The Science of the Penalty Shootout
In the end there must be a winner. It’s those stakes that make top level sport what it is so, ultimately, somebody’s gotta win and somebody’s gotta lose and one way or another we have to find that resolution. And while there may be some pretty terrible ways of deciding winners in various sports, a certain cricket world cup final springs to mind, football’s got it sorted when it comes to the penalty shootout.
Think about the absolute essence of football: it’s all about trying to kick a ball into a net more times than the other team. Effectively that’s what you’ve got with a shootout, it’s a boiled down version of the game itself. One attacker versus one goalkeeper. The ball placed twelve yards out. One unimpeded kick to score one goal... or not. It doesn’t get more fundamental than that and yet what seems like a simple task at first quickly escalates into a titanic battle of mentality and strategy when those stakes are involved. World Cups have literally been won by penalty shootouts before and yet this crucial tiebreaker is still so misunderstood.
Take, for example, the degree of luck involved. There’s this belief out there that penalties are a bit of a crapshoot, a lottery, a random undertaking at the whim of fate and fortune. But what does that even mean? That the outcome is out of your control? Perhaps. If you hit a spot kick perfectly into the top corner then you’re probably going to score... but even then the keeper might have proactively guessed where you were going and moved early to save it. You can’t control a keeper’s role in the process. But you can control your own part, and not telegraphing where you’re aiming, not being predictable, that’s all part of executing this seemingly fundamental skill in this one-off desperate scenario.
These days it’s only really fans and media who still fall for that lottery idea. Most clubs and international teams on the elite end are spending plenty of resources on trying to gain an upper hand for penalties through research and science. Every little advantage counts when we’re potentially talking about the difference between lifting a trophy and watching your opponents lift it instead.
And there are sorts of fragmentary ways you can gain those advantages. Studying a bloke’s history from the spot to see if there’s a particular area they target most often. Same goes for studying keepers, do they make a disproportionate amount of saves going in a particular direction? Then there’s the simple fact of whether a kick taker is left footed or right footed, because there’s a small but definite trend that players are more likely to shoot across their bodies (right foot to left side, from the shooter’s perspective). Or whether a goalie decides which direction to dive in before the kick is taken or not. This is one of the most fascinating parts of this because the conventional wisdom is to pick a side and go for it but there’s plenty of evidence these days that it’s more efficient to wait and react. That way if a kick’s taken well, so it goes. You probably weren’t gonna save it anyway. But if they shank it a little or try to get too cute then you’re hopefully there to deny it. Having said that, it takes less than half a second for the ball to get from penalty spot to goal-line so it’s a risky scheme and you’d still better be keeping a line on any tells from the kick taker (non-kicking foot placement, eyelines, etc.).
Also hugely important: how you arrange your shootout lineup. The logic holds that you oughta stack your lineup nice and top-heavy. That way you prioritise getting those early goals on the board because not only can nobody take those early goals away once they’re on the board but they also quickly ramp up the pressure on the other side too. Yet research suggests that the first and fifth penalties are the most crucial in terms of the outcome. So while you definitely don’t want to bury one of your most reliable guys at five and risk having others miss and thus wasting them... that fifth taker’s gotta be cold-blooded. Different characters are going to thrive in different situations so it’s possibly more a matter of personality rather than player in that particular role.
There’s been a bit of a push for a reform in the order of shootout kicks over the last couple years, with the ABBA model coming into use in a few experimental cases. In that case the team who goes first takes one kick, then the other team takes two, then two more for the first team and that continues the rest of the way in pairs. Pretty much like how the serving works in tennis tiebreaks. ABBA instead of ABAB. The reason for that is there’s a distinct advantage to kicking first in the shootout otherwise. It’s an advantage that you forfeit as soon as you miss one but statistically they reckon 60% of shootouts are won by the team that takes the first kick.
Speaking of percentages, there have been 30 instances of penalty shootouts at FIFA Men’s World Cups, with 196 our of 279 total penalties being scored in those shootouts, adding up to 70.25%. That average is apparently a little higher in shootouts in other competitions, understandable given the prestige and pressure of the World Cup, while penalties taken in regular time are scored at something more like 80% depending on where you read it. That number’s also influenced by the fact that for a one-off in-game spot kick, you’re designating your best penalty taker for that task. So in terms of shootouts, think about it as roughly 7-8 out of 10 kicks are being scored.
Then there are the mind games. A western stand-off style slow run-up to psyche out the keeper. A keeper jumping up and down on the line, swinging their arms around and trying to look as big as possible. Those kind of things, it’s about how you can intimidate your opponent into a mistake. A modern variation on the goalie thing that you see quite often is keepers waiting until the last possible moment to retreat to the line so as block as much of the goal as they can while they can, thus making the goal seem smaller through depth perception and therefore the task of kicking a ball into much harder (on a subconscious level, at least).
Of course there’s no ruder example of mind games than the panenka kick, so carelessly debonair that it might as well count for double. Andrea Pirlo won the World Cup with one of those. It doesn’t get more condescending than that. The panenka, by the way, is named after former Czech forward Antonin Panenka who scored the decisive kick in the 1976 European Championships final against West Germany that way.
But the mind games go both ways. It’s not only about putting the other fella off, these days there’s more emphasis than ever on building yourself up. If you think about it any professional player is going to be able to physically take a penalty. Kicking a ball accurately across a relatively short distance, they can do that with their eyes closed. Really, the penalty shootout is all about mentality. If you step up believing that you will score then you’re much more likely to than the person who steps up worrying about the possibility of failure. That’s inviting doubt to the table. Doubt leads to failed execution. So all the little tricks you can find to make yourself (and your teammates especially, a huge part of this is shifting the pressure from the individual to the team) feel confident and in control is massive.
When England beat Colombia on penalties at the last World Cup it was notable that keeper Jordan Pickford collected the ball each time after he’d faced one so he could personally and hand it to the next English taker, wishing them luck in the process. That way they reach the penalty area after that frighteningly long walk from halfway feeling they’ve got a guy in their corner but also they get to hold the ball, feel it in their hands, as they approach. They get to place it exactly where they want it. The whole thing is in their own rhythm... they’re in control here. Sort of like how you can usually tell which player is going to take a free kick by seeing which one placed the ball. Gareth Southgate was extremely forthcoming in talking about how much work England had done on the mental side of penalty shootouts in preparation, especially for a country that had a reputation for bottling it at spotties – itself a negative shadow that they with them brought to every shootout. Southgate felt they had to go above and beyond to exorcise the demons. And they did.
Another one came four years earlier when the Netherlands beat Costa Rica on penalties and, with seconds left in injury time, coach Louis Van Gaal subbed off his staring keeper Jasper Cillessen and brought on backup Tim Krul – a goalie who tends to excel in penalty situations. Not only was Krul the better option for the shootout and therefore an improvement in that way, but it also told their opponents that they had a plan. They’d thought about this. Again, they were in control. Naturally the Dutch won it, with Krul saving two kicks (“It’s Krul for the Dutch, it’s crueller for Costa Rica!”) and Jasper Cillessen led the celebrations... although it didn’t help them so well in the semi-finals as they were knocked out on spotties by Argentina, with Cillessen trapped in goal after they ran out of subs.
It’s funky how often these things come down to trying to assert control. As much as possible anyway in a volatile environment like this. The more in control you feel, the more you feel like you get to be the one to determine the outcome. We might be talking small margins here but those small margins can make a huge difference, penalties themselves are already a small margin and the thing to always remember is that if you can’t handle the small margins then, mate, you probably should have tried a little harder to win the game during normal time then, aye?
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