He died of a heart attack at his villa in Thailand. **** knows what he was up to A proper lad till the end.
So everyone flapping over “An Austrian football expert gives her verdict on Marsch’s time at RB Salzburg” however the reality is - Played 94 Won 64 Drawn 13 Lost 17 Goal Difference + 177 Let’s get behind the team & new manager.
Penalties are too generous a reward. We have a solution… and it involves running John Muller Mar 4, 2022 Statistically speaking, just about every penalty you’ve ever seen was a miscarriage of justice. Here’s an example from New Year’s Day that could end up deciding the Premier League. Bernardo Silva dribbles into Arsenal’s penalty area from the right. He’s only got one team-mate in the box against eight opponents, but he’s determined to make something out of nothing. Bernardo zigs left with the ball. Granit Xhaka bites hard. When Bermardo zags back to the right, Xhaka throws out a leg and grabs a fistful of shirt to slow him from getting to the byline. please log in to view this image Was the penalty deserved? Yeah, maybe. The call was soft but fair by the letter of the law. But did the punishment fit the crime here? Come on!!! Even if Xhaka had stopped to tie his shoelace and let Bernardo stroll right past him, this play wasn’t going anywhere. The ball was near the byline. Another defender was already sliding over to cover. There was no angle to shoot. Every passing lane was blocked. If Bernardo was lucky, maybe he could have bounced the ball off somebody’s shin for a corner. A corner kick has about a two per cent chance of leading to a goal. A penalty kick? 78 per cent. You don’t need a PhD in statistics to spot the problem here. The officials turned a low-stakes passage of play into a potential title-deciding event, making the attack somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 times more dangerous. They did this based on a VAR call that might as well have been a coin flip. And we all eventually forgot about it because — here’s the bizarre thing about this sport — this happens all the time. Almost every penalty rewards the attacking team with a vastly higher chance of scoring than they would have otherwise had. Just take a look at where the ball was before the last decade’s worth of Premier League penalties… please log in to view this image It’s hard to say why penalties are tilted toward the left side of the box (something about all the right-footed shooters, maybe?). The more important thing to notice here is how far from goal the ball typically is when the whistle blows. If every penalty had been a shot instead, less than one in a hundred would have been as valuable as the 0.78 xG that shooters enjoy from the penalty spot. Ah, but what if the ball carrier wasn’t trying to shoot right away — what if the penalty prevented him from passing or dribbling to somewhere more dangerous? There’s a way to measure that, too. Possession value models estimate how likely a team is to go on to score from their current situation. Using a simple version by Manchester City’s own AI scientist Laurie Shaw, we can get a feel for an attack’s eventual goal probability based on where the ball was at the time of the penalty. The story is pretty much the same as before. Out of more than 900 penalties since 2011-12, only a handful of them come anywhere close to a penalty’s 78 per cent chance of scoring. In fact, due to the chance that the attack will turn the ball over before taking a shot, the model’s scale of possible possession values doesn’t even go up that high. please log in to view this image This is back-of-the-napkin math, so we shouldn’t take the median 0.06 possession value as gospel. Our model only knows the location of the ball, not what’s happening on the pitch, and the co-ordinates of the last event before the whistle don’t necessarily tell us where the attack might have received a pass or broken free into space if not for the penalty. If the foul was even semi-intentional, it was probably because the defender felt like the attack had a good chance of scoring. But even if we guess that the real value of a possession that draws a penalty is more like the 95th percentile on our curve, that’s still just a 19 per cent chance of scoring — one-quarter as much as a free shot from the spot. Unless an attacker is taking an open shot inside the six-yard box at the time of the foul, there’s basically no situation where a penalty kick makes mathematical sense. No other sport works like this. Hack a three-point shooter in basketball and they’ll get an equivalent number of free throws that she’s slightly more likely to make. Rough up a quarterback in American football and they’ll get 15 yards and a first down. Referees usually try to make victims whole by giving them a reward just a little bit better than the opportunity that the foul denied them. The effect of an average call on win probabilities is slim to none. Football’s