Why Penalties Should Be Harder

What do you think is the probability that these chances result in a goal? These are obviously all open goals, but you definitely expect the striker to score. They've got an average xg of 0.8, which means there's a roughly 80% chance of them getting scored. These are incredibly difficult chances to create. Only 6 out of every 1000 shots in the Premier League have a higher xg than 0.8. And what's my whole point with this? Well, it's nearly the same probability of scoring that you get when you win a penalty. It's actually 0.79 xg. And I personally think most fouls leading to a penalty don't warrant such an easy chance to score. And in this video, I'm going to investigate if penalties should be harder and how the laws of football could be changed to improve them. The Premier League only averages around 2.8 goals a game. So obviously scoring a goal is a huge game changing event and a big part of what makes it the beautiful game. It's crazy then that one refereeing decision to give a penalty can create a 0.79 xg chance, which is an almost certain goal. No other sport works like this. In basketball, you get a free throw. In rugby, you might be able to kick for three points. And in American football, you'll get 15 yards and a first down. Here you can see where most penalties when the Premier League and it's clear the majority of them are near the edge of the box and not in the most dangerous goal scoring positions. This graph shows how dangerous the chance was when the penalty was conceded. You can see that the average is only about a 10% chance of a goal. Meanwhile, a penalty will offer you a nearly 80% chance of scoring. Many of these penalties were coming from situations that were just never going to lead to a goal like debatable soft fouls and questionable handballs. Take for example, the penalty that Macedonia won against England. I personally don't think that foul warrants an 80% chance of scoring. It's also worth noting that although 20% of penalties are Currently, it's a one in three guess for the goalkeeper. And even if they guess correct, they're still unlikely to save it. So we've effectively got a punishment that gives an almost certain goal, even if the foul is minor, and doesn't warrant to change the course of the game. The Premier League could start by trying to reduce the amount of penalties that are given out. This chart shows what percentage of penalties are given for handball. And as you can see, it's been rising. And this year, nearly 26% of penalties are given for handballs, many of which were non deliberate, as the hand just has to be in an unnatural position for the penalty to be given. It's not often I agree with Hiram Maguire, but he came out and said that penalties are given for everything. And that there are too many soft penalties at the moment, I think we should be more lenient with non deliberate handballs and maybe look at penalising them with indirect free kicks instead of penalties. The referees also need to be harsher on diving for and perhaps VAR should intervene and give yellow cards for these offences. There's also the crazy idea of changing the size of the penalty area, but I think it's too much to ask for the lines to be redrawn on every football pitch around the world. In recent years, penalties have actually been getting easier to score, with VAR ensuring that goalkeepers have to stay on their lines and FIFA's new rules that ban the goalkeepers from touching the post or trying to distract the penalty taker. I personally think we should be doing the opposite and making penalties harder to score so they aren't so much of a guaranteed goal. There are lots of ways this could be done. One potential idea is that the player that gets fouled has to then go and take the penalty, or at least the last player to touch the ball on the attacking team, with an exception if the player is injured. This would make it more exciting and also mean that it's not always the best penalty taker in the squad that's taking these penalties. Another idea is to stop the stuttered run ups and ensure players can't pause or alter the speed of their approach to the ball as they're taking a penalty, like Lewandowski does to great success. Another idea that I like is implementing the ice hockey style penalty shootout that the MLS implemented back in the 90s. This led to a 45% success rate of penalties and would be a lot fairer reflection of how dangerous the fouls are that often cause penalties. We could also look at adjusting where the actual penalty kick is taken from. Perhaps it could be moved to 15 yards instead of 12 yards. I also came up with the pretty wacky idea of having a penalty line and the penalty is taken on the line and the nearest point to where the foul was committed. This would better reflect the location of the foul to the difficulty of the penalty, as well as making penalties more difficult and in my opinion way more entertaining. My last idea for making penalties harder would be to make it more difficult for the penalty taker to score a rebound if the keeper saves it. You can make the attempt like in a shootout, or ban the taker from touching the ball again until it has left the penalty area. My little brother also suggested that we could potentially let the players run into the box as soon as the whistle blows, which will allow the defending team more chance to stop a rebound, which also forces the player to rush, which stops like feints, which makes the pen harder. If penalties weren't such a guaranteed goal, say there was a 50-50 chance of them being scored, we could then look at allowing the referees to give more penalties out since they won't be such a guaranteed game-changing event. We could start penalising more fouls from defenders in the box, allowing strikers and attackers to have more time and space on the ball and score those beautiful goals that make the game so amazing to watch. You know, there's also the strong argument that perhaps we should just forget all of this and keep it the same. Football has had its rules for hundreds of years and it still doesn't fail to produce amazing to watch games that are full of excitement. One strong argument is that if you give out less penalties or make them harder to score, you'll get less goals and obviously goals make games so much more exciting and penalties give smaller teams a chance at potentially scoring against a much better side with a little bit of luck from a handball or a call from the referee. Currently defenders are incredibly careful in the box to make sure they don't concede those penalties and perhaps if we tweak it too much, it could have a domino effect and make the game more boring to watch, which I definitely don't want. I think if there's anything to take from this video, I love the idea of making the player that wins the penalty take the penalty. I think that is such an easy rule change that would make the game way more exciting and then I would also suggest that we ban stutter run-ups to try and give goalkeepers a better chance of saving. Hope you guys have enjoyed this video. Thanks for making it this far. I'm going to try and upload consistently on this channel over the next couple of months, diving into various different topics within football. So if you've enjoyed it, please leave a comment about your opinion in the comment section below and subscribe if you want to be notified for future videos and perhaps share it to somebody in one of your football group chats or whatever if you feel like they would enjoy the video as well. Consider checking out the first video that I made that was all about refereeing and what the future of refereeing could look like. Peace out, stay tuned for the next episode.