Misbehavior During Penalty Kicks and Goalkeepers Holding the Ball Too Long as Trivial Offenses in Football

Rule violations occur in every sport and the respective book of rules prescribes how match officials need to sanction them. However, there are some rule violations that are nearly never penalized, even if they are perceived by the match officials. A phenomenon that has been neglected in the scientific community so far, for which we want to introduce the term trivial offenses. This research focuses on two potential trivial offenses in football: rule violations regarding the six-seconds rule, the time a goalkeeper is allowed to control the ball with his hands, and rule violations during the performance of penalty kicks. The aim is to provide empirical proof of the existence of those trivial offenses and describe the respective patterns. For this purpose, two observation systems were constructed; one to investigate 45 games from the German Bundesliga with respect to the six-seconds rule and one to study rule violations during 618 penalty kicks from four European football leagues and one cup event. The following variables were collected: Goalkeeper, MatchLocation, Minute (representing the minute of the game), PreviousAction, CurrentScore, Time (representing the time the goalkeeper controlled the ball with his hands), and Penalization for the six-seconds study; Responsibility for infringement, Decision of the referee, and Outcome for the penalty study. Reliability tests showed almost perfect agreement for the data of both samples. On average, goalkeepers control the ball 6.0 s (SD:4.54) with their hands and the six-second rule was violated in 38.4% of the situations, none of which was penalized. This duration was significantly influenced by CurrentScore (p < 0.001), which indicates a tactical abuse of this situation. None of the investigated penalty kicks was conducted without a rule violation either. In most incidents (96.3%) outfield players from both teams as well as the goalkeeper commit offenses. The umpire only judges 2.8% of these incidents correctly, most of them by approving the scored goal. In total, this research proves the existence of trivial offenses in football and shows how methods and tools of performance analysis can serve to investigate and even solve this issue.