Refs awarding penalties at nearly a 50% higher rate than historical

I blame it on the MSM and social media

I’m still waiting for yellows to be fished out at the obvious dives

Reds for it taking place in the penalty box

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hate penalties. Conversion rate of the opportunity is so much higher than an actual run of play chance.

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Penalty Stats 1992-93 to 2020-21

Home Penalties % 61.25
Away Penalties % 38.75
Penalties Scored % 82.97
Penalties Missed % 4.14
Penalties Saved % 12.89


Data would suggest “Home cookin” with 5 out of 6 penalties awarded leading to a goal.

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keeps working they'll keep doing it.

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Makes it worse that VAR isn’t fixing the mistakes these refs are making. That sterling flop yesterday should have been an easy overturn.

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He sold it, but there absolutely was contact from more than one defender. Blame the defenders for such horrible decisions in the box. It was 100% soft and not the way you want a game like that decided. But that isn't Sterling's fault.

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It's just regular gamesmanship, but it gets characterized in a terrible way because of the difficulty of scoring in international tournaments in particular. International tournaments also are areas where you get different referee interpretations of the rules. Some refs will always call a foul when players go down, where other refs will call fouls as they happen. What's egregious for me is when players back themselves into corners to earn free kicks from wide areas, and fall on the ball to ensure it. If a player shields a ball in the corner, he knows that the slightest attempt to initiate a tackle, regardless of the character of the tackle itself, will result in a free kick. Harry Kane did it yesterday, and many average players do it, like Granit Xhaka, when they find themselves in poor positions, and end up committing egregious hand-ball offenses for the sake of getting the referee to call a foul on the opposing team.

The essential problem is that the rules of the game are so vague that they give lots of incentive for gamesmanship, especially when you have such wide height and strength differences between players. There is every incentive for a smaller player to go down at contact, because referees will absolutely not protect them otherwise. Any small player who is a good dribbler, Neymar, Hazard, Messi, knows that if they ride a challenge, they are much more likely to gain a free-kick if they go down even though the foul occurs without the opposing player going down.

How do you fix this? First start calling all these little fouls like shirt tugs, but give indirect rather than direct free-kicks. Second, have retrospective action for any event that occurs in a match. I've seen so many yellow-card tackles that occur early in a match not given yellow-cards, which sets the tone for the rest of the match. The problem is that this limits the aggressiveness of certain players, and the solution to this isn't easy. One solution might be something they do in indoor soccer, which is give a blue card and then have that player sit out for 5 minutes, which gives a temporary advantage to the opposing team without ruining the game. It also allows the referee more leeway to accurately call a game.

The other option is to add a second referee who is also on the field and can watch incidents, as the game is incredibly fast, and the referees have to cover a massive amount of ground. Thirdly, you can mike the referee, and give "cards" for disrespect, which would stop the crowding the referee bullshite, although sometimes it is fun to watch a game that has been simmering explode into chaos after a hard tackle, like this one LINK at the 5:00 minute mark. These disrespect cards can accumulate over a season and cause teams to lose points if they are excessive.

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Makes it worse that VAR isn’t fixing the mistakes these refs are making. That sterling flop yesterday should have been an easy overturn.

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Two players made contact with him in the box. I've seen softer penalties given.

What I didn't like was commentators saying "that soft of a penalty shouldn't have been given in 'this situation'." I'm sorry, but if it's a penalty at the 5 minute mark and the 55 minute mark, it's a penalty at the 105 minute mark. And it doesn't matter if it's a week 3 Watford v. Aston Villa match or the final of the Euros. A penalty is a penalty. And, yes, what happened to Sterling was a penalty.


My beef with penalties is this: I think that a PK should be a one off play. Either you make it or you don't. If you make it, goal for your team. If you miss, or it is saved, it should be a goal kick for the defending team. This rebound shite off of a penalty kick is kind of absurd, if you ask me, but that's my "Americanism" showing, I guess.

I have spoken.

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Non soccer opinion

Enlarge the penalty box

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Shrink penalty box, people get tripped up in the far corner then get to go right in front?

The goal box is the new penalty box. Everything outside of this is an indirect kick that must touch someone else before going in.