose. Are the top players just not good enough to win the game?
No, I don’t like shoot-outs … hate them in hockey and I hate them in football … some of the best hockey I’ve even seen was during overtime in the Stanley Cup Playoffs … riveting drama … the slightest mistake and the game is over.
Phaw … I do appreciate the difficulties in implementing these ideas … don’t get me wrong … but I still don’t like them …
Perhaps do away with the knock-out stage altogether, use a Swiss Pairing system of something … sophisticated tie-breaking formula … flip a coin … anything but shoot-outs …
[quote=“madsircool, post:6, topic:758568”]
No. Player health is at issue. There is already little or no offseason for many of the top players. There is also nothing wrong with PKs. Its actually one of thr most exciting spectacles in sport. Messis miss last night was memorable. The final of World Cup 1994…
[/QUOTE]Sure, if you like shootouts thats fine I guess. But shootouts have nothing to do with the game of football. They also have nothing to do with the game of hockey. They are totally different games. Having the biggest games of the sport decided by an only tangentially related game (that is mostly a game of chance) is stupid. Frankly I would rather have ties decided by a coin flip than by kicks.
After full time one regular 15 and then a 15 with a golden goal. After that I don’t know. I loathe pks and any silly idea about pulling goalies or removing players.
I guess the best idea may be to just add more periods while allowing more subs until someone scores.
After 120 minutes of 0-0; having tens of millions dollars if talent out on the pitch risking serious injury from fatigue; just what is wrong with PKs? They require skill and calmness under the most extreem pressure.
It’s a bit funny to compare with NHL hockey, where there are shootouts in the regular season, but not in the playoffs. Since I’ve grown up around this, it seems more natural to do it this way. Maybe that’s just bias, and anyway hockey tends to be a bit higher scoring, so the overtimes tend to be fairly short.
My opinion of it is that single-elimination knockout is an obviously stupid format if your goal is to discover the best football team, but a good format if your goal is to have a fun, exciting event where the best teams still have the best chances. So a shootout isn’t so objectionable, since the knockout format introduces randomness already.
But they should still have the shootout at the start of the match, not the end!
It seems only vaguely related to the skills of the actual game. It’s as if baseball went to home run derbies to resolve games after nine innings.
But baseball players don’t push themselves to the brink of exhaustion. Inti football is often played in the height of summer in brutal conditions. Its rare, but football players have died on the pitch. Like democracy, PKs are the worst system of all, except all the others.
Or free throws to decide a basketball game. PKs are a crap shoot not much better than flipping a coin.
I need a little clarification because you bring up penalty-kick shootouts in your OP, and then you mention the NHL going to shootouts in regular season games in post #4.
Is your thread about methods of deciding which team advances in an elimination round (in soccer)? Or are you talking about ways to settle draws during the regular season. Or both.
They are two very different discussions.
They best alternative I’ve ever seen to the current system is having the penalty kick shootout held after the 90 minutes of regular time have expired, but before the 30 minutes of extra time starts.
Then, the result of the shootout is only used if there is still a draw after 120 minutes. This way the motivation for a team to score in extra time is greatly increased. The drawback is, it is only increased for one side (the side that lost the shootout) while the other side is motivated to bunker and only play defense.
Still, that’s no different from how it is in the last 20-30 minutes of an elimination game already if one of the teams is ahead a goal.
That’s the only thing I would consider changing. Otherwise the current system is the best we have. Better that drawing lots, like they used to do.
And certainly better than the hare-brained schemes we see in threads like this like unlimited extra-time periods while removing players after each x minutes of time elapse.
Surely suggestions like that are only a joke (I hope).
Remove the offsides rule in overtime. 
ummm… no.
The idea is to try to find a better way of determining who advances in a tournament elimination round. NOT to create an entirely new sport.
I’ve pondered this question myself, lately ( as I do everytime there is a Euro Vase or Big Cup competition happening) - my suggestion (which I know is hilariously misguided due to the already massive amount of referee controversies) is to simply award the victory to the team judged most aggresive throughput the match, if the score is tied following OT.
Wheter to do this based on the opinion of a jury (who would that be) or based on pure statistics (shots on goal, corners awarded, possesion of the ball on the opposition half) or a combination of the two, I’m not so sure about. It would spark a whole new level of controversy I would imagine.
However, it is quite complementary to another thing I’d like see done in football, series og tournament group play) - any match that ends nil nil should award both teams zero points.