How to improve the World Cup? Scrap penalties and move the goalposts | Simon Jenkins

There’s no need to settle matches with a lottery when football’s laws could be tweaked to make them more high scoring

Penalty shootouts are an offence against the greatest of team games, association football. They are a lottery, doctored to add tension, personal agony, group ecstasy and nationalist hysteria, for the benefit of television. They are to sport what Love Island is to Romeo and Juliet.

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