It might spice-up the whole match to have this final-someone's-gotta-win tiebreaker before other tiebreaker matches, and then hold the result "in case it's needed". That'd be in the same spirit as this recommendation to have Soccer penalty-kick shootouts before overtime.

https://slate.com/culture/2016/06/how-to-fix-the-penalty-sho...

That is: you know who will win if all other tiebreakers draw, giving the side which didn't earn this final-tiebreaker the knowledge they have to be more aggressive, much earlier. (In the extreme, you could play this before every other match.)

It still irks me that something as rare and prestigious as the World Cup (and Olympic Hockey) can get decided by shootouts. I mean, I get it, football has a huge pitch and it'd probably be ridiculous to have guys exhausted, barely able to jog at the 150th minute.

That said, one of the things I love about NHL playoff hockey is that without compromise, it's first goal wins overtime, where players are willing to do everything and anything to get that win. Block every shot, hustle when they're exhausted... it's truly amazing. One of my favorite quotes about the quintuple overtime game between the Penguins and Flyers in 2000:

> LeClair: After the third overtime … our locker room became a lot more loose. It was pretty comical in the locker room between guys searching for food, some guys getting IVs. It was a little bit of survival mode.

> Primeau: Usually on the road the team orders pizza for the locker room. There's pizza for the guys, power gels, power bars, they were really popular. The trunk of those was gone, the pizza was gone. Trainers are going up to concession stands to see if there's anything there. [The] coaches' popcorn was eaten.

The problem with excessive overtime (and the now abolished Golden Goal) in football is that the quality of play decreases dramatically as the players get ever more exhausted. Going to 120 minutes already doesn't lead to one team clearly outplaying the other in almost all cases.

The big difference to e.g. american football is that football is a low scoring game even at the best of times. Tired attacking players will score even less, since a succesful offense relies on outrunning and outplaying the defense, while the defense typically can deny a lot of goalscoring opportunities by simply being in the correct positions. If no one can score by minute 120, it really doesn't make sense to make the game go on even longer.

I agree that a penalty shootout is close to a coin flip most of time and that this isn't a satisfying way to decide a winner. However there are teams (e.g. the german men'sn ational team) that consistently outperform on penalties. That's because penalties are far less about technique than they are about psychology. It's all about performing under pressure. That pressure is even higher in a penalty shootout at a big turnament. This plus the sheer drama of it make penalty shootouts one of the most thrilling events at a big turnament.

I fervently believe that soccer would be a much more entertaining game if the substitution rules were significantly loosened. When I played in high school, substitution was allowed on any dead ball situation, and we effectively used something like a hockey line shift, with midfielders shuttling in and out every five minutes. The result was that you could play at a much higher tempo than if you had to conserve energy for the entire match. It was far more enjoyable both as a player and a spectator.

There was a very good rule change recently: if a game goes to overtime, all teams can do one more exchange. This allows teams to safely use up their regular 3 changes without having pressure to save one change for a possible overtime.

But watching "friendship" games between national teams where often there are much relaxed change numbers (these games are the one opportunity for the national trainers to experiment widely with the team setup), they tend to be pretty bad. Changing the compositon of a team strongly has a huge potential to be very disruptive. This shows how much football is actually a team play.

you'd also spend a whole ton of time waiting for players to get on and off the field.

Not if you do it more like hockey does it.

That’s easy when your playing surface is 6x smaller.

There is plenty enough "down" time in football as it is that handling it shouldn't be a problem.

You could do it like AFL and not stop the game for substitutions.

You're talking about Golden Goal. Soccer already have that from as long as I remember.

Then it was "downgraded" to Silver Goal. Only both to be abolished later on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_goal

Wiki mentioned "The golden goal and silver goal were widely perceived as failed experiments" but I'm in the opposing camp. Golden Goal is freaking exciting as a spectator.

This sounds mad - madly entertaining that is:

>In a qualification game for the 1994 Caribbean Cup, Barbados deliberately scored a late own goal in a successful attempt to qualify for the finals by forcing golden-goal extra time against Grenada, as an unusual tournament rule stated that golden goals counted double in calculating goal difference. Needing a two-goal victory to qualify, Barbados found themselves 2–1 up with three minutes left of normal time. After the Barbadians scored an own goal to bring the scoreline level at 2–2, Grenada tried to score in either net while Barbados defended both goals for the final three minutes of normal time.[4] Barbados won the game in extra time and advanced to the next round.[5]

> Golden Goal is freaking exciting as a spectator.

It wasn't. Teams played super safe for extra time, just passing the ball in their own half and so on, because they felt like they'd have a more consistent chance in the penalty shootout.

