A comparison of penalty shootout designs in soccer

László Csató

4OR, 2021, vol. 19, issue 2, No 2, 183-198

Abstract: Abstract Penalty shootout in soccer is recognized to be unfair because the team kicking first in all rounds enjoys a significant advantage. The so-called Catch-Up Rule has been suggested recently to solve this problem but is shown here not to be fairer than the simpler deterministic Alternating (ABBA) Rule that has already been tried. We introduce the Adjusted Catch-Up Rule by guaranteeing the first penalty of the possible sudden death stage to the team disadvantaged in the first round. It outperforms the Catch-Up and Alternating Rules, while remains straightforward to implement. A general measure of complexity for penalty shootout mechanisms is also provided as the minimal number of binary questions required to decide the first-mover in a given round without knowing the history of the penalty shootout. This quantification permits a two-dimensional evaluation of any mechanism proposed in the future.

Keywords: Sports rules; Soccer; Penalty shootout; Mechanism design; Fairness; 60J20; 91A05; 91A80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10288-020-00439-w

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