They should just do it like chess and use roulette as the tiebreaker. Much more entertaining than lots. And fairer than penalties 
The suggestion is certainly better than many others. However, if an underdog team takes an early lead through a fluke or mistake, then they’ve got an incentive to sit down on it in the same way as teams might settle for draws in other situations. It also causes difficulty with the concept of the referee as adjudicator of the match duration - who decides when individual goals were scored? Tonight we had the TV producers award a red card, although the ref forgot to show it. Imagine a similar cock-up with goal timings.
But isn’t the desire to actually win the game a stronger incentive for the underdog to sit on an early lead? (I don’t watch enough to be able to answer that. If an underdog scores first, do they generally try to protect that lead?)
Regarding your point about time adjudication, I don’t really follow. Could you elaborate?
If an underdog scores, then they will obviously try to protect it. The problem is when teams don’t even expect to score, and play defensively. Either, in knockout competitions, it can be a “well, at least penalties gives us a chance” attitude, or in World Cup matches, they just get every man behind the ball. It can work wonders against lacklustre teams, such as England (ahem). But it makes for very boring football.
Time adjudication: there’s no official clock. The referee is the final arbiter. Various threads, and various wikipedia articles, discuss this. Awarding an official time to something which isn’t officially-timed might be a problem!
I’m in agreement as even big teams do this.
IIRC in the semi-final of Euro 2000 when Italy played Holland all Italy did was put 10 men behind the ball hoping to get to penalties.
Final result - Italy win on penalties after 120 minutes of (brilliantly executed) defensive football.
Interesting idea. Indeed, a team with a 1-0 lead would have incentive to push it to 2-0 and then sit back. Unfortunately, I think teams would sit back at 2-0 or 3-0. Entertaining up until the second or third goal, but the game should be beautiful throughout, IMO.
Of course, GorillaMan has already put it better, as I expected. But there’s my two euro anyway.
Don’t remind me. I think Holland missed 6 out of 7 penalties that day (2 duriing the run of play and 4 in the shootout). The Italian defense wasn’t all that brilliant. They gave up 2 PKs and numerous other chances. Holland just failed to put them away.
France will “get it” over Korea. France has more soccer fans and would bring in more revenue.
Er…so…that’s how they win games now, huh? I thought it was still the whole “score more goals than your opponent” routine.
I assume he meant in the case where Korea and France are tied on points & goals for and against etc.
They haven’t used that system for years. 
‘Finally his (Robert Hubner) 1983 Candidates Quarter Final match against Vasily Smyslov was awarded on tie break to Smyslov by the spin of a roulette wheel.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hübner
Nowadays it’s pairs of quickplay games (and they have used a single game system where White has 5 minutes to Black’s 4, but Black qualifies if the game is a draw)
Duh. :smack: France isn’t even playing Korea tomorrow, now that I think about it.
If you think tossing a coin is crazy, here’s a great example of what happens when authorities don’t think through the repercussions of their tournament setup. Ace.
Actually both sides seem to have been very motivated!
Wasn’t there a World Cup match where the score suited both sides at half-time, so they just passed it around for 45 minutes?
That was Austria vs West Germany in 1982. At least FIFA actually changed the rules to try to stop that from happening again.
Quote from Wikipedia( I do not know how to put it in those boxes)
West Germany and Austria knew that a West Germany win by 1 or 2 goals would qualify them both, while a larger German victory would qualify Algeria over Austria, and an Austrian win would eliminate the Germans. (The fourth team in the group, Chile, was eliminated regardless of the outcome.) After West Germany scored after 11 minutes of furious attack, the two German-speaking teams went into an unspoken agreement and just kicked the ball around aimlessly for the rest of the game to the chants of “Fuera, fuera” (“Out, out”) from the disgusted Spanish crowd, while angry Algerian supporters waved banknotes at the players. This sham performance was widely deplored, even by the German and Austrian fans who had hoped for a hot rematch of the 1978 World Cup match in Cordoba, Argentina in which Austria had beaten West Germany, and led to the introduction of a revised system at the 1986 World Cup and future World Cups, in which the final two games in each group were played simultaneously.
Just to be clear, the reason for the change is that the players and coaches don’t have a finished match in the group behind them and know exactly how many goals each team needs. It’s easy enough for the coaches and players to find out the current score of the other game, but obviously they can only guess at the final score as anything can happen in really any period of time.
There was another disputed example, when, I believe it was 1978 when Argentina needed to beat Peru by 4 goals in order to advance. They won 6-0, and to add to the debate was the fact that Peru’s goalie was actually argentinian. I think this happened in a later group stage, not the inital one (they now only have the one group stage, but there used to ba a second group stage).
Yeah, that’s a fly in the ointment.
If there were some way to deal with the timing issue, then a slight complication would (I think) alleviate the “sit on an early lead” issue:
Leading Minutes and Trailing Minutes could both be multiplied by the goal differential. So, if you scored in the first minute, and then won the game 1-0, that would be 89. But if you scored a second goal with 30 minutes to go, that would give you an extra 30, since you’d have led by 1 for 59 minutes (worth 59) and then by 2 for 30 minutes (worth 2*30=60) for a total of 119 for that game.
Same idea for trailing minutes; each minute subtracts one for every goal you are behind at the time.
As mentioned, the lack of publicly tracked official time would be an issue, but certainly not an insurmountable one. It’s also a touch more complicated, but it wouldn’t give anyone any incentive to sit on any score, really, as another goal would always be noticeably helpful to your standing in this tiebreaker, regardless of whether you were ahead or behind and by how much.
That’s a change to the fundamental laws of the game (scoring and timing), so it’s not going to happen.
The last big change, golden and then silver goals IIRC (to lessen the number of matches decided with penalty shootouts), was widely panned and eventually removed.
You’re suggesting making large changes to the way the game is played to solve a relatively minor problem.
I know what a golden goal is, but what’s a silver goal?