Have any professional sporting tiebreaks been decided by a coin toss (or equivalent)?

Question

In most professional sporting events that involve some form of ranking system to determine an overall winner, or progression into later stages, there are a series of tie-breaker rules to determine a winner / loser when the primary ranking metric is tied across two or more competitors.

For example, for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, the tie-breakers for the group stage were as follows:

1. greatest number of points obtained in all group matches;
2. goal difference in all group matches;
3. greatest number of goals scored in all group matches.

[...]

1. greatest number of points obtained in the group matches between the teams concerned;
2. goal difference resulting from the group matches between the teams concerned;
3. greater number of goals scored in all group matches between the teams concerned;
4. greater number of points obtained in the fair play conduct of the teams based on yellow and red cards received in all group matches;
5. drawing of lots by the FIFA.

_{https://www.fifa.com/worldcup/news/tie-breakers-for-russia-2018-groups}

Quite a lot of these tie-breakers end a coin toss, or another "luck of the draw" type scenario, to determine the "winner".

My question is: has any professional sporting event ever had to use its final "it's down to luck" tie-breaker?

Answer 1

There are a number of examples of this, but mostly from the days when they didn't have nearly as many tiebreakers before the "coin toss". Some football examples:

• In Group F of the 1990 World Cup, a drawing of lots was used to decide the positions of the Republic of Ireland and the Netherlands in the group.
• The 1968 European Championship semi-final between Italy and the Soviet Union.
• The 1964-5 European Cup quarter-final between Liverpool and Köln

The latter two would these days have been settled by a penalty shootout; the former would probably have used one of the "disciplinary record" tie-breakers but I haven't looked into the details.