End the Penalty Shoot-out

Hats off to Italy. They deserved to win. If it looked like France dominated for most of the match, well, that is the nature of the defensive Italian football. Zidane, who I previously praised, had a very uncharacteristic, unsportsmanlike moment when he drilled his head into the chest of Materazzi, deserving the red card that sent him off.

I´m not writing to praise or blame anyone. This was an exciting match with lots of scoring opportunities. Exciting, that is, until the penalty shoot out. It may seem wrong for me, as an American coming from a land with little soccer history, to criticize the sport that is number one in the rest of the world. But I will state it simply. The penalty shoot-out is not fair. It is a stupid way to decide the best in the world.

The shootout has nothing to do with football. How often in a match you have the opportunity to kick a still ball from a running start, knowing in advance where you are going to kick it? As a goalie, how often do you know where you are going to jump and then do so, before the ball is even kicked? A football player shoots on the run, from different angles, with obstacles and his back to the goal. A goalie is always instinctively reacting to all of the moments on the field and positioning himself accordingly. In the shootout, there is no reaction, It is all guesswork. You may as well flip a coin, it just as fair. If it is going to come down to this, we may as well watch athletic psychics in goal trying to block shots from out-of-shape men with strong and accurate legs.

Imagine if the Masters golf tournament ended in a tie. Instead of playing extra holes until someone wins, there is a putting contest. That wouldn´t be fair to the golfers who are excellent in every area but are average putters. Actually, a putting contest takes more of the skills from golf than the penalty kick takes skills from football. So better yet, how about a miniature golf contest. Sounds stupid, right? How about if the NBA decided games by three-point shootouts, or more appropriately, a game of HORSE? This reduces a team competition to an individual skills contest. Why should the football team with the best goalie win? Is there not a whole team involved?

More people watched this event than any in the world, and even as an American, I will say that football is the only sport I can really enjoy on TV (It´s the lack of commercials and timeouts). I´ve heard several arguments for keeping the penalty shootout. The game would go on forever, they say. It has always been this way. The players would be too tired, they say. Another sport is going on right now in France. Several weeks of bicycling for hours a day, with only two days off. The players would be too tired? I´m sorry, are we not watching the best football players in the world?? Are these not athletes?

Anyway, I can´t just complain, I´d rather offer solutions, so here they are, a mix of one or all of the following:
1. More substitutions in extra time. This way, you can have fresh legs late in the game and players won´t be dead after 120 minutes. Players with fresh legs will be better able to attack.
2. Sudden Death (also known as Golden Goal). This is more fair than in American football because possession changes so much more frequently. This settles the contest more fairly in the case where you have both teams scoring in the extra minutes, because that currently results in a shootout.
3. Widen the goals a few meters. It will increase the likelyhood of goals coming in the extra time. I´m sure there is a company out there that can make this happen.
4. Have each team remove 4 players after the extra time, and /or shorten the field (yellow or blue lines can be on the field so as not to confuse the players) Maybe you can remove 5 players, maybe 6. This way, at least the teams are still playing football, and the likelyhood of a goal will probably increase.
5. Continue playing until somebody scores a goal, the way it was intended to be scored.

If you don´t like my solutions, I´m sure there are better ones out there. I´d like to see better solutions. I´d like to see FIFA actually take a risk and do something, at least put it in place for the final game. But if you´re content with the greatest contest in the world being played for 120 minutes and then decided by the flip of a coin, well, you wouldn´t understand why I´m outraged to begin with.