No more penalty shoot-outs?

Sepp Blatter has tasked former German international and World Cup-winning manager Franz Beckenbauer with finding an alternative to penalties. His call comes after two major tournaments last season were decided by shoot-outs – Chelsea‘s Champions League triumph over Bayern Munich and the African Nations Cup when Zambia beat Ivory Coast.

Mr Beckenbauer, honorary president of Bayern Munich, is also head of the Football Task Force 2014 which has been charged with recommending rule changes and Mr Blatter said the body should now look at penalty shoot-outs.

Mr Blatter told the Fifa Congress in Budapest: “Football can be a tragedy when you go to penalty kicks. Football should not go to one to one, when it goes to penalty kicks football loses its essence.

“Perhaps Franz Beckenbauer with his football 2014 group can show us a solution perhaps not today but in the future”.

But since the option of allowing joint winners of major competitions does not appear to on the table, what are the alternatives? Dr Rogan Taylor, director of the football industry group at Liverpool University wonders if Mr Blatter has had “one too may cream cakes”.

He told Channel 4 News: “The reality is that football is a bit like a penalty shoot-out in that it is just a series of anarchic events. To my mind winning a penalty shoot-out is not as great a victory as a win in play but it is intense and dramatic and most football fans know it’s a lottery”.

Picture gallery: Chelsea win the Champions League

One of the major problems with the penalty shoot-out is that it relies more on luck than on the combined footballing skills of the teams to decide a game which until that point has been, at least score-wise, evenly matched.

Silver goal

Previously, the use of the “golden goal” was in favour, whereby extra time was played at the end of 90 minutes until one team scored, at which point the game stopped.

The idea is used in ice-hockey, field hockey and korfball with the theory being that teams have an incentive to score instead of playing out extra time and relying on the less arduous (though more stressful) eventuality of penalties.

As Dr Taylor points out, “at least the golden goal means that the winner comes during play,” though its critics argued it encouraged defensive rather than attacking play and often led to stalemate anyway.

In 2002, the “silver goal” was briefly tried. This was similar to the golden goal but instead of play stopping after a goal is scored, the game ends after the first period of extra time, with the team in the lead being declared the winner. It was dropped and is no longer in the rules of the game.

But without making the beautiful game even more complicated are there really any other original ways to decide the winner?