The pressure of taking spot kicks

Football penalty shootouts are one of the most infamous, highly pressurised situations in world sport. On the face of it, kicking a ball into a target with an area of 192sq feet (18m2) should be easy. Even when accounting for the presence of a goalkeeper, accurate shots hit to the corners of the goal, particularly the top corners, are almost impossible to save.

But despite the overwhelming odds in the favour of the penalty taker, many penalty kicks are not converted (20-30 per cent) and this number increases for kicks that are likely to determine the outcome of a match.

One of the main reasons for this performance failure is that players get anxious. Theoretical models suggest that anxiety-induced performance failures are caused by either an inward shift of attention to conscious movement control or by distracting a performer's attention away from task-relevant information and towards worrisome thoughts or external task-irrelevant stimuli.

Research examining the effect of anxiety on penalty taking has mostly found support for a distraction explanation. For example, when anxious, penalty takers have been shown to exhibit an attentional bias (i.e. more visual fixations) towards the goalkeeper, and instead of looking where they are shooting – which offers the greatest chance of producing an accurate shot – they worry about, and focus visually on, the goalkeeper.

This also biases eventual shot direction, resulting in shots being hit more centrally, closer to the goalkeeper, and therefore being easier to save. Interestingly, these effects are further exacerbated when the goalkeeper uses distracting behaviours (e.g. waving their arms around, moving along their goal line) to grab the kicker's attention.

An important variable to consider in mitigating the effects of anxiety on performance is perceived control or the perception of one's capacities to be able to cope and attain goals under stress. Previous work has shown that training penalty takers to shoot accurately significantly reduced perceptions of outcome uncertainty (i.e. players felt the outcome was more down to their skill rather than luck) and made players feel more competent and better able to cope under pressure.

It is therefore clear that physical practice and psychological preparation can have a potentially positive impact on the control beliefs of penalty takers, and this may help them to feel better prepared, and potentially less anxious in this scenario.

Three tips for preparing for the pressure of football penalty shootouts are:

First, players should be educated regarding the typical stressors they are likely to experience through each phase of the shootout process from the short period prior to the shootout commencing, the lonely walk to the penalty spot, and when preparing to take the shot itself. This will help players become aware of the thoughts and emotions that they are likely to experience and help them to begin to develop coping strategies in response.

Second, a major stressor in shootout scenarios is the lack of organisation in relation to who is going to take the kicks and in which order. Where possible, coaches should have a predetermined list of each penalty taker together with a specific running order for all 11 players.

Although such a running order cannot be always adhered to, alleviating this uncertainty from the outset will give players more time to prepare themselves mentally for competing in the shootout and greater opportunity to seek help from support staff for the development of problem-focused or emotion-focused coping strategies to maximise perceptions of control.

Third, players must practise taking penalty kicks in training and this training should be as realistic as possible, from replicating the walk to the penalty spot, attempting to elicit anxiety in players from audiences or competition, and exposing players to distracting antics from the goalkeeper.

Exposure to these situations should coincide with the development of personalised strategies to help players to cope with the dynamic emotions they are likely to experience during the shootout, from dealing with intrusive thoughts and consequent disruptions in concentration during the walk to the penalty spot to dealing with worry about the performance of the goalkeeper when preparing to take their shot.

Many will say that it's impossible to recreate the anxiety experienced during penalty shootouts, so practice and preparation is pointless. Others will simply say that penalty shootouts are a 'lottery' with the outcome determined by luck rather than skill.

While the first assertion is true – it is practically impossible to recreate the magnitude of anxiety experienced – such an attitude is untypical of the practice activities of performers in similar highly pressurised sporting situations (e.g. golf), where it's realised that these skills need to be ingrained so that they are robust under pressure. And yes, there will always be an element of luck in penalty shootouts, but how prepared players feel for the scenario should not be left to chance.

Greg Wood is a senior lecturer in sport and exercise psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University and a member of the BPS Division of Sport and Exercise Psychology.

Related research

Wood, G., Jordet, G., & Wilson, M. R. (2015). On winning the "lottery": psychological preparation for football penalty shoot-outs. Journal of Sports Sciences, 33(17), 1758-1765