I like it. The tactics involved to play offense and defense simultaneously would be insane and entertaining to watch.
And it’s a lot cheaper than my idea, which involved tilting the field.
Then you wouldn’t have a Championship Match. Removing games as a result of ties is silly because you avoid the entire reason for elimination tournaments - cascading one-off matches.
It would make far more sense to say that in the event of a tie, both teams move forward. Remember ties aren’t actually considered something shameful in the rest of the world as it is in the US.
Yes yes I know. I am a fan of the sport. I’m an American, but I watch European soccer more than any other major sport. I get it. I am looking for a solution that provides an incentive to play to win as opposed to an incentive to play to not lose.
Which I think is my other problem with kicks. Often near the end of knockout games you see teams switch to “play to not lose” mode and let kicks decide. This is something else no one really likes.
I may end up on the side of kicks are the least bad, but I want to explore other options first.
If we were to make double elimination for ties work there would need to be other tweaks to the tournament structure. I’m not sure what they are or how they work yet.
If eliminating both teams it too extreme I think advancing both teams but giving them a one goal disadvantage at the start of the next game would work. Then for the final you play until someone breaks the tie.
I was arguing earlier that ties are integral to the sport, but it’s true that ties are terrible for knockout tournaments. So the solution then, without changing the game fundamentally, would be to add extra incentives to not tie.
Maybe there are better ways to incentivise this. Right now I am still on the side of go back to a coin toss for everything but the final but that’s not all that interesting to talk about. And there might be better ideas.
However, the “play until there is a sudden death winner” also gives an incentive to win in regulation otherwise the players will get worn out, which people here apparently think is something to avoid at all costs.
Because the prevalence of ties is much higher than in other sports, and because there’s serious opposition to any change due to status quo bias.
Outliers can be optimal. Perhaps most other sports have less than the optimal level of ties. But, statistically, that’s not usually how it goes.
If you were designing a sport from scratch, and people were pitching ideas, and someone said: “You know, I think about a third of the time, there should be no clear winner”, is your first thought: “Yes! That seems perfect!”
I agree with this. Known, pre-emptive tiebreakers are absolutely the wrong path, because they warp the shape of what is supposed to be the actual game to follow.
So?
It’s kind of this strange American (I am American as well, FWIW) abhorrence of ties. It’s not really considered that big of a deal for other countries, especially in regards to soccer. (FWIW ties are also not rare in ice hockey either).
Well part of the reason is because both teams are gassed. Look at Poland-Portugal yesterday. Both teams were definitely extremely tired after the first extra period. Yes, Poland went to a play not to lose mentality, but that was also a factor of fatigue (both Poland and Portugal went to extra periods in their previous matches as well).
Compare this to the Copa America, where, except for the Final Match, a draw in regular time went immediately to PKs without extra periods. There was very little, if any, play not to lose mentality in the end of knockout games. Teams played to win, even though they’d be assured of PKs. It’s because they weren’t completely exhausted.
I see absolutely no reason to disadvantage a team that ties in the previous match simply to disincentivize ties in knockout tournaments. After all, two teams that tied each other may have had 12 shots each and had a final score of 2-2, while the team they are facing in the next round may have won their game 1-0, but only took 3 shots and played a very negative park the bus type of game.
Well, the UFC used to have this feature in their tournaments, advancing alternates in place of drawn matches.
For the World Cup, alternates could just be the bottom half of the round robin play, ranked by the already-existing tie-breakers. So, like, if Costa Rica and Greece tie in the Round of 16 (which they did in 2014), both are eliminated and Ecuador advances in their place. (In 2014, Ecuador was the best ranked team that didn’t move on to knockout play: 1-1-1 (4 pts) with a GD of 0. Portugal was the next best, with 1-1-1 (4 pts) and -3 GD, so Portugal would be the second alternate team used, etc…)
Use alternates in realtime order. Meaning the very first alternate used would be the highest rank, the next alternate used would be the next highest ranked, etc…
Missed the edit window:
And looking more closely, in 2014 Ecuador’s 1-1-1 / 0 GD was actually better than Greece’s 1-1-1 / -2 GD, so this particular example is pretty defensible.
Sucks for Costa Rico, who finished group play with 2-0-1 / +3 GD, but c’mon, they couldn’t beat Greece without it going to a shootout?! Perhaps they started playing for the shootout…
Well Greece is well known for using ridiculously negative tactics. That’s how they won Euro 2004. Park the bus and hope to get one goal and win 1-0. So I don’t fault Costa Rica that much.
This is an excellent point
Another idea: in an international tournament, in the event of a tie after 120 minutes, smallest population advances.
France has, what, 70 million people? Iceland has 330,000? If an advantage like that can’t give France a win in a full 90 minutes along witha couple of overtime periods, send 'em home! (Well, they ARE home, but you know what I mean.)
[No, I’m not really serious. But I sometimes do think that baseball, a sport where there is a wiiiiide disparity in payroll, should dispense with tiebreaking games to decide who advances to the playoffs (should one be needed) and determine who’s in and who’s out based on payroll. If Boston winds up tied with lower-payroll Kansas City or Houston for the last wild card position after 162 games, don’t bother to play a game; figure that the Royals/Astros did much better with their more limited resources and move 'em up while the Red Sox get to start their offseason early.]
So I explained the connection in the very next sentence. Come on.
Abhorrence is an emotionally loaded word. I’m not emotionally invested in the number of ties there are. But the number of ties is directly related to the likelihood of games being decided by a tiebreaker procedure. Which this thread is about trying to eliminate.
And the obvious way to get rid of a tiebreaker is to reduce the number of ties.
I’m a long-time soccer fan who also hates PKs as a tiebreaker, though I understand that they are currently the best all-around solution. I actually kind of like the suggestion someone previously mentioned of having the team that scored last win, on the premise that it’s harder to score on a team that has the lead. Reminds me a bit of the away goals rule for home-and-away knockout series. But it does nothing for 0-0 games, so it’s an incomplete solution anyway.
Regardless of all that, here’s my modest proposal- no more goal kicks in extra time. Every ball over the touch line results in a corner kick. This is something of a virtual tilting of the field towards the goals without changing the basics of the game from standard soccer too much. You’ll definitely end up with more offense, though perhaps of lesser quality, but fewer draws AET should result. You can still have PKs as a last resort or combine with another rule (golden goal/last goal wins/unlimited ET Periods/whatever) to rule PKs out altogether, but this change might make draws AET exceedingly rare all by itself.
There’s the glimmer of a good idea there, but that just means that any time a team has possession they can just boot it deep, then have a corner kick. There could be a “no intentional corner kicks” rule that refs would have to do their best to enforce, but that’s not ideal.
What if they used the amount of time the ball was in each half of the field during regular play as a way to break the tie? The time a ball is in each side might indicate which team had the stronger offense. For example, if A and B are playing and the ball was in A’s side of the field for 50 minutes, B would be the winner in a tie. The idea is that B was the more offensive team. It wouldn’t reflect who was controlling the ball, just who’s side the ball was on. So a team who spends a lot of time kicking the ball to their own backfield or stalling back there could end up hurting themselves in a tie.
This would put too much burden on the one guy in the entire stadium who keeps (and keeps it to himself) the game clock. There is no publicly known official game clock during the game.
Joke or not, I kind of like this idea.