A Proposal to Improve Overtime in the World Cup
As I watched Ghana and Uruguay move through a scoreless overtime on Friday night, I was reminded of a recent conversation I had with my colleague Jon Eguia. We were lamenting how it essentially seemed like the shoot out turned the game into a coin flip (does anyone have any data to prove otherwise? eg., that the better team wins more often in a shoot out?), and were comparing it to the situation that you sometimes get in overtime in Champions League games where, because of the away goal rule, once one team scores you end up with a situation where there will definitely be a winner in the overtime, so one team has a tremendous incentive to pull out all the stops and try to score, and, if they do, the other team then has the exact same incentives. This seems like a more fun type of game to watch then the normal cautious dance you get in overtime at the World Cup (the crazy ending of the Ghana-Uruguay game not withstanding).
Jon, however, had a solution. His proposal was that immediately following the end of regulation, the shoot out should take place. This would then be followed by the normal half an hour of overtime, but with the new caveat that should overtime end in a tie, the team that had already won the shootout would be declared the winner. Should one team end overtime victorious, then the results of the shootout would be irrelevant.
I see two big advantages of this rule change. One, you are guaranteed 30 minutes of football where one team knows that if it does not score, it will lose. Yes, this would lead to the other team packing it back on defense (but not, it should be noted, excessively changing personnel, on the chance that it could lose the lead and need to score), but this would be compensated by the other team going all out to try to score. I think I would rather watch this type of game for 30 minutes than the standard, cautious overtime play.
Second, you get a shoot out every time you go to overtime. Shoot outs are indeed fun to watch, but I think the problem with them is that they smack of arbitrariness. So while Jon’s proposal doesn’t actually remove the arbitrariness, it does give the players the chance for redemption in the ensuing overtime play. Which in turn might make it that much more enjoyable to watch the shoot out: you get the fun of the drama, without it necessarily being the final word on the matter.
Thoughts?
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Update: Turns out that Jon was not the first person to think of this idea - Juan Carillo of USC published an article on the topic in the Journal of Sports Economics!
Comments
Though I would probably prefer something that would do away with the arbitrariness of penalties entirely, while keeping the drama. E.g. Have consecutive 15-minute overtime periods with a silver goal rule, and after each period the teams have to take two players each off the field…
Posted by: Marton | July 5, 2010 05:34 AM
This page summarises some research into shootouts:
http://www.penaltyshootouts.co.uk/research.html
But it doesn’t cover the piece of research I found most interesting in recent years, which indicated that players who believed that shootouts were a lottery were more likely to miss than players who felt their fate was in their own hands (i.e. that it was a test of skill and nerve):
http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=3066
I suppose this is a bit like the research indicating that people who subscribe to the (mostly false) view that their social destiny is in their own hands (i.e. the American dream of meritocracy) are more likely to prosper than people who adopt the alternative (more true) view.
Posted by: James Conran | July 5, 2010 06:41 AM
Back in the 60s, they on occasion actually did decide the “winner” by actual coin flip.
I think the problem with this system is that one side packing in the defense is much more likely to make the game uninteresting than two sides playing cautiously. Look at the Spain — Paraguay game, where the latter played just about the whole game in a stifling defensive style.
Posted by: Dmitry Gorenburg | July 5, 2010 08:59 AM
Why don’t they just go into sudden death overtime, and play until one team scores, and the team that scores wins? Is this really that radical an idea? This is how overtime situations are handled in other sports.
Posted by: Ed | July 5, 2010 09:51 AM
I’m predicting thirty minutes of pure boredom: a whole team defending against another team that is very offensive.
Posted by: Amílcar Tavares | July 5, 2010 11:36 AM
The idea is interesting but I agree with Amicalar that it is likely to lead to even more boredom with 1 team playing 10 behind the ball at all times. Plus since you argue that overtime is no better than a coin flip, why give one team that advantage heading into overtime?
Golden goal is a much better solution, as Ed notes. I would also allow an additional substitution, maybe two, if games go into overtime.
Posted by: bw | July 5, 2010 03:09 PM
The choice to go to kicks from the mark is intentional by FIFA because they like matches where goals get scored. One can imagine a match that would run indefinitely with no score by either team because they’re evenly matched; without going to kicks, the game would never end. Similarly, old golden goal rules make for a potentially quick and disappointing end to a game where two teams are similarly capable but one scores a surprise goal. The current system is a blend of crowd appeal and the need to maintain uniform rules to determine a winner (the Laws of the Game apply identically to all soccer matches everywhere, unlike in other sports).
Posted by: Thomas J. Leeper | July 5, 2010 04:22 PM
Many youth tournaments in Europe do something like this, where each team participates in a shoot-out early in the tournament that then serves as a tie-breaker later on. The problem with the proposal is that it is costly (shoot-outs are very time-consuming), while the benefits are uncertain (for the reasons mentioned above). The time element breaks up the flow of the game and gives players an opportunity to regroup and rest (thus perhaps reducing the likelihood of goals).
Soccer actually had the golden goal rule for a while but abandoned it after it was concluded that it made teams more rather than less cautious.
The only modification that I would propose is that penalties are not used to resolve the WC final. Just do what they did in the olden days: replay the game two days later.
Posted by: erik | July 6, 2010 08:43 AM
Golden goal was tried and failed.
It has one of two efffects: either a) it denies us the excitement that would ensue in the remaining extra time after one team has scored or b) it just makes the fear of conceding a goal in extra time even greater, hence discouraging risk-taking.
Admittedly golden goal without any time limit hasn’t been tried though.
Posted by: James Conran | July 6, 2010 09:05 AM
“Why don’t they just go into sudden death overtime, and play until one team scores, and the team that scores wins? Is this really that radical an idea? This is how overtime situations are handled in other sports.”
This post by Dmitry makes the most sense to me. Somebody will eventually score, and there won’t be any dispute about who deserves the win.
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July 7, 2010 11:27 AM
What they should do is start taking guys off the field. 10 on 10. Then 9 v 9 and so forth. Taking guys off opens up play and makes it easier to score. Alternatively they could just switch to 6 vs 6 on a short field. As anyone who remembers playing that sort of tournament as a kid should remember, you score way more.
Posted by: Ben | July 7, 2010 01:48 PM