The rise and fall of MLSs 35-yard shootout and why it should be brought back

Major League Soccer was full of oddities when it launched in 1996: teams with names like the Mutiny and Burn. Uniforms that were the sportswear equivalent of a Sunny D advertisement. A clock that counted down, not up. And most famously — or infamously, depending on who you ask — the NASL-style, 35-yard shootout. 

It was a quirk used to settle tied games, because in America — in 1996, at least — there simply had to be a winner. After all, the Ford Taurus and Chevrolet Lumina couldn’t share the J.D. Power reliability award in the mid-90’s. It had to be the Taurus. The league’s Fruitopia-chugging, Reebok Pump-wearing fans would surely never accept the idea of a draw.

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The concept was simple, but feels alien more than 20 years later. Games that ended in a tie were settled in a high-flying version of the traditional penalty-kick shootout from 12 yards. The moment the single attacker lined up over the ball 35 yards out made his first touch, the play was live — just a straight-up, one-on-one, five-second breakaway that allowed both the goalie and the attacking player to demonstrate their individual skill, flair and, at times, fearlessness. 

Most of MLS’s early rule oddities — wrinkles like the countdown clock, allowing an extra substitution for the goalkeeper and a handful of more obscure changes — went by the wayside without so much as a whimper. But the shootout? Oh, the shootout. It’s the one that got away. The shootout persists in the memory of many of the league’s fans, not as an example of a necessary change but one of the unique twists the league got right in its infancy.

It was fun. It was different. Yes, it had a distinctly American flavor — it felt a bit like settling a split-decision title bout with a post-fight arm-wrestling match — but who cares. Many fans loved it. A sizable chunk of players loved it. Seemingly, the only people who didn’t love the 35-yard shootout were FIFA and IFAB. And when have they ever gotten anything wrong? 

Now, 25 years after MLS’s inception, we’re faced with a barrage of throwback content. There’s no shortage of shootout content, either — the league itself is cutting together highlight videos of some of the more memorable ones. Players streaking in on goal. Goalies putting it all on the line. Fans in delirium. It begs the question:

Why did they ever get rid of this thing?

Origins

First things first, calling the 35-yard shootout by that name or, even worse, the “MLS shootout” does a great disservice to the North American Soccer League, MLS’s oft-maligned predecessor. A more fitting title for the format would be the “NASL shootout,” or even the “NASL penalty,” as my friend Adam Snavely puts it. Soccer fans in this country sometimes have a short memory, so a quick refresher is often helpful.

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Ten years into its existence, in 1977, the NASL was exploding and expanding to every corner of the country. Pele had near-single-handedly made the New York Cosmos a household name globally, and soccer’s future looked, for once, relatively bright in the U.S. 

Yet the league still struggled with that age-old question about making soccer more exciting, fun, relevant and… more… American. Already, the league had eliminated the possibility of draws, using a traditional penalty-kick shootout to decide tie games. But traditional penalties, to the decision makers at the NASL, were staid, arbitrary and greatly favored the kick-taker. How could the playing field be leveled? Out of that question, the NASL shootout was born. 

“People were just disenchanted with the penalty-kick rule because it just didn’t feel fair,” says Ted Howard, who, as NASL assistant commissioner, oversaw the implementation of the shootout in 1977. “We were always experimenting with things and we tried the shootout rule. A player taking the shot would start 35 yards from goal and would have five seconds to get a shot off. It made it seem like it was a breakaway — and the five seconds would sort of simulate the defensive pressure you’d feel on that breakaway. Truly, it felt like a moment in an actual game.” 

The 35-yard line was already a part of the playing field in the NASL, the product of one of its other rule changes — offside was only called between the endline and the 35-yard line. (That, too, should be considered for adoption by FIFA, but I digress.)

Initially, the assistant referee timed the kicks with a stopwatch and sounded an air horn when time expired. Later, the NASL contracted watchmaker Seiko to design a large, roll-out scoreboard that displayed the countdown for all to see, sounding a buzzer after time expired. The shootout became a production. Fans loved it. It resulted in some of the most memorable moments in the league’s history, most notably Carlos Alberto’s brilliant strike in the 1978 NASL playoffs: 

But FIFA hated the concept. They hated many things about the upstart NASL, and brought the hammer down on the league in the early ‘80s, insisting that they fall in line with the rules of the global game or be banished. In some ways, the NASL relented, abandoning several proposed rule changes. But their commitment to the shootout remained unwavering. It survived until the league folded after the 1984 season.

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A holdover

Ten years later, in 1994, Major League Soccer was eager to distance itself from the NASL. MLS, after all, was formed on the idea of financial responsibility and slow growth — new concepts in American soccer circles. And yet, despite all of this, that uniquely American attitude, the idea that no game could end in a tie, persisted.