I remember a lot of bitching over the French national teams wining by the Golden goal in 98 world cup and 2000 European one. And I had forgotten the old term of sudden death.

It was only European cup. World Cup was a very clean 3-0.

Vs Paraguay and Laurent Blanc goal in 1998. My original message wasn't clear, I meant they won two games with golden goals,one during the world cup in 98, and the other for the final in 2000. Basically France profit of the Golden goals in two consecutive major competitions.

I disagree. It doesn’t give teams a chance to fight back, which you get even on penalties. Absolutely one of the worst ideas to ever feature in football.

> It still irks me that something as rare and prestigious as the World Cup (and Olympic Hockey) can get decided by shootouts.

Even without the shoutouts, football is a very random game (compare with something like Tennis). And this is amplified by the tournament format. I like how experts take this game so seriously and come up with deep analysis when there's so much randomness in the result.

You need some data to back that up.

The bulk of football is played in "league" format, not "cup" format, where teams all play each other two times in a year. With 34 matches, for example, much of that "randomness" is gone.

Some of the public analysis can be qualified as theological debate, yes; but behind the scenes, in professional clubs, there is a lot of actual tactical work and preparation, which really removes a lot of the “randomness”. The best team doesn’t always win a game, but it usually wins a league and it often wins a cup, and that’s not by accident.

Golden Goal can have the problem of teams playing too defensively. My favorite option for these sorts of things is drop offs, every x minutes a player from either side comes off. In soccer space is the most important factor to goal scoring. For a while field hockey used this but I'm not sure why they switched back.

Side note - I appreciate these sports threads, they're very rare in geek circles.

Part of me feels the same, but (in NHL overtimes at least) I've also heard that injuries become progressively more common per time played as games stretch into longer and longer overtimes. That seems worth avoiding.

Golden goal has been tried in the past in football tournaments, and has been rejected. It was widely perceived that it did not lead to more attacking football.

I hold to the even nuttier notion that soccer should abolish goalies entirely. Figure out a goal system that works without creating a one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others position with as many rules as the entire rest of the game.

It would end "ripping nil-nil ties" and the ridiculous(!) separate game of tiddlywinks that is penalty shootouts (and nothing like the game you just spent 120 minutes playing). As a bonus you'd have higher scores and more usable stats.

In hockey, players rest most of the time, and can keep playing much longer. Also skating takes much less effort than running.

A soccer player must first of all be a decent mid distance runner: They run an average of 7 miles per game!

In soccer, I think the longer they play, the more tired people get, the more it rewards defense, and you'd just see very few goals after 120 minutes.

You could imagine things like removing the goalies to get a playing result that's not penalties.

I've played both hockey and soccer for a long time (not super-competitive though). Hockey is far more tiring even with short 60-90s shifts in a 60 min game vs. full time for a 90 min soccer game.

I'm not sure why but for me at least the short shifts mean I'm flat out when on the ice and never quite get a rhythm like I do in soccer where I eventually settle into a steady pace... like a long distance runner.

Anyway, agree with parent comment that penalties aren't a great way to settle a competition. One option that could be interesting in soccer is to drop to 9 players in overtime and allow a couple extra subs.

It really depends on the individual. I’m like you, I prefer regular running over sprints, and could happily run a full football game, but I’d be dead after 5 minutes of full-court basketball. Some of my friends are the opposite, they could kill it on the court for ages but wouldn’t last 30 minutes in football. Some of it is due to conditioning, but like all athletic performances there is also an element of genetics.

You don't have to imagine to find a sport with greater running distances, match lengths, and goals-without-a-goalie: Just go watch an Aussie Rules Football match.

They have roughly 2 hours of play, and it's not unknown for players to run over 11 miles a match.

20min quarters with stoppages

120 interchanges per side for the match

different, but still equally intense as FIFA Football

I imagine there aren't a lot of drawn games?

The scoring for Australian football is dramatically different. The final score in the last australian football grand final was 79 to 74. Its closer to basketball scores than it is soccer.

2010 Grand Final was a draw.

As a Geelong fan I enjoyed neither St Kilda or Collingwood winning for the week before the rematch.

> It was pretty comical in the locker room between guys searching for food, some guys getting IVs.

It's impressive that they made such an extreme effort, but I'm not sure I would use the word "comical" to describe needing medical treatment. (I mean, lots of athletes receive medical attention and presumably nobody considered it a life-threatening emergency, but that part still doesn't sound quite "comical".)

They get IVs to stay hydrated. They're not "in need" of medical treatment, they're choosing to use something that's usually a medical treatment as a routine process instead of drinking from a water bottle. I assume because it's either faster hydration, or avoids stomach issues.

