So I just learnt that Uefa is trialling a change in how the kicks from the mark are staged. This will happen at the current Womens U17 championships that are being played in Europe. Here is a report about it - http://bbc.in/2pHbs6f ABBA is how teams A and B will take the kicks. The reasoning is that currently the team kicking second has to play catch-up. No more. It borrowed the strategy that tennis uses.
I read about it - total insanity... Plenty of jokes about the idea already, like: 1. Let them shoot at the same time, one team on one goal, another on another. 2. Put goals next to each other, and let them shoot together. I do not like this idea.
That's what NCAA Football overtime does, although the average amount of penalty kicks for one team is higher than the average amount of NCAA Football overtimes.
I think it is a great idea for a trial. Possibly takes away a big unfairness of KFTPM through minimal changes to procedure.
We needed KFTPM to decide a VB match last night after a very good game. The team that kicked first won. Obviously that proves that a change needs to be made. Seriously, the team kicking first never missed so you could see the tension ramping up in the opposing players. I can see value in trying ABBA. Plus I like their music.
Ok so I'm confused, if the team kicking first has the advantage why was there a law change to give the winner of the toss the choice to kick first or second a few years back? I'd say almost all the teams I do choose to kick second as well. Just wondering where the perception of a benefit comes from with regard to kicking first.
Apparently someone looked at the results and determined that statistically speaking the team that kicks first wins 60% of the time. The assumption must be that as teams learn this bias, winning a 50-50 coin toss will turn into a 60-40 likelihood of winning the game. Maybe the ABBA system will even the odds back up. In my experience (small sample size of course) teams tend to choose to go second. I imaging that may change as this 60-40 statistic becomes better known (in the absence of a different system of course).
According to BBC article on the change, teams kicking first win 60% of the time. http://www.bbc.com/sport/football/39798344 Whether that is true at youth levels is a separate question. At youth levels (especially the younger ones) the GKs may be feeling more of the pressure. As levels increase and the expectation is that every kick should score, the pressure moves far more to the kicker -- the GK can no longer be a goat but only a hero. I've long thought that ABBA would be more fair -- especially if the kicks goes into extra kicks. At lower levels, however, I am concerned that it is one more complication for the referees. (Yes, I know it isn't that complicated, but kicks are stressful for the referee team as well as the players.) It will be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.
I'm fascinated that two of you are reporting that teams choose to go second. In my experience every sophisticated team/coach has chosen to kick first -- going back to when I played the conventional wisdom was that it was an advantage to go first. (But I don't believe there was any recent change on this -- the recent coin flip change was a flip to decide which goal to use [in the absence of a reason to use a particular goal].)
There are statistics that show the team that kicks first wins ~60 percent of the time. http://www.soccermetrics.net/paper-...ick-shootout-paper-apesteguia-palacios-huerta
Key words For all I know it comes from experience with the NCAA pointy ball tie-breaking system where it really is an advantage to go second.
Interesting passage from the summary: Finally, the authors analyzed data in which they had information on the shot outcome — was it missed by the kicker, or saved by the goalkeeper? — and found that the save rate was approximately the same between the two teams in the shootout. The difference in scoring rates in the shootout is correlated very strongly with the miss rate of the kicker. Therefore the burden of success in the shootout rests not with the goalkeeper but with the kickers selected. So in conclusion, the penalty kick shootout as it currently exists is biased toward the team that wins the toss, only becomes unbiased if the shootout reaches sudden-death (more than five rounds), and is less a battle between goalkeeper and striker and more one between the striker and the mass between the striker’s ears. That the difference is focused on the kicker is what many of us suspected. I was surprised to see that the advantage appears to disappear once the kicks get past the initial 5 and 5.
Ok now I feel old. I thought this was more recent. It looks like the change I was referring to was in 2003. The winner of the toss was given choice to kick 1st or second. I don't have my old books in front of me to see what it was prior to that. But presumably you were either forced to kick first or second for winning. http://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/who-we-are/the-laws/2001-2006.html
That surprised me too. Maybe the sample size was too low to see a statistically significant difference.
I'll check my 70s Laws when I get home. IIRC, the KFTM weren't part of the Laws then, but the coin flip to choose who went first was already part of the process. It's been quite a while, but I'm pretty sure the games I reffed and played, we always had a coin flip to decide. But it's possible we were doing it wrong. (I also recall discussions about which to choose in high school, but of course that is a different rule set.)
Total insanity in what way exactly? This is a very minor change and shouldn't be an issue at all for referees to switch to. If it improves the game in general and the "spirit of the game" (which is what IFAB is all about these days), then what is wrong with testing it out in a youth tournament?