Football Tested a Fairer Penalty Shootout and Threw It Away for Being Confusing

The shootout has always had a known bias

A penalty shootout looks symmetrical. Five kicks each, same spot, same distance, alternating.

It is not. IFAB has put the chance of winning for the team that kicks first at around 60%.

The mechanism is psychological and it is easy to see once stated. Under the standard ABAB sequence, the team kicking second spends the entire shootout in the same position: the opponent has just scored, and now you must score to stay alive.

The first team never faces that. It kicks to extend a lead; the second kicks to avoid losing. Do that five times in a row and the difference accumulates.

Which means the shootout — the mechanism football uses to decide World Cup finals — is substantially decided by a coin toss before it starts.

ABBA is the tiebreak’s answer

The proposed fix was borrowed directly from tennis.

The tiebreak faced the identical problem: serving first is an advantage, so the sequence alternates in pairs rather than singly, and the advantage cannot accumulate on one side.

Applied to penalties, that gives ABBA: A kicks, then B kicks twice, then A twice, and so on. Neither team is repeatedly the one kicking under must-score pressure, because the pressure position rotates.

The trials produced what the theory predicted. The data showed ABBA moved outcomes closer to 50-50 than to 60-40.

That is not a marginal result. It is a rule change that measurably removed a bias worth ten percentage points in a knockout tie.

And IFAB dropped it

IFAB then agreed that ABBA would no longer be a future option for competitions, citing an absence of strong support, mainly because the procedure is complex.

Its technical director, David Elleray, put it more directly: empirically it seems fairer, but it’s a bit confusing.

That is one of the most honest sentences a rule-maker has ever produced about their own decision, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than mocked.

The case for confusion mattering

The argument against ABBA is not that fairness is unimportant. It is that a shootout has a second job besides producing a just result.

A shootout must be followed. Eighty thousand people in a stadium and hundreds of millions watching need to know, at every moment, who is ahead and what the next kick means. That understanding is most of the drama.

Under ABAB, everybody knows the pattern instinctively — they alternate, and after five each it goes to sudden death. Under ABBA, the running order is genuinely hard to hold in your head. Which team is on its fourth kick? Is this one to win it or to stay in it?

Referees reported it as difficult to administer. Broadcasters found it hard to caption. Players lining up were unsure when they were due.

So football weighed a 10-point fairness gain against a loss of comprehensibility at the single most watched moment in the sport, and chose comprehensibility.

Whether that was right

Reasonable people differ, and it is worth putting both cases plainly.

Against the decision: this is a sport that decides its biggest matches by a procedure it knows is biased, and it had a tested, working, cost-free fix in its hands. Complexity is a transitional problem — people learned the tiebreak, and offside is far harder than ABBA. A generation would have learned it in a season.

For the decision: a rule nobody understands is a rule that erodes trust in the result. Football has watched VAR demonstrate exactly that — technically better decisions, delivered in a way spectators find opaque, producing more anger rather than less. The lesson IFAB appears to have drawn is that being right is not sufficient.

There is also a third option nobody adopted: keep ABAB and let the team that wins the toss choose whether to kick first or second. That preserves the familiar sequence, and turns an unearned advantage into a decision — though it still hands that decision to a coin.

What actually happens now

The shootout remains ABAB, five kicks each, sudden death after that, with a coin toss deciding order.

So the 60-40 bias is still in the game, in every knockout competition, up to and including a World Cup final — a known, measured, uncorrected advantage that football has looked at directly and decided to keep.

Most sports carry an unfairness because nobody has noticed it. This one is unusual: football noticed, tested a solution, confirmed it worked, and declined it on grounds it stated openly.

For the rest of the laws, see soccer rules and who invented the penalty kick.