It would also encourage the winner of that game to play extra slow and defensively for a draw, but still - the tradeoff might be neat

That would be really awful. The winner of the tiebreak would have a huge incentive to go for a draw. In chess, it's a lot easier to go for a win or draw than try for a win at the Grandmaster level. This would only increase the likelihood of there being more draw matches. I mean, just look at the 12 games in the WCC. Magnus was clearly playing super safe in order to draw the match and go to the tiebreaker, where he has a huge advantage. He did the same thing in 2016.

This is the tiebreaker format in fencing bouts. 3 3 minute rounds up to a max of 15 points (touches). If the final period ends tied, 1 minute sudden death overtime with a predetermined winner ("priority") by coin flip.

For what it's worth, it does work pretty well, but it helps that the tiebreaker doesn't require physical effort. A long set of PKs followed by an overtime would be a hell of a burden on goaltenders, especially the (would-be) loser.

Armageddon :

"the players proceed to a single game of Armageddon, where the parameters are set to so far as possible give each side a 50-percent chance of winning—White gets 5 minutes, Black gets 4 minutes, and a draw will make Black the World Champion."

That really seems to favor black by a rather large margin. Wonder if there are any stats on the win ratios for each color in this format. And how do they decide who get's each color?

A fairer approach might be to auction the time. i.e. each player bids on number of minutes (or perhaps 10 second intervals?), the highest bid takes black with the win-on-draw condition and that many minutes taken from the 5 minute time.

Or similarly, employ "I cut you choose": one player chooses the time limit for black, the other then selects which color they want.

Color is determined by random draw. I think most people feel that black has the advantage, but because there's no standardized timing it's hard to find relevant statistics. Armageddon is pretty much a thin chess-like veneer on top of a coin flip.

Most sports that have these 'last ditch tiebreaker' rules end up being coin flips in practice, or at least end up testing a completely different skillset than the normal game. Hockey and soccer shootouts are pretty much coin flips, and American pro football overtime is a completely different game. College football overtime is even more of a diversion from the actual game.

Whenever you try to force an outcome in a sport, you get further and further away from the original game.

It could make sense to instead let the players bid for black (ie, winning draws), in units of time-differential, similar to this idea for auctioning off 1st possession in a USA-Football overtime by starting yard-line:

https://slate.com/culture/2009/01/why-the-nfl-should-replace...

This has been tried (I think for some US Championship tiebreaks), and I like it a lot. If memory serves, the winning time bids for Black were quite low; people really value draw odds.

Its pretty unlikely to end in draw with blitz clocks, one player can usually gain a minuscule advantage and win on time if necessary.

It doesn't though, because black has 20% less time than white.

Yeah, but these guys blitz out great moves like crazy, I just don't think an extra minute is enough time to capitalize on any slight inaccuracies induced by the time pressure black is under. I could be wrong of course, which is why I was interested to know if there are any win ratios for the format around.

Speaking as a former world ranked competitive player who specializes in fast time controls (blitz and bullet) — you guys are severely underestimating how important the time factor is in blitz.

Blitz is almost an entirely different game from classical chance. Yes, technically the rules are the same, but tactical ability and ability to think under pressure plays a massively more important role than positional ability, which tends to be the deciding factor in top level classical chess.

A 5m to 4m time advantage is the equivalent of a 100-200 point handicap. Think about it... if both players are evenly matched for 30 moves taking the same amount of time, say 3m, then you end up with an interesting middlegame position where White has 2m and Black has 1m. Now you are playing bullet chess with a 2 to 1 time advantage, which is more of like a 300-400 point handicap.

All that to say - blitz chess, even at the world championship level, is characterized not by "slight inaccuracies" but by major mistakes if not outright blunders. You can even have wild swings in the final minute as each player makes critical mistakes.

To get a feel for chess at this speed, I highly recommend watching some bullet chess streaming videos from chess.com or lichess. It is both highly entertaining and very instructive about the time aspect of chess.

Black has two disadvantages starting though, second and additional time pressure. As for the win rates I can't imagine they'd be very good data because armageddon is the format of last result for tournaments so there's likely fewer games played. On top of that there's a lot of player variation under time pressure. Some (like Carlsen who has a rapid elo of 2880 and a blitz rating of 2939) have their ELO improve as you move to faster formats while others get worse (like, unfortunately for him, Caruana who goes from rapid 2789 to blitz 2767). The rating differences alone mean Carlsen is the heavy favorite to win going into these tie breakers well before we get to the armageddon round. [1]

I think given the probabilities in the 538 model Carlsen's decision makes a lot of sense. Why slug it out to a probable draw with the chance to lose out of nowhere when you can move to another format that drastically favors you?

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/carlsens-bizarre-decisi...