I'd actually like us to come up with something that's less of a lottery and more of a reflection of the skill of football as a team sport than the status quo which is a bloody cruel and unfair way to lose a football match.
http://www.thesportinmind.com/articles/brazil-2014-penalty-shootouts-theyre-just-a-lottery-right/
Jordet and Hartman (2008) examined all the penalty shootouts that had taken place in the FIFA World Cup, European Championships and the UEFA Champions League (36 shootouts with 359 penalty kicks) and discovered a number of things. When a particular penalty kick was to win the shootout, players were successful 92% of the time. When a penalty kick was to keep a team in the shootout (i.e. not to lose), players were only 61.8% successful. This finding was attributed to “avoidance motivation” (Jordet and Hartman 2008), where those faced with a kick to avoid losing were forced into an avoidance (negative) mindset.
But they are racist, apparently:
http://www.penaltyshootouts.co.uk/research.html
One of Hofstede’s four national cultural dimensions – individualism/collectivism – strongly correlated with nations’ win/loss record (r=-.600, sig= .014, N=16). A regression analysis produced an Rsq of .395 indicating that this national cultural dimension explains almost 40% of the variance in the results of penalty shoot-outs with collectivism being favoured over individualism. These results demonstrate a strong national culture bias in favour of collectivist nations. One explanation is that players from individualist nations are more anxious and under greater stress due to the blame they will attract if they miss. Other explanations are associated with support and self-image. Given that this national culture dimension does not seem to underpin performance in regular play, the existence of this bias in penalty shoot-outs raises important concerns for their continued use.