Reducing the cost of paying the penalty

For the price of a cup of coffee one morning this week, I bought a glimpse into football’s future.

I met up with Robbie Butler, a lecturer in economics in University College Cork, and his brother David a final year Commerce student.

They’ve done some extremely interesting research on footballers’ birthdays which I’ve written a column about and will appear in tomorrow’s newspaper.

Over the course of the hour-long chat however we free-wheeled from related books (Superfreakanomics, Why England Lose and Outliers are three recommendations) to work Robbie had done on ‘Fergie Time’ – or the phenomenon of a top six side’s extra added time at home. It’s fascinating.

On the eve of another World Cup final however – and remembering how the last one ended in Berlin – I thought I’d share one proposal which they explained, slowly, to me on the format of penalty shoot-outs that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.

“We went to this conference in London – the International Conference of Football and Psychology,” says David. “We were in a debate on penalties before and after time; I don’t know if you’ve heard that argument?

Robbie picks up the story: “These Australian economists argued that after 90 minutes, you have the shoot-out, THEN, you play extra time and if its still level after 30 minutes, whoever wins the shoot-out wins the game. So essentially it gives the team that loses the shoot-out an incentive to go and attack and win the game in extra time.”

Wow. Now for FIFA – a conservative organisation that doesn’t seem to a DVD player – turning a game upside down does seem unlikely. But it’s worth thinking about right?

“You take John Terry, his career is defined by one kick almost,” Robbie explains, “Now imagine if he was able to dust himself off and went out and played the 30 minutes to try to win it.”

It’d be fairer, I suppose – but maybe arch-villain Terry is a poor example.

“Now there are some arguments against it, one being the warm-down issue. If you stop for 10 minutes and then try to go again there’s the potential for injury. But shoot-outs are so lax these days – timewise – they’d have to just blow the whistle and say ‘right, let’s go’. Straight turn over, let’s go,” says Robbie.

“We had one of the main criticisms of it which is if you had the shoot-out and then went to extra-time, what way do the away goals go?

“So imagine Ireland and France had been 0-0 in Croker last November. And it was then nil-all in Paris as well and France win the shoot-out. So then we go to extra time and it’s 1-1. Who wins, the shoot-out or the away goal?

“We argued it should be an away goal. But we would.”