MLS’s original stakeholders explored various options in regards to settling tie games. Counting total corner kicks, for one, was trialed in several divisions of the USISL, but proved unpopular. Traditional penalty kicks were explored, as was the idea of playing extra time with short-sided teams. They also explored using the 35-yard format but inserting additional defenders or instituting a “stampede kick,” where the penalty-taker was chased by the opposing team. In the end, they settled on the original, untouched NASL penalty format.

“It was a holdover from the North American Soccer League,” remembers then D.C. United president and CEO Kevin Payne. “And there was a lot of feeling, particularly among people in the league office, that we didn’t want to have any ties. Some of us argued that there were enough people who understood the game and were already following the game in Europe and elsewhere that it wouldn’t bother them, but I think that was kind of a main reason for it. And the fact that it had been used in the NASL — I was never a fan of the shootout and I was never uncomfortable with allowing ties.”

Others, though, did not share Payne’s opinion. Or, at minimum, were a bit more receptive to pushing the boundaries of the game. 

“Shootouts were preferable to PKs or any other mechanism that we talked about,” says Sunil Gulati, then MLS’s assistant commissioner. “It came down to a few simple things. The game itself over the 90 minutes wasn’t affected, except that you knew there was going to be a resolution to a tie. The shootout had been tried and we’d talked to some folks who’d been part of the original NASL. And you’d find quotes even now from — from Carlos Alberto, Johan Cruyff or Franz Beckenbauer — they liked it a lot. So if you were going to settle ties, we decided to go that way.”

MLS culled many of its original players from the USISL, so the concept of the NASL penalty wasn’t an entirely foreign one to the league’s attackers and keepers. And many of the league’s American players had grown up watching the NASL as kids. 

Those who remained uninitiated got their first taste in MLS’s inaugural preseason. 

“After every single preseason game we played,” remembers then NY/NJ MetroStars goalkeeper Tony Meola, “regardless of the score, we did shootouts, just so teams could practice it. So when we were all in Florida together, after every game. You could’ve won the game 5-0, but the league had you do a shootout anyways, just to get guys used to doing them.” 

The keys to success

Over the course of the four years that MLS employed the NASL-style shootout as a tiebreaker, some standouts emerged — goalkeepers who were adept at closing down attacking options and particularly reckless with their bodies, and the craftiest attacking players. 

Offensive shootout leaders

On the offensive side, one name stands above all others: Imad Baba. During his four-years with the New England Revolution, Baba cemented his place as the league’s greatest-ever shootout taker, besting the league’s early royalty like Preki and Roy Lassiter. Over the course of his career, Baba converted 11 of 13 attempts, a nearly 85% conversion rate. When informed 20 years later that he’s the league’s best-ever 35-yard shootout taker, Baba is surprised, but only so much. He always loved the format.

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“I think for us as players, we really enjoyed it,” says Baba. “It was different than just sitting up there and taking a PK. If you take a PK, obviously, the goalkeeper is at a tremendous disadvantage and the shooter is just gonna make it most of the time; so this actually gave a different look to a tiebreaker situation, especially for the goalkeeper. And I know the fans loved it. Fans actually looked forward to having a tie so they could see this one-on-one situation. The fans would go crazy. I thought it was a great, different look to the game.”

“11 out of 13,” Baba says, with a chuckle. “That’s pretty damn good.”

Baba’s approach to taking a shootout attempt varied from keeper to keeper, but the former Revolution and Rapids attacker says he always felt exceedingly comfortable with the ball at his feet — something Lassiter echoed as important to his success, as well.

“I wanted to get closer to goal as quickly as possible,” continues Lassiter, “and have as few touches as possible in the dribble as I approached. Hit it long first, let me get my momentum going and then attack the goalkeeper — it’s just really hard for the goalkeeper to deal with anything at that point. If he thought I was going to shoot, maybe I made a small fake and dribbled around him, and then other times maybe I would just slot it in around his feet.” 

The goalkeepers polled for this piece all pointed to Lassiter as one of their most difficult opponents, and his career numbers — 11 conversions in 15 attempts — back that up. 

“The dude was just faster than everybody else,” remembers Garth Lagerwey — who holds the title of the league’s best shootout goalkeeper. “You had to adjust to somebody like Roy. You knew you weren’t gonna advance as far on him because he was just plain faster than you, right? So if you come out quick, he’s just gonna go around you.”

The other player that came up frequently in conversations with Zach Thornton, Jeff Cassar and Lagerwey — the league’s three greatest shootout stoppers, statistically — was former U.S. national team stalwart Jeff Agoos. Raised on the NASL, Agoos modeled his technique after Brazilian legend and NY Cosmos defender Carlos Alberto.

