Watching the Euros these past two weeks has been swell (England games aside). Had one of the finest weekends in a long time last week, when I watched football on my couch from 2pm to 10pm back-to-back Saturday and Sunday. Felt good to get back in touch with my roots.

Something I noticed is that it seems like games that go to Extra Time nearly always seem to end up going to Penalties. This makes sense, players are tired after 90 mins and they play more conservatively. Coaches likely coach more conservatively too. Its more ‘acceptable’ perhaps to lose in a penalty shootout than in Regular/Extra Time because its such a lottery. Think about how we viewed Hodgson after losing to Italy in Euro 2012 on penalties. For underdog teams it makes sense to sit back, put 10 men behind the ball and try your luck in a shootout. There’s probably a greater chance of an upset that way if they’re really not good enough to beat a favourite in open play. Its been griping me a bit because these Extra Time periods have been pretty dull and seem like a formality before a penalty shootout. Especially watching Portugal, who are awful.

I went through the recent history of World Cup, Euros, African Cup of Nations, Asia Cup, Champions League, Europa League/UEFA Cup and some domestic cup finals to figure out how often a game goes from Extra Time to Penalties. Analysed around 100 games tournaments/years and found around 300 extra time periods, results below (including current Euro 2016 data):

AET – means the match ended in Extra Time via someone scoring.

Golden Goal messes this up a little bit, so I’d put the percentage a bit more in the 60% region if I could go through and exclude those games from the sample. Weird research thing – Copa Libertadores (the Latin American version of the Champions League), Copa America (until recently) and Copa Sudamerica don’t even bother with Extra Time. They go straight to a penalty shootout after a tie in 90 mins.

Even so, I suppose 55-60% of games going into Penalties isn’t terrible.

Here’s the competition breakdown:

So Copa America is a bit of an outlier because they’ve only had about 3 games with Extra Time, hence the high percentage. Europa League/Domestic Finals drag the overall down a bit as they’re in the 40s. For Domestic Cups, I looked at just Cup Finals from England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Other countries weren’t really sophisticated enough to include. Obviously I excluded the years where we used to just do replays.

In terms of whether this has increased/decreased over time…there’s nothing to suggest this. Its pretty random with up and down years and no discernible pattern. I think my conclusion would be that tournaments have expanded a lot more in the last 5 years, with more knock out rounds and thus more chances for a game to go to Extra Time/Penalties. So it just seems like it happens more often when I think as a percentage, its probably pretty consistent. I could probably go back and slice the data into different decades but I can’t be bothered at this point. Just take my word for it.

Anyway, I was hoping the figure would be higher – 75% or something, so that I could make an argument that the format needs to change. The 55-60% mark probably isn’t that bad and doesn’t represent an overall problem in the sport. I don’t particularly enjoy 30 min extra time periods where nothing happens and I’m not a huge fan of the lottery of penalties. Although it does make for one of the greatest spectacles in sports. I read something recently that said they should change the format, so you have penalties after 90mins, then play Extra time based on the score of the shootout. So 5-3 in Penalties means the losing side has to score 3 goals to win in the 30 min period. Would encourage some attacking play and not leave countries unfairly hating a single player for the rest of their lives…Gareth Southgate!

I’d support some sort of experiment – at least they tried in the past with Golden Goal/Silver Goal but it might need something more drastic.