Good riddance to the away goals rule
The news that the away goals rule will not be used in UEFA competition from this season brought a flurry of gloomy prognostication. The game will be ruined, the naysayers insist. Away teams, disincentivised, will sit deep, especially in the first leg, knowing that a 0-0 draw is a great result because in the second leg they will potentially have an additional half hour of extra-time in front of their own fans in which to force a win. And perhaps that is what will happen – but if it is, it will require major changes.
Firstly, such pessimism relies on the assumption that the away goals rule did achieve what it set out to do, that the additional value placed on an away goal did make away sides more attacking. But there is no evidence for that at all; in fact, if anything, the data suggests the away goals rule made it harder for away sides to score.
The regulation was introduced to the European Cup in 1967-68, so we have 12 seasons of data from the competition before the away goals rule. In that time, the away side failed to score in 33 per cent of games. In the 12 seasons after the introduction of the law, the away team failed to score in 45 per cent of games. In other words, after the introduction of legislation supposed to encourage the away team to attack, they found it 36 per cent harder to score.
Of course, correlation is not causation; there are other factors at work here. Football did generally become more defensive from the mid-60s onwards. It is possible that without the away
The problem that the away goals law was intended to challenge, however unsuccessfully it did so, has largely disappeared
goals rule the away team would have failed to score in more than 45 per cent of games. But there are two teams involved in any game. If you incentivise one team to do one thing, you almost certainly incentivise the other to do the opposite. Could it not be that that increase in away teams failing to score is the result of home teams being incentivised to stop them scoring?
If that is the case, and Arsene Wenger, for one, has spoken of that dynamic, it may be that the removal of the law actually makes football less tentative. It is true that a 0-0 draw without the away goals rule becomes a better result for the away side than with it, but equally a 2-2 draw without the rule becomes a better result for the home team.
Besides which, football has changed radically since the law was introduced. Shutting up shop is much harder now. That’s in part because of law changes, making a rigorous offside trap far harder to impose and cracking down on intimidatory tackling. But it’s also because of technical and tactical changes. Improvements in pitches, balls and boots mean that, at elite level, a good first touch is taken for granted. That
increases the pace of attacks, allows the best sides to practise rapid and sophisticated patterns of play for breaking down massed defences.
And because elite sides tend to dominate at domestic level, very few of them are particularly good at defending – which is one of the reasons the final stages of the Champions League over the past few years have been so dramatic and thrilling. It is theoretically possible that the abolition of the away goals rule will see elite teams radically revise their approaches, but it seems unlikely.
And anyway, the problem that the away goals law was intended to challenge, however unsuccessfully it did so, has largely disappeared. Travel is not so arduous as it was. An away trip in Europe is no longer a trip into the unknown. Conditions have been homogenised, stadiums sanitised. There is no longer the same sense of discomfort and danger. When the away goals rule was introduced to the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1965-66, the away team only won 16 per cent of games. Before COVID changed the parameters, that figure had more than doubled. A study in The Times, meanwhile, showed that, until 1980, home teams in UEFA competition had an advantage of 1.06 goals per game. By 2000 that had fallen to 0.77. By 2018 it was 0.51.
Or take a recent case study: MLS introduced away goals for its play-offs in 2014. Before the law came in, away teams failed to score in 42.7 per cent of games; afterwards, that figure went up to 43.5 per cent – which is pretty much what you’d expect in the present environment in which defending is difficult: the incentive for away teams to score is balanced by the incentive for home teams not to let them.
Put simply, playing away isn’t the handicap it used to be. The away goals rule isn’t needed, and it never worked anyway – perhaps even achieved the opposite of what it set out to do. It should have been abolished years ago.