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“I did have a very specific strategy,” says Agoos. Outside of the basic rules of the format, “you could do whatever you wanted. This brings me back to the old NASL, with the Cosmos. I remember seeing a number of these shootouts with the same rules, and players would lift the ball up and allow the ball to bounce.”

That technique — getting the ball bouncing early — gives the shooter a tremendous advantage, says Agoos, and forces the goalkeeper to make a decision: if they come out, the bouncing ball can easily be lofted over them. If they stay put, the task of beating the keeper from 15-20 yards out is simplified by the keeper remaining relatively close to goal. “It was a very effective tactic, plain and simple,” remembers Lagerwey.

Leveling the competition

Lagerwey also gets a bit warm and fuzzy when he’s told he holds the distinction of being the league’s best shootout stopper. 

“You put a twinkle in my eye,” he jokes, before offering a quick self-assessment of what made him so efficient over the years.

Goalkeeping leaders

“I was pretty courageous,” Lagerway says, before trailing off into laughter. “And look, let’s be honest, I wasn’t very good. So, you know, laying my body on the line was kind of what I had to do to have any kind of success. You’re literally going into a confrontation in a pretty tight space most of the time in a shootout. So I think a lot of it is just being willing to use your body to block a lot of stuff.

Far from the arbitrary nature of a traditional penalty kick, every 35-yard attempt called for a finely-tailored approach.

“With a penalty kick, I think it’s just harder to read,” says Lagerwey. “At least it was for me, because you didn’t have a touch to work off of, you know, you just had to kind of try to read body language as they approached the ball. In a shootout, you could read touches, so every time a player touched the ball, they gave you information about how they were going to strike it. And that evens the playing field quite a bit.” 

“If it was a fast player who had good dribbling skills, I knew they were going to try and go around me,” adds Cassar. “They’d take a wider angle to beat me with speed. Maybe a crafty player is going to open up and swing back the opposite way. That would be more of a South American-type player, someone who had those characteristics. If it was at true No. 9 or even a center back, they liked to slot the ball with pace, down low. You’d take all of those things into consideration during your approach. I just tried to make them feel uncomfortable. When players are uncomfortable, they just aren’t in the right mindset to make a strike.”

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All three of MLS’s best shootout keepers, in some form or another, also mentioned the fact that the 35-yard format was simply a fairer matchup than a traditional penalty kick. Over the four years the shootout was employed, attempts were converted approximately 45% of the time; for the sake of comparison, traditional penalties in MLS play from 1996-2000 were converted at a rate of about 70%.

Some keepers were better suited to the shootout than others. Certain teams, even, kept a shootout specialist goalkeeper in reserve, inserting them in the waning minutes of regulation (they could do that by exploiting another of MLS’s oddball rules, which allowed a fourth substitution for a goalkeeper) in anticipation of a potential shootout. This was the case during what most would consider the most bizarre moment in the history of MLS’s use of the format.

A buzz of negativity

Former U.S. and New England Revolution striker Joe-Max Moore remembers one particular shootout more than any other. In a match between the Revs and the Miami Fusion on September 11, 1999, Moore was deputized as the Revolution keeper for the final three attempts of the shootout.

With keepers constantly being put in situations where they faced a one-v-one, full-speed physical confrontation with an attacker, the risk of a collision — and a red card — was greatly elevated. So when Revolution keeper Jeff Causey, a shootout specialist who’d been subbed in only moments earlier, drew a straight red for hauling down Fusion forward Welton, Joe-Max Moore slipped on the gloves.

“Unfortunately, it didn’t work out too well,” says Moore, laughing. “I always loved jumping into goal at the end of practice. I thought I had a real chance. But I guess I didn’t — I think I went 0 for 3.” 

By 1999, there was growing concern about some of MLS’s oddball rules, most notably its use of the NASL shootout. 

“What happened with Joe-Max, that was a little silly,” says Gulati. 

Perhaps even more alarming was that the percentage of games decided by the shootout — a mechanism probably designed only for occasional use — had risen to a staggering 30%, a statistic that likely speaks to larger issues with the standard of play at large, or perhaps the defensive tactics employed by teams who favored themselves in the shootout format. 

The league was also struggling financially, just a couple of years away from a crisis that would nearly bring its total demise. When newly installed commissioner Don Garber assessed the league’s fortunes, off the field and on it, the shootout was one of the first things to fall by the wayside.

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”There was a negativity buzzing among the hardest-core fans. … We have to go back and shore up our existence with the core soccer fan,” Garber said at the time. ”We found through research that millions of people played soccer without a shootout. We want to build the model with core fans, instead of going over it.”

