Image by RoboMichalec from Pixabay
We’ve known for a while that World Cup soccer has a problem - it’s so low scoring that a significant number of crucial games, including one championship match, has been settled with a penalty kick shoot-out (PKS).
A lot of solutions have been proposed, but the PKS is easily solved by borrowing a few tools from other sports. If a knockout tournament game is tied at the end of regulation time (90 minutes for pro-level soccer), we should do the following:
Fifteen minutes of sudden death play with no stoppage time. You score, you win. Instantly. In soccer, both teams usually get possession of the ball quite a bit before the first score so each team would have a realistic chance of winning. Thus, the advantage gained from kick-off certainly exists, but in practice is small.
If the sudden death period ends with no scoring, then we’d resort to a series of hockey style power plays. We’d play on half the field. The attacking team gets 4 players and defense gets three players plus a goaltender. If you score, the power play ends, and then we’d switch roles. If you can’t score, the power play ends after a few minutes, and then the switch happens. Each team would get the chance to score. If we’re tied after each pair of possessions (each team gets one attack and one defense), we could do one or two more rounds. Alternatively, each power play could be extended a few minutes. For most out of bound balls, we’d play normally (throw-ins, corner kicks, etc). If the defense kicks it to the other half of the field, the other players on the attacking team will hang back and can just pass the ball back. If the defenders kick it out of bounds way downfield, we’d just throw in from half field. As with sudden death, no stoppage time except as a way to penalize defenses for delay of game tactics (e.g. delay of game might add 30 seconds and result in a turnover/free kick).
Yes, if this doesn’t work, we’d go to a flippin’ penalty kick shoot-out.
This system has some really positive attributes. First, it rewards extremely aggressive attacking and downgrades a “park the bus” style of play after the end of regular time. If you can’t score, it’s super hard to win in this format.
Second, power plays are inherently imbalanced, so that rewards aggressiveness. If you build your team around heavy defense or midfield control, that will disadvantage you in the power plays since you won’t have enough elite level strikers or wingers to exploit power plays.
Third, the system is designed to reward highly aggressive play in the sudden death period. Teams would be way more likely to go “all in” for corner kicks and move everyone up. Or we might even see “blitzkrieg” moves were even the goal tender moves up. Who knows what sneaky moves coaches and players might cook up to steal a game in a sudden death situation? That would be way cooler than PKs.
Fourth, it’s interesting as you see a “trimming” - regular time and sudden death is played by the entire team, power plays are played by about 40% of the team, and PKs are the one-on-one we all know about (9% of the team).
Fifth, it’s less about “exhaustion ball” and more about entertaining the audience with interesting attacking play. It’s also less likely to result in as much exhaustion because game time would be a little shorter in the worst case. Most of the time, sudden death or power plays would do their job to terminate the game.
Sixth, if you love penalty kicks, you’ll love this because any penalty kick in sudden death is massive. PKs in power pay are almost as massive.
Seventh, if you love the PK shoot-out, you’d still get them, but they’d be very rare and they’d only happen when both defenses were so incredibly awesome that they prevented scoring in seriously imbalanced situations. That strikes me as appropriate.
Let’s give it a shot, it can’t be worse than the current reliance on penalty kicks.
++++++
My books: Grad Skool Rulz - cheap advice manual for grad students / The history of Black Studies / Obama and the antiwar movement / A Social Theory book you will enjoy reading / Intro Sociology for $1 per chapter