-
A further word about the penalty shoot-out circles on the sheet:
For each penalty shoot-out, there are a total of 7 circles per team. The little dot after the first five circles indicates that the format is best-of-five. If the two teams are tied after five kicks each, then use the remaining circles to break the tie. If you need more than two tie-breaking kicks, you'll have to continue to record the shots in the margins!
In one game my kids and I played, we did go to seven shots each in a penalty shootout. Out of curiosity, this led me to look up the longest ever penalty shoot-out in professional soccer.
The current world record for the longest penalty shootout in a first class match is 48 penalties during the 2005 Namibian Cup in Africa when KK Palace beat Civics 17-16 (hence, 15 shots were missed in total).
Closer to home, a significant super-long shoot-out occurred in the English Premier League's FA Cup in 2005. Tunbridge Wells advanced to the First Qualifying Round of the FA Cup after a 2-2 draw against Littlehampton (AET), after a penalty shoot-out that last 40 kicks! Tunbridge Wells won 16-15 (so, 9 missed shots).
I also looked into World Cup penalty shoot-out statistics out of curiosity.
They first occurred in 1982, where they were used to resolve one match. Since then each World Cup has needed 3 to 4 shoot-outs, with the exception of 2002, which needed only 2 shoot-outs.
Since 1982, then, there has been an average of 2.86 shootouts per World Cup. Put alternatively, since 1982 17.9% of matches in the knockout round have required penalty shoot-outs.
If you treat 1982 as an outlier (since the shoot-out was new to the Cup, and since that Cup needed only 1 penalty shoot-out), you might be interested in the statistics for 1986-2006. In this period, there was an average of 3.17 shoot-outs per World Cup. Alternatively, 19.7% of matches in the KO round were resolved via shoot-out.
As a rough rule of thumb, then, you can expect a bit less than 1 out of 5 matches at the knockout stage to require a penalty shoot-out in the real World Cup. It'd be interesting to see how this compares to the card game. My sense after a few games of the card game is that the percentage of games requiring a shoot-out is pretty close to the real Cup.
|
|
|







