Dear Soccer: Please, No More Penalty Kicks

Soccer’s long-awaited Champions League final kicks off tomorrow: Britain’s powerhouse Manchester City vs. Italy’s spunky AC Milan, the Miami Heat of global soccer. This one’s for all the tea and tagliatelle.

It’s soccer’s biggest showcase since last fall’s classic World Cup brought us the march of Morocco, the magnificence of Messi and Mbappe, the recalcitrance of Ronaldo.

I’m looking forward to it, but I have just one request: Please, no more penalty kicks. And yet, I already fear this one’s headed down that ill-conceived, well-trodden, anti-climactic path.

To be clear: penalty kicks should have no place in a major championship. This isn’t about sports; this is a moral issue. I’m expecting Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Ad infernum cum poena calcibus (“To hell with penalty kicks”), any day now.

I’ve grown weary of commentators lamenting the penalty kick as a cruel and inhumane device, as if it’s been foisted upon us by a malevolent higher power, like Sepp Blatter. Because if we put on our thinking caps, pull out a white board and some dry erase markers, and think really, really hard, we just might see that there’s another way: keep playing.

If I were Soccer King for a day, I would do two things. First, I would sell the next World Cup to the Maldives (we could call the underwater stadium the Fish Bowl, which would be neat) for ten briefcases of cash and a private island, then carry on as if the whole bidding process was fair and transparent. Sue me, I’m a traditionalist. Second, I would abolish penalty kicks from major tournament play forever.

Penalty kicks take a hard-fought match and transform it into a game of chance. Because when it comes to penalty kicks, all goalies are guessers.

Some years ago I challenged my brother-in-law, who was then playing varsity and travel team soccer, to a contest. He was at the peak of his powers; I hadn’t kicked a soccer ball in 12 years. I took five penalty kicks. I made all of them. It wasn’t even close.

Granted, there’s real pressure on the game’s biggest stage. But World Cup penalty kicks have a successful conversion rate of over 80%, the inescapable conclusion being that for professional soccer players, converting penalty kicks, is, well, pretty easy. That strikes me as an odd way to crown a champion.

Not to mention unsatisfying. Imagine deciding an NBA Finals Game 7 with a free throw shooting contest (best of 10), the Super Bowl with a field goal kick-off (best of 5), or a hot dog eating contest with a kale salad. With penalty kicks, the priority seems to be ending the game, rather than finding out who the better team is.

The solution? Soccer should take a cue from hockey. During the regular season games can end in shoot-outs, but come playoff time, they skate until someone scores.

For soccer, that would require a welcome shake-up of stingy substitution rules. How stingy? In the last World Cup, only five subs out of 15 were allowed; before that it was a measly three. My proposal (again, Soccer King for a day) would be to allow unlimited substitutions during overtime. This would keep legs fresh and force a team to make a winning play, rather than a winning guess.

There has been too much semi-stationary carnage already. In the last World Cup Brazil, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and Spain were all felled by the freebie. At the time of their demise, each had 10 world-class players–a whole starting team!–on the bench, yet to break a sweat. Pardon my French, but that’s nutty.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Soccer, time to put your best foot forward and boot the PK.