It is pretty stupid the game is decided by penalty kicks. The Red Cards should be reviewed in soccer as well.
They didn't lose in regulation either, the NFL has recognized how stupid their overtime rules are and changed them. Soccer right now decides champions based on coin flips. Penalty kicks are about randomly jumping and kicking in one direction, not skill oriented. Uruguay beat Argentina 5-4 in the Copa America on Penalty kicks, because their goalie guessed right. You don't really know the history of the game.
i couldn't agree more. it would be like settling an nba game by playing one on one. or having a home run derby decide a baseball game. why don't they just go to golden goal after the extra time? seems simple enough.
Japan won fair and square based on the rules of the game, the rules are just outdated and immature. That seems fair enough to me.
I'd still like to know why FIFA did away with the Golden Goal last decade. It was one of the few things about international soccer that made sense.
I have always thought penalty kicks were lame. You might as well flip a coin. How about who had the lead for the most of the game? There are a lot of ways they could fix this, but it is so hard to make changes in a global sport... I don't think it will ever happen.
It's not really that they did away with the Golden Goal, it was more of a failed (in their eyes) experiment. Pre '94 (probably not a coincidence that was the year the World Cup was in the US) there was no such thing as golden goal. Everyone seems to think that the golden goal would create more offense, when the opposite was true. Teams don't want to give up a fluke (or counter attack) goal, so they just sit behind the ball and play defense. Not related to your post, but the others bashing shootouts, what is a better alternative? I don't think I've ever heard any good ones. More subs, removing players, golden goal, silver goal, corner kicks (someone on ESPN mentioned that yesterday) all have their disadvantages, just as a shootout does. A penalty kick, despite what people here and on TV think, is not an automatic goal. Nor is defending one pure guesswork. As a goalie, you can predict where a player is shooting based on the angle of their hips or planted foot. At the World Cup level, I'm sure they study tape on to find patterns. Just because the goalie goes the wrong way doesn't mean that it is a pure guess. That would be like saying a batter who gets fooled by a curve ball was just guessing that it'd be a different pitch.
The best goalies in the sport have repeatedly said they guess, so I'm not really sure what you're trying to prove. Yeah I can think of a million different things soccer can do rather than decide their champion with a completely different sport. Yeah a free throw is also not automatic, neither are home runs in a home run derby. Looks like you're just defending the established norms of soccer because you feel like it. The best sports use the aggregate to weed out what is referred to as "noise". A sample size of 5 penalty shots is stupid. At the very least it should be a far larger sample size. Sports is about luck, the point of tournaments is to determine a victor with the least amount of arbitrary/lucky results as possible. I'd rather have a golden goal decide a game, actual complex tactics and athletic ability vs predetermined guessing. Just play 15 minute quarters until one team wins or forfeits, that's much more fair. Or play 2-on-2, whatever, something that requires actual athletic ability.
