Was the sight of Chelsea players bickering like a disorganized under-12 team over who would take their penalty against Everton on Monday night entertaining or outrageous?
The answer is probably “both”. In some ways it was understandable: Chelsea were 4-0 up at the time, the game was won and their regular starter Cole Palmer had already scored his hat-trick, so in a season where moments of genuine joy have been extremely rare for anyone. but Palmer, it was someone else’s chance to get his flowers.
😳😳😳 pic.twitter.com/qCP4uALalE
– Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) April 15, 2024
(UK viewers can watch the feud above, those in the US can see it below)
The Chelsea players had a heated exchange over who would take the penalty. They then won 4-0. 👀 pic.twitter.com/Gh6wg5cEvQ
– NBC Sports Football (@NBCSportsSoccer) April 15, 2024
In the end, Palmer took over and scored as usual, but it raises one of those questions that always buzzes in the background about what little tweaks we could make to football and what football could take other sports.
Should penalties be imposed on the offending player?
This already happens in basketball, for free throws. For those unfamiliar with how the sport works, they are a lot like penalties: when a player commits a foul, they are awarded between one and three free throws (depending on various factors), taken from a line five meters from the basket.
As with a football penalty, the taker cannot be challenged, but the offending player must shoot, unless he is injured or has somehow managed to get himself sent off between the granting of the free throw and its execution. In these scenarios, the opposition chooses who shoots.
This can lead to extremely fluctuating results. The best free throw shooters rarely miss: the best player in the NBA this season is Klay Thomson, with a 93 percent success rate. However, the worst almost makes it a toss-up: According to Basketball Reference, among players who have made at least 100 free throws this season, the worst is Chicago Bulls center Andre Drummond, who makes just over 59 percent of the shots. free throws. time.
What if we introduced this into football? What if only the offending player was allowed to take penalties?
Eliminating childish arguments as we saw at Stamford Bridge would be a minor consequence, but there are others.
This would introduce an element of peril, to begin with. Even though we imbue penalties with a sense of drama, their outcome is one of the most predictable parts of football. Typically, penalties are converted around 75 percent of the time, and that’s even higher in the Premier League this season, at just over 90 percent.
It’s not really a fair fight. Regular takers become more and more skilled and prepared for penalties, and even the best goalkeepers rely on educated guesses about where to dive – they essentially have no chance if the taker does things correctly.
Even the mind games lean in favor of the attackers: the old trick of someone standing on the spot with the ball to absorb pressure and distraction tactics from the opposition, before handing it to the true taker, would be abandoned. Here it would just be a striker versus a goalkeeper.
At the highest level, designated penalty takers have almost become too good – but if we were to add an element of chance to things, the risks would be even greater.
Take Chelsea in the Premier League this season. They took 12 penalties: Palmer took and scored nine, but they only scored one of the other three, with Enzo Fernandez and Raheem Sterling missing one each. Nicolas Jackson, the man most unhappy about not receiving the spot-kick against Everton, has never taken a penalty in professional football, as far as we know. If he had accepted it, the result would have been much less foregone conclusion than with Palmer.
It wouldn’t be a major change, in the sense that it might not make a huge difference in who takes the penalties. The graph above shows the players who have suffered the most penalties in the Premier League over the last 10 seasons. Most of those at the top of the list are penalty takers anyway, which makes sense. Penalty takers tend to be attackers and attackers are most often in the position of being hampered by a penalty.
But it also shows that it could make a little difference. Of the names on this list, Jamie Vardy’s Premier League conversion rate is 81 percent, Harry Kane’s is 89 percent and, despite some recent wobbles, Mohamed Salah’s is still at a perfectly good rate. a predictable 81 percent.
Then there’s Wilfried Zaha, who only really became a penalty taker in his final seasons at Palace – and not a particularly good one, with a below-average conversion rate of 64 percent. Anthony Martial has only taken a handful of penalties in the Premier League, scoring three and missing one; a small sample size, but maybe there’s a reason he’s not a regular. The most important is Sterling, who has missed more penalties than he has scored: seven taken in the Premier League, three entered. If you extrapolate those numbers and apply his conversion rate to the penalties he won, he would have missed about 13 out of 23. How is that a danger?
This could also go some way towards correcting one of the flaws in the penalty system: a player can be fouled in the corner of the area, which is around 26 meters from the middle of the goal, facing outside the goal and (on this season’s match). Premier League figures (at least) are rewarded with a 90% chance of scoring. This seems extremely unfair, but it is difficult to legislate effectively beyond drastically redrawing the boundaries of a football field. This rule change wouldn’t be an exact way to redress that balance, but introducing a little random element might help a little.
It would also highlight a little more those who perform really well in open play. Although no-penalty goals are separated from overall totals in some metrics, they don’t show up in the numbers most people pay attention to. So Palmer’s goal tally (20 league goals, nine from penalties) wouldn’t seem as impressive, while Ollie Watkins (19 league goals, zero penalties) would benefit hugely. Likewise, we cannot accuse frequent penalty takers of “stat padding”: after all, they would have won the spot kick.
There are certain scenarios in which the identity of the shooter would not be clear: for example, when a penalty is awarded for a handball. It would need to be the attacking player who touches the ball last, which could get a little tricky in a goalmouth scrum, especially in games without detailed replays available to watch.
Also take the strange scenario that Thomas Tuchel complained about recently during Bayern Munich’s Champions League match against Arsenal, when David Raya passed a goal kick to Gabriel, who put his hand on the ball and resumed the goal kick. If this penalty had been awarded, and if we had opted for the “last Bayern player to touch it” solution, it would have been Serge Gnabry, whose shot went over the bar – but as there was a series of substitutions immediately after, almost a minute and a half had passed between his shot and the “infringement”. That would have been weird.
One fun theoretical thing this would eliminate is that it would almost certainly eliminate the possibility of a goalie taking a penalty without a shootout. They’re incredibly rare now, no matter how much some of us would like Pep Guardiola to let Ederson take one for Manchester City, but they would become virtually impossible with this rule.
The most obvious downside is that it takes away some of the meritocracy of football: prescribing who should have the opportunity to score a goal makes, to say the least, feel a little left out and attenuates slightly arbitrary way the advantage that a team with one main goal, the crack penalty taker has.
How would we feel if a player won a penalty with a dive? They could be doubly rewarded for cheating, with some personal glory and a goal for their team. The flip side is that it opens up the possibility of a quick rematch: take Anthony Knockaert, who, in Leicester’s Championship play-off semi-final against Watford in 2013, threw himself onto the turf and got a penalty for his team, but his kick was saved, the ball went up the other side and Troy Deeney scored one of the most spectacular goals in recent English football history.
The comparison with basketball is also not entirely valid, given that there are many more opportunities to score: a free throw is much less likely to make the difference between winning and not winning than a penalty, so a change in football would have a disproportionate impact. impact in certain scenarios.
Will this change in laws take place? Certainly not. Would this make a huge difference to the game? Probably not. But would that make some scenarios more fun for us, the audience, and introduce a little more danger? Yes, that probably would be the case.
(Top photo: Alex Pantling/Getty Images)