ABBA Penalty Shootouts

ABBA' penalties

While the traditional shoot-out sees Team A take a penalty, then Team B, then Team A, then Team B, and so on, the 'ABBA' shootout is like a tennis tie-break. Team A takes the first penalty then Team B takes two successive penalties, before Team A takes two successive penalties and so on.

What's your view on the new ABBA penalty shoot out rules, as they felt the team going first has an advantage?

Personally I don't see any reason whatsoever to change the existing rules & don't like this at all. I don't see any disadvantage going second, as the first penalty taker has increased pressure taking the first kick. Sort of thing they would do in America, rules like this should stay well out of English Football.

 

Abba r **** m8

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I agree, the argument that statistically the team going first or whichever way round it is more often than not wins doesn't hold much to me. It's tough luck, the pressure is part of it and all off the things to fiddle with penalty shootouts would be very low on the list.
I'm sure going first is decided by a coin toss anyway so it's not like home team advantage it's just the way it is.
The powers that be seem intent on changing things which aren't really an issue at all to me.

I think what adds to my annoyance is the pundits forcing laughs out at every ABBA pun made to go witht he shootout.

 

To understand the change, you need to understand statistics.

This is not an effect that can be explained rationally through chance. There is a clear, unexplained benefit of going first in the shootout, based on a large sample size.

Essentially, it is like a study of coin flipping, whereby after hundreds of flips it landed on heads more than 60% of the time. The most rational answer for this - a dud coin.

Commentators typically called penalties a lottery, when it is in fact anything but. Giving a team such an advantage immediately is an unfair way of deciding a match. Avoiding a change because it feels strange, whilst also calling out for the game to reform to reduce unfairness, is pretty hypocritical.

 

Winner takes it all bruv !!!!

 

Not really sure what you are saying. Surely if it can't be rationally explained then there is no benefit in going first?!

Hope you don't mind me saying the 100 x coin flipping analogy of yours is completely cuckoo. there are no patterns to be read into that, each time you flip a coin with just a 50/50 chance, same as in a casino red or black.

To me ABBA takes away the excitement of a penalty shootout.

 

Still wont help the England national side.

Actually ABBA have a better chance of winning a penalty shoot out than England!

 

You are correct that each time there is a flip, the chance of getting heads or tails is 50%. You are also correct that that chance of getting heads of tails is completely separate from the previous throw (i.e. getting three heads does not increase the chance of getting a tails in the next flip, just as 5 reds does not increase the odds of getting a black - the odds are always 50%).

However, the more coins you flip, the more the random error is reduced. If you flip 5 coins, you might find that you get 4 tails and one heads. This does not make the chance of a getting tails 80%. It means that the coin hasn't been flipped enough times for the probability to play out - your 80% findings have occurred through chance.

Flip it 50 times, and it will appear a lot more like the 50% chance of getting either outcome. Do it 500 times, and it will resemble an outcome even closer to 50%.

That is what people mean when they use the phrase statistical significance. This means that the results, given the number of cases, are statistically incredibly unlikely to have occurred by chance.

If you flip a coin hundreds/ thousands of times, and you have a 60/40% split, then the odds of getting heads/ tails is not 50/50. The odds of winning a penalty shootout is not 50/50, if we look at who takes the first/ second penalty using hundreds/ thousands of cases - the coin is biased.

The most obvious explanation, is that whilst people are generally more likely to score penalties than miss, psychologically people are more likely to miss when they are behind, even if they haven't had their turn yet.

 

How?

If 60% of shootouts are being won by the team who go first the system is clearly biased in their favour. The outcome is basically being decided by the coin toss that precedes it.

 

They distract the fans and players with their infectious europoppy sound.

 

See where you are going with the maths, but I dont believe this scenario plays out in single one off penalty shoot outs, when all the other human factors are involved. Therefore reading into say 10,000 of these individual penalty shoot outs does not then give any empirical evidence that who goes first has a statistically better chance of winning the shoot out, It is all random when humans are involved.

The excitement of a penalty shoot out has many other factors, such as skill & confidence of the individual player, wet or dry, the condition of the pitch, tactics in terms of the the order of the penalty takers etc to give you the best chance.

You toss a coin & the winner chooses first or second, nothing fairer than that.

 

Always thought toss a coin and one team gets to chose the end the other gets to choose who goes first is the fairest way

 

This.

Surely we never want to get to a scenario in football where a team/fans uses 'statistical advantage' of going second for the reason for them losing an individual penalty shootout.

 

The fact that a player of the same team will step up straight after the first one is taken is a bit anti climatic.

 

You're part of a tiny minority then according to the research behind this change:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/newsArchives/2010/12/Penalties.aspx

96% of coaches/players questioned said their reason for preferring to take the first kick was to put pressure on the team kicking second. And in 60% of cases it appears to work. Out of 20 penalty shootouts it was shown that 19 winners of the coin toss chose to go first - and the one team who volunteered to go second lost.

 

What team wouldn't want to take any perceived psychological advantage possible. Chelsea took the first kick yesterday, scored & eventually lost the shootout.

Going first is not in itself an advantage just because 60% of 100,000 previous shoot outs analysed were won by who went first.

It's just altogether wrong to see a team take two penalties in succession & dampens the high octane environment, it completely loses the momentum of the excitement. Especially for the fans that have to wait an extra 2 minutes when they are already shi**ing themselves. especially if their team missed the first penalty.

 

Isn't ABBA the system used for serving in tennis tie-breaks? Any views on that, IBB?

 

This only holds if all teams are equally competent at penalties? Has there been a large enough sample size to discount that possibility that superior penalty takers end up going first more often than second due to random chance?