draconian theory of justice is totally different. Maybe the purpose of penalties is to deter bad behaviour, since referees can’t see everything and fans don’t want a whistle every time the ball gets near the box, or maybe it’s retribution, left over from some 19th-century notion of punishment. Whatever the idea is, multiplying an attack’s goal probability many times over in a sport where goals are few and far between is ridiculously heavy-handed. One refereeing decision routinely changes the whole outcome of the game. please log in to view this image This is nuts, right? Penalties are the worst rule in sports. People have been trying to fix them almost as long as they’ve been around, proposing changes like a semi-circular penalty area that would make more sense to anyone who’s glanced at the goal probabilities. please log in to view this image A proposed change to the penalty area printed in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1913 (via the Society for American Soccer History) The good news is that we don’t have to redraw every pitch on the planet to fix penalties. Instead of redefining the crime, IFAB and FIFA can soften the mandatory sentence and make the sport more fun while they’re at it. There’s a fairer, way more exciting way to do penalties than spot kicks from 12 yards out: the running 35-yard shootout. The idea comes from the old North American Soccer League, whose enterprising executives hoped to lure fans to watch the likes of Pele and Johan Cruyff by ridding the sport of un-American draws. Any game that ended level went to a 15-minute ‘mini game’ followed by a penalty shootout. By 1977, though, the league decided even that wasn’t dramatic enough. Penalty kicks were dull and lopsided, tilted too far in the shooter’s favour. Why not settle a football match with something that looked like football? NASL’s solution was to give each shooter the ball 35 yards from goal, one-on-one with the goalkeeper, and allow him five seconds to get a shot off. Shooter and goalkeeper would both take off running toward the top of the box, with the shooter hoping to close the distance before a shot at the buzzer. “It made it seem like it was a breakaway — and the five seconds would sort of simulate the defensive pressure you’d feel on that breakaway,” former NASL assistant commissioner Ted Howard told The Athletic. “Truly, it felt like a moment in an actual game.” Fans went crazy for the running shootouts. Watching anyone, even the great Pele, kick a dead ball from 12 yards out was boring. Watching Pele try and fail to lift a shot over a charging Kenny Cooper of the Dallas Tornado? Now that’s showbiz, baby. Players seemed to love them, too. Here’s Franz Beckenbauer putting away a playoff shootout in 1978 and celebrating like he’d just won a second World Cup… FIFA hated America’s go-it-alone approach to reforming the laws of the game, but even they could see the entertainment value in running shootouts. In 2017, Marco van Basten proposed replacing penalty kicks at the end of extra time with a 25-yard, 8-second version of the old NASL rule. “This is spectacular for the viewers and interesting for the player,” Van Basten said. “With this idea, he has more possibilities: he can dribble, shoot, wait, and the goalkeeper responds — this is more like a typical playing situation.” What nobody has gone so far as to suggest — not Van Basten, not NASL, and not MLS, which used running shootouts for its first four seasons in the 1990s — is that running shootouts should also replace disciplinary penalties in regular time. The data on penalty situations makes a pretty strong case that option should be on the table. Yes, running shootouts are more exciting and more like real football. They’re also fundamentally fairer. please log in to view this image Out of 1,721 shootout-style attempts from 1996 to 1999, MLS players converted 45 per cent of them. That’s a higher goal probability than 99 per cent of possessions that lead to penalties, enough to deter defences from committing reckless or intentional fouls, but not so much higher that running penalties would automatically determine match results to the extent that spot kicks do. That’s the disciplinary sweet spot that most sports aim for. Of course, football loves tradition, and any kind of rule change — even to fix something as obviously dumb as penalties — is bound to be unpopular. But before you fire up the caps lock key and head for the comments, ask yourself how much you would really miss the current system. Are you sure you want to see your team lose because a worthless cross grazed somebody’s arm? Wouldn’t it be a lot cooler to make penalties a fair fight and give the goalkeeper a five-second shot at glory? Even Johan Cruyff, who sometimes refused to participate in shootouts as an NASL player, eventually came around. “I thought it was fantastic,” he admitted in later years. “I still think Europe should try it.”
