Why penalty shootouts, despite their problems, are here to stay (2024)

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In the beginning, football had rather ludicrous ways of deciding ties.

Early competitions such as the FA Cup used extra time and replays to decide drawn games. This meant ties could go on for a long, long time. In 1971, an FA Cup tie between Alvechurch and Oxford City was decided over six games in a span of a little over two weeks, with four games going to extra time. In all, the playing time was 660 minutes — 11 hours.

Some charity competitions in the early 20th century came up with the ingenious idea of deciding drawn games on the basis of which team was able to win more corner kicks. Much like the infamous boundary count rule in the Cricket World Cup of 2019, this method completely changed the incentives within the game.

It was only in 1923 that the International Football Association Board (IFAB, which determines the laws of the game) came up with a rule explicitly stating that only goals can be the basis of victory, and that any match that finished with both teams scoring an equal number of goals was “drawn”.

As football became more popular and tournament schedules more packed, endless replays became more and more unviable. Hence, a draw of lots or coin tosses began to be used to determine winners at the end of games still level after extra time. Notably, Italy progressed to the finals at the expense of the USSR in the 1968 European Championships on the basis of a coin toss. This would be as arbitrary as any method to determine a game of football could be, leaving fans highly unsatisfied and fuelling all sorts of conspiracy theories.

Clearly, football needed a better system to decide drawn games.

And penalty shootouts, flawed as they are, were a revolutionary upgrade over previous systems that decided tied games.

Penalty kicks were first introduced in 1891 to prevent defenders from simply roughly attacking players when they got too close to the goal, a practice very common at that time (and still highly regarded by some English pundits).

Early penalty kicks were taken from 12 yards away, but allowed the keeper to charge out of the goal line. It was in the early 1900s that laws were introduced to ensure the keeper stayed on the line and thus modern penalties were born.

It would take half a century for competitions to begin using penalty ‘shootouts’ to determine tied games. Initially deployed by amateur and semi-professional leagues, Fifa saw shootouts as gimmicky until quite some time after they had already been around.

Finally, in 1970, Fifa decided to adopt penalty shootouts on IFAB’s recommendation. This came after determined lobbying from many parties, notably the Israeli FA which had in the 1968 Olympics, ‘lost’ the quarter finals to Bulgaria after a draw of lots. The format of the penalty shootouts, which has largely withstood the test of time, was devised by Israeli FA general secretary Joseph Dagan.

While introduced into the laws in 1970, the first penalty shootouts at the World Cup would occur only in 1982, when Germany edged out France in the semi-final. Since then, the World Cup has seen 32 other penalty shootouts with two finals (1994 and 2006) being decided on their basis.

West Germany’s Horst Hrubesch slots home the vital penalty in the first-ever shootout in a Fifa World Cup. Photograph: Bob Thomas/Getty Images

Conventional wisdom says that shootouts even the odds in favour of the underdog team.

To an extent, this makes sense. Penalty shootouts greatly take talent discrepancies out of the game. In open play, better teams have a huge advantage. More talented teams are more likely to control games, meaning they reduce the number and quality of chances that the opposition gets while maximising their own. In penalty shootouts, both teams get the same number of shots taken from exactly the same place on the field. This means that talent in only a very specific aspect of the game matters.

According to InStat data gathered from 2009 studying 100,000 penalty kicks, 75.5 per cent of all penalties taken end up in the back of the net. While there will inevitably be some difference between good penalty takers and bad ones, it is not huge.

Also, good penalty-takers can come from anywhere. For instance, InStat data indicate that Asians are the best penalty takers in the world, scoring 76.15 per cent of their kicks while North Americans are the worst, scoring 73.4 per cent. Notable is that the difference between the best and the worst is a meagre 2.75 per cent and also that Asia, in no way an elite footballing continent, produces the best penalty-takers.

Since penalty kicks are statistical events with only two possible outcomes (an attacker scores or does not score), with one outcome (the attacker scoring) significantly more probable than the other, the value of a miss is massive. And anyone can miss. On Tuesday, Spain missed three consecutive penalties, with Pablo Sarabia (a penalty specialist), Carlos Soler (with the unlikely record of scoring from three penalty kicks in one game) and the ever-dependable Sergio Busquets fluffing their lines while less fancied Moroccan players scored.

Are penalties really as random as some say?

The unpredictability surrounding penalty shootouts has led some observers to deem them to be completely random, like a game of chance. On any given day, any team can win, with players having very little control over the outcome itself. There are two aspects to be looked at here.

Penalties are mostly just a lottery, and everyone trying to infer serious meaning and strategy behind them is just doing this. pic.twitter.com/4D7ihzwOrS

— Grace Robertson 🏳️‍⚧️ (@GraceOnFootball) December 6, 2022

First, whether penalties involve any skill at all.

This is simply addressed. Of course, they involve skill, from both the penalty taker and the keeper. The kickers’ accuracy and placement along with the power that they generate are honed over years of practice. Similarly, goalkeepers spend a lot of time studying penalty takers and working on their reflexes and anticipation.

A 2021 study by sports economist Alex Krumer studying penalty shootouts between teams in different tiers in domestic football, suggested that a difference in one league between the teams increases the gap between probabilities of winning by 8 percentage points in favour of a team from a higher division. Simply put, this study indicated that better teams are likely to fare slightly better in penalty shootouts.

Second, are there external factors that tangibly impact the outcome of shootouts?

One factor frequently cited is that teams which take the first penalty kick in a shootout are more likely to win. According to InStat, teams shooting first edge out teams shooting second with a 51.48 per cent probability of victory. The conventional understanding of this is that teams shooting second are under greater pressure to score, following the other team’s kicks. This pressure adversely impacts performance.

However, penalties remain great leveller, because even with factors that make them less arbitrary than a pure game of chance, penalties are far more random than playing the game of football itself.

Are there any viable alternatives to penalty shootouts?

An article in The New York Times in 2014 said, “The penalty shootout is an abomination. It reduces a team sport to a contrived tiebreaker that obliges physically tired and emotionally drained players to step up one by one, trudge half the length of the field and try to shoot down the opponent’s goalkeeper from 12 yards … Ludicrous. Grotesquely, compellingly ludicrous.”

The game of football tests individuals and teams in multi-faceted ways. However, penalty shootouts boil the game down to a simple, somewhat random game that does not encapsulate the beauty and complexity of football as a whole.

But are there available alternatives? Several proposals have been floated. An interesting one is playing extra time with increasingly less number of players, opening up space on the field to likely result in more goals. Under this proposal, extra time would start with 11 players facing each other and after a designated period of time it will become 10 v 10, then 9 v 9, and so on. While fascinating, there are many issues — namely with the fitness of players, red cards, etc. — that need to be addressed before such a system can be adopted.

Another suggestion is to change the mechanics of penalty kicks themselves: possibly shift the penalty spot farther back to increase the chance for goalkeepers to react and save kicks, or institute hockey-like penalties where an attacking player dribbles down the pitch with the ball while a goalkeeper can freely move out to make a save. Both these alternatives solve some common complaints about penalty shootouts but not all, and throw up their own issues as well.

As things stand, penalty shootouts seem to be here to stay, imperfect as they are, but better and simpler than many other possible alternatives.

Also, penalty shootouts are exciting to watch. Over the history of competition football, shootouts have provided some of the most memorable moments in the game, taking players and fans on emotional rollercoasters all in the course of a few tense minutes. Is that not what sport is all about?