 

Stats aside I think it is garbage as a spectacle. There are far greater biases in sport (e.g. Winning toss in cricket). Has anyone analysed what percentage of winning teams were taking the pens in front of their supporters out of interest?

 

I think that's a hard call to make until we've had to sit through one where we have a vested interest. I don't really get the point about the fans - why would you be less excited because you've got to wait 2 minutes more?

No idea. The LSE study, a summary of which I linked to above, was all I could find at a quick glance.

Surely the spectacle was garbage yesterday because Chelsea clearly didn't give a fark? Their keeper took their second penalty like it was all a big joke and they had two appalling misses. The shootout never got going because one team weren't in it and a standard ABAB shootout would have been an equal damp squib. I can't think of a reason it would be any less enthralling if the shootout was of high quality and went the distance.

 

Am I missing something or was this kinda the point of ABBA?

 

At the end of the day it's all about money, money, money

 

I like this. Like a tie break on tennis. It's good

 

Fernando missed his penalty though!

 

Going first in any heads up sport is always an advantage because even if you mess up the other team/player has to be successful. It doesn't end the contest.

Would be interesting to see if going first in tennis ties breaks is significantly worse or better than going second. I guess not if they're testing it with penalties.

 

The reasoning behind the statistical significance of the 60% of first takers winning is thusly:

When you have a sample size as large as the one used by IFAB, which we must presume is sufficiently large since we were not involved in the calculations, that large sample size balances out the many factors involved in deciding an individual penalty shootout: skill of the players, which fans are placed behind the goal, rain and pitch slickness, wind, etc. Those all play a large part in one solitary shootout. But in a sample size as large as, say, 10,000 shootouts, the cumulative effect of those factors is such that we may presume in 50% of the shootouts those factors work in favour of the first team and in the other 50% those factors work in favour of the second team due to the fact that which team is which is decided by coin toss. Therefore, we may presume that if the penalty system is fair, we can expect the distribution of wins to be evenly split between team 1 and team 2. This is called controlling for confounding variables.

Now that we have a large enough sample to control for confounding variables and have established the null hypothesis, which is that 50% of shootouts are won by team 1, we would analyze the data to see what we observe. What we observe is that 60% of shootouts are won by team 1. This is a 10% difference, which if we assume a sample size of 10,000 is a very large variation from the null hypothesis. In any case, a statistical test for significance would be calculated to determine the likelihood of this variation occurring by chance. Since the difference between the observed value and the null hypothesis is so large, that likelihood (called the p-value) is probably below 1% even with a smaller sample size like 1,000. This would mean that we can say with over 99% certainty that the null hypothesis is false, and conclude that the opposite is true: P(team 1 win) =/= 0.5 . Therefore, the ABAB penalty shootout is not fair.

Fans may think otherwise, but whatever you think is frankly irrelevant in the face of the numbers. Not trying to be harsh but if you disagree you're incorrect, that's just maths. A similar test would have been used to verify that ABBA penalties are fair (or, if not fair, closer to it than ABAB penalties) and apparently, they are.

 

The trouble with the tennis comparison is that if you miss and fail to win the point your opponent automatically gains one. Whereas obviously in football whether a shootout is ABAB and ABBA it could still end 0-0.

 

Not sure of the stats but if I was a tennis player on grass I'd go 2nd because I don't want to be 3-0 down due to one poor point.

 

Doesn't it depend on what factor you choose to analyse? If I analysed kicking in front of your own fans and it showed 60/40 wouldn't that neutralise the impact of kicking first or second by your logic? If nobody has analysed the "kick in front of own fans" factor how can you dismiss it?

Edit: how can they have performed a similar test on ABBA pens? Sample size is 5.

 

Thank you. This is really very well put together as a numerical argument, but the math still cant even out a one off penalty shoot out between humans, so whats the point of it!

Even so, that then begs the reverse question in that how does having 2 shots then redress the perceived improbable balance mathematically for the team that goes second? Would that then put the first team at a disadvantage & then you will have teams wanting to go second.

The overriding point is that if football goes down this murky path, all sorts of stupid rules can be justified to be brought in over the next decade, next it will be stopping the game in general play while the ref looks at video evidence of a potential foul & then making a decision. Its not good for football in my opinion.

 

Of course it depends on what factor you choose to analyze. Kicking in front of your own fans affecting the outcome is a different statistical question in which you would have to figure out a control for the type of penalty shootout. Or you would have to include the type of shootout in the conclusion; i.e. we conclude that kicking in front of home fans gives an advantage to the home team in an ABAB format.

I'm not sure what you mean by your edit. What sample size is 5?

 

There have only ever been 5 ABBA pens so I don't see how you can say they have tested that it is fairer?

 

Unfortunately all that I can demonstrate is that the ABAB system is unfair, not why it's unfair. That's a much more complex question which cannot be easily addressed with maths. There is chatter about the psychological pressure of kicking second being alleviated by the knowledge that you're being followed by a teammate, but I can merely shrug my shoulders and point at the numbers. At the end of the day, I would rather the system be more fair even if I don't know what made it unfair in the first place.

 

Murky path? Crikey. It's just an experiment with a different way of doing something which doesn't even impact on one of the fundamentals of the game. It's not like they're saying goals scored from outside the box count double or players can now pick up the ball and run with it in extra time. I'm glad the sport we follow is open-minded enough to try new things. There's plenty of evidence to say that if they don't really work or aren't particularly liked - eg. golden/silver goals or 10yd advance of the ball for dissent - they'll be reversed in a couple of years.

 

I don't know where you're getting that number but it seems unlikely to me that there have been 5 ABBA shootouts in the history of football everywhere. It is possible that the two systems were tested in a control setting on a smaller scale as well. I can only assume what they did to conclude that ABBA is better as I do not work for them.