Ukraine, the homeland of the Volokh clan (and of several of my ancestors), has advanced to the quarterfinals of the World Cup, by far their best result ever. If they win their next game, they will equal the best showing ever by the old USSR team (which could draw on a much larger talent pool, including Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the Soviet empire).The Ukrainian team defeated Switzerland on penalty kicks after a scoreless game.
Despite the euphoria in the Volokh household, penalty kicks are a very poor way to break ties in a soccer game. It’s much like deciding the outcome of a tie game in basketball by a free throw shooting contest. In my view, a far preferable solution is to require the teams to play until one scores a “sudden death” goal, as is done in the National Hockey League playoffs. The argument against this approach is that the game might go on on interminably, exhausting the players and hurting the winning team in the next round. However, a team that could not defeat its opponent in regulation time deserves to be disadvantaged in the next round relative to an adversary that did. Moreover, as experience in the NHL, NFL and other sports shows, sudden death overtime is tremendously exciting and helps stimulate fan interest.
But if excessively long games are a real concern, the rules can be altered to reduce the number of players for each side during overtime (e.g. – going from 11 to 10 after 30 minutes of overtime, 10 to 9 after the next 30, and so on). Each reduction in personnel would increase the chance of a goal and make it less and less likely that the tie will continue. And a 9 on 9, 8 on 8, or even 5 on 5 soccer game is much closer to ordinary play than taking a penalty kick, thus eliminating the anomaly under which a game is decided by a competition vastly different from normal nature of the sport.