Soccer: Penalties Ought To Be Changed

Far too many soccer games are decided by penalties, either because of fouls in the box or in the penalty shootout. Changing penalties might improve soccer.

Soccer is a great game. And the penalty is its tuck rule.

According to Wikipedia, the penalty has been a part of soccer since 1888. Relatively unchanged since then, the 12-yard spot kick has become a ubiquitous part of the game and even the culture around it. Players and managers beg referees to penalize their opponents for perceived infractions in the 18-yard box surrounding the goal.

The penalty itself is not the problem, but the enforcement and giving out of them is, simply because penalties are far too easy.

According to FiveThirtyEight, 71.5 percent of World Cup penalties are scored and 75 percent of penalties in other major international competitions are scored. 12 of the 13 penalties awarded during the most recent World Cup in 2014 were converted, and even the one that was saved should have resulted in a goal, but France’s Yohan Cabaye missed a sitter on the rebound.

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Penalties During Play

So, with penalties being so easy to convert, it would make sense that they would not be given out very often. The problem is that penalties show up all the time. Leicester City, the improbable champions of the Premier League, won 13 penalties during the 2015-2016 season, one every three matches or so and five more than the next team, Manchester City. 13 penalties were awarded during the 2014 World Cup’s 64 matches, about one every five games.

It would be easy to say that officials simply needed to stop awarding penalties so often, but their hands are oftentimes tied by FIFA’s Laws Of The Game, which essentially state that any offense committed in the box that would normally result in a direct free kick is penalized with a penalty kick. Which means that Luis Suarez’s intentional handball which saved a goal for Uruguay at the 2010 World Cup receives the same punishment as, well, this:

But that’s the way the rule is written. The referee was not wrong to make that call, in fact, it was probably the right call, but the fact that it essentially awards the offended team a point-blank goal-scoring opportunity is a problem.

There is a potential solution, however. It would be a simple fix which uses pre-existing language to tweak the penalty so that it does not award goals for minor infractions.

The change would be simple: if an infraction which denies a clear goal-scoring opportunity occurs in the box, a penalty is awarded normally. If an infraction occurs which does not deny a clear goal-scoring opportunity, the ball is placed at the top of the penalty arc (the small semi-circle on the long side of the 18-yard box), and the offended team is awarded a free kick from that spot, direct or indirect, depending on the infraction as per the normal rules. It would be a definite advantage to have a free kick in such a position, but it would not be a point-blank chance to score a relatively easy goal. Referees already need to determine what a clear goal-scoring opportunity is and is not for the sake of giving out cards, so it would not increase the number of judgment calls they need to make. It is just one suggestion, but it is a workable one that would decrease the number of games being decided by penalties awarded for infractions.

Penalty Shootouts

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Penalty shootouts are one of the most dreaded events in sports. After 120 minutes of tiring deadlocked play, five players from each side step up to try to score penalties on the opposing keeper, and the team that scores the most goals wins. Two hours of running and passing and defending and trying to create scoring opportunities comes down to two minutes of ten kicks, one of which can decide the entire match and perhaps an entire international tournament. Six UEFA Champions League finals have ended in penalties since the turn of the century, and two World Cup finals have ended the same way.

The problem with making changes to soccer’s extra time structure is that, unlike baseball, where teams can keep playing extra innings until a winner is declared, in soccer the players have been running around a large field for two hours with limited substitutions, so they are completely exhausted by the time extra time is complete.

Many domestic competitions have solved this problem by simply scheduling replays for games that are still drawn after extra time. While it is a good solution for a domestic competition where rounds are drawn weeks apart, it could prove to be a potential logistical nightmare for a major international competition like the World Cup. The schedules and venues for these competitions are decided years in advance and because the games are only days apart, replays in early rounds of the knockout stage could cause later rounds to be rescheduled as well.

Ideally, one would want the play itself, not penalties, to decide the winner of the game. To this end, perhaps after extra time, substitutions could be reset, allowing additional substitutes to enter the fray for an additional 20 or 30-minute extra time period. International and large club rosters carry enough players to do this, and it would mean that the game itself would continue without leaving the result more or less up to chance. Maybe FIFA could take an idea from the NHL and reduce the number of players on each side to eight or ten to open up play and create more scoring opportunities.

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There is no easy solution for this problem, which is why the penalty shootout system developed in the first place. However, seeing as how ultimately it is a chancy and unfair way to decide a winner, one would hope that FIFA would at least look into ways to end matches like this in a more competitve fashion.

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