“I’ve always given credit to Don for that,” says Payne. “He was brand new on the job and he didn’t know anything about soccer. But I remember we had a board meeting in New York and Don said ‘look, I don’t really know a ton about soccer but it seems like our most avid fans are telling us that they hate this, so why are we doing it?’ That was the point when we started planning to do away with it.” 

“Honestly, I didn’t like (the format),” says Preki. “That’s not the real world in the world of the game. I mean, at the end of the game when you’re tired, you now have to sprint to the ball 30 yards? You don’t want to run. I understand we are all pro athletes, but it becomes a little taxing and I don’t know, I just wasn’t into it.”

Lassiter, too, had seen enough of the shootout, though he’s softened on it over the years. He cedes that it’s exciting, but he’s also a bit of a purist. “I was so glad they got rid of them, because it didn’t seem like real soccer to me,” he says. “It just appeared invented.”

Strangely enough, MLS couldn’t even wait until the end of its 1999 season to do away with the shootout. In the week before MLS Cup, the league announced the format was dead (along with the countdown clock) — and that the rules for the final had been changed. If the match was tied, it would be decided via two 15-minute periods of overtime followed by a traditional penalty kick shootout. 

The league wasn’t done just yet with the idea of discouraging ties, though — it installed two five-minute periods of golden-goal overtime, which lasted until 2004 — but its shootout days were over. Some fans lamented the loss. 

“The game would end,” remembers Gulati, “and fans would just be thrilled for the shootout. Kevin (Payne) made the comment — he said ‘fans would be really excited at the end of a basketball game if you said ‘we’re going to have a free throw contest to settle this.’’ If it was flipping a coin, they’d be excited. But we wouldn’t flip a coin for a game. So eventually we obviously banned it and came in line with the international game.”

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Bring it back

Several years ago, Jeff Agoos — now MLS’s vice president of competition — got an email that piqued his interest. It was from IFAB, the global organization that determines the rules of the game, and they were interested in something near and dear to Agoos’ heart.

“We actually had some interesting conversations with IFAB about (bringing the 35-yard shootout back),” remembers Agoos. “I have tried very, very hard (to bring the shootout back), and it’s not going to happen. We had some emails with Marco Van Basten, who at that point was technical director and was interested in the shootout. We sent them a bunch of information. But I don’t think that gained any traction at all. I think we’re going to be seeing penalty kicks for the foreseeable future, unfortunately.”

Nearly every goalkeeper polled — Zach Thornton excluded — favored the idea of bringing the shootout back in some form or another. Meola, for one, said his primary point of contention with the original format was that it sent teams home empty-handed if they lost in a shootout. “But if you added it after a draw for an extra point,” suggests Meola, “so if you drew, you went away with a point but you had a chance to get two points, for that. That’s kind of how I’d like to see it implemented.”

Lagerwey would also put his own spin on things — using the format only to decide decisive games, instead of eliminating draws. “At the same time,” he says, “any idea on soccer emanating from America — and this is probably still largely true — is dead on arrival in the global game. It would have to be a long-term process to try and persuade everyone that this is better. Soccer is a game that’s been around a long time and is very traditional; similar to Major League Baseball here in the U.S. It’s just difficult, culturally, to change some of the tenets.”

Lagerwey’s take is undoubtedly correct; the United States, for the foreseeable future, will likely continue to be viewed as a relative backwater when it comes to the global game. But there is precedent for FIFA aligning itself a bit more with “soccer” and less with “football.” For years, they instituted the distinctly American concept of using sudden death (excuse me, a golden goal) to decide matches, and the backpass rule — easily one of the most seismic changes to the rulebook in the modern history of the game — also originated in the U.S. Actually, it was one of the rules the North American Soccer League suggested FIFA implement in the early ‘80s, right around the time FIFA was calling the NASL an outlaw league. 

“What’s funny, man, is everyone says that traditional penalty kicks are random and unfair,” says Lagerwey. “The data suggests that they are, too. You’d think that soccer fans would want to find a fairer way to settle games but, at the same time, it just doesn’t seem like there’s much of an appetite to do so.”

But there should be. The sometimes crippling insecurity that exists at most levels of the game in this country — among fans, administrators and nearly everybody else involved in it — has fostered the idea that any soccer innovation that comes out of this country should be written off completely. The NASL-style shootout — a daring experiment that, in this writer’s view, proved to be a success, not a failure — is an example of something that got thrown out with the bathwater during MLS’s early years. 

Bring it back already.

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Staff writers Matt Pentz and Sam Stjeskal contributed reporting to this piece. Special thanks to Rick Lawes for his assistance with the statistics compiled for this piece.

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