It’s Time to Get Rid of the Away Goals Rule in Soccer

In the quarterfinals of the UEFA Champions League (UCL) last week, Tottenham advanced, beating Manchester City by an aggregate score of 4-4. Wait, what? How does a team lose through tying?

The culprit is soccer’s away goals rule, used in many competitions including the UCL, which states that if two teams are tied after a two-leg playoff where each team gets one game at home, and one team scored more goals on the road, that team gets to advance.

Here’s what this looks like in practice. In the first matchup between Tottenham and Man City, Tottenham won 1-0 at home. When Man City hosted the second leg, they were victorious by a score of 4-3. Overall, each team scored four goals, but because Tottenham scored three on the road, and Man City failed to scored at all in that first matchup, Tottenham moves on to the semis. However, if both games had finished 1-0, with each team not having recorded an away goal, they would move on to extra time and potentially penalties to decide a victor.

Outside of the inherent unfairness of allowing one team to win when the score is tied, this rule is also arbitrary in nature. If the goal is to come up with a tiebreak system that doesn’t require any additional soccer to be played, one could just as easily choose to reward the team with the fewest fouls or cards, for example. And although these methods might be more susceptible to match-fixing, the point stands that there isn’t anything special about away goals.

The format encourages the away team to be more aggressive in seeking out goals rather than just trying to prevent the home team from scoring. While this might be somewhat more exciting for the viewer, the rules should not favor attacking over a strong defense. If a road team decides their best strategy is shutting down the opposing attack, they should be able to attempt to do so without worrying about away goals. In a two-leg match, where goals are scored should not matter.

But they do. Even worse, in the UCL (along with the Europa League and even World Cup qualifying), they matter when a fixture has to go into extra time as well.

Let’s go back to the example where both matches between A and B end in a 1-0 win for the home team. In this case, the aggregate score is 1-1, and since both teams have zero away goals, the match heads to 30 minutes of extra time. If one team scores more goals than the other, they win. If neither team scores, a penalty shootout will determine the winner. These scenarios are pretty simple. But what happens when each team scores a goal?

The away goals rule is applied once again, and since the road team, which scored a goal in extra time, now leads 1-0 on away goals, they win the match. This is ridiculous, and even more unfair considering that the winner has essentially been given an extra 30 minutes to score away goals.

So this begs the question: “what is the best tiebreaker system?” For starters, if the away goals rule is stripped away, the standard 30 minutes of extra time with penalties afterward if the score remains tied is a strong option. It gives the teams time to settle things themselves before the dreaded shootout. To spice things up, the golden goal could be incorporated, which turns extra time into sudden death, with the victory going to whoever scores first during the 30 minutes. This also reduces the chance of penalties.

Of course, extra time still means one team gets an extra 30 minutes playing at home. To avoid that, competitions could opt to go straight to penalties when the second leg ends tied on aggregate. No one likes penalty shootouts, but surely teams would prefer a chance to decide their fate rather than be ousted on away goals.

Penalties aren’t perfect either, as the team who kicks first wins roughly 60% of the time. This should even out over time if a simple coin toss is used to determine who kicks first, but the method could be improved by switching from the ABAB order which sees teams alternate kicks to an ABBA order similar to tennis’ tiebreak system.

This is probably the fairest way to do a tiebreak, although it essentially reduces the match into a few kicks which are largely random and do little to prove which team is better. For this reason, extra time will almost certainly be used moving forward.

It seems somewhat absurd to even need to argue this point, but teams who score the same amount of goals as their opponents should not be eliminated from the knockout rounds of competitions. So here’s a goal for soccer tournament organizers everywhere: get rid of the concept of away goals altogether.