How to Take the Perfect Penalty: Dr Ken Bray (University of Bath)

At this year's FIFA World Cup in Brazil, winners and losers will be decided with just one kick of the ball. As matches in the knockout stages draw on undecided, players will face the ultimate test. Heroes and villains will be made, reputations sealed or destroyed. Everything rests on this one kick. Hold your nerve. Hold your breath. For England fans, this is all too familiar. England fans know what happens next. But for teams competing in Brazil this summer, help is at hand. Senior visiting fellow at the University of Bath and author of the book How to Score Science and the Beautiful Game, Dr Ken Bray has studied the stats behind the shootout. The success rates for a penalty in normal play are about 80%. It drops to around 75% in a shootout for reasons that are very clear. In a shootout, for example, you can't follow up on a shot and score as you can in a normal penalty. You have to do the business with one shot. Secondly, you must pick from less experienced players in your team. You can't simply use the best strikers. And finally, of course, the keeper gets more and more savvy as the shootout progresses, more and more likely to make a save. The teams that do best are teams like Germany and Argentina. Germany in particular have won 80% of their encounters. Then we go down a kind of staircase of shame until we reach England, who have been successful on only 17% of occasions. And I think the reasons for these differences are quite clear. It's failure to prepare mentally and failure to take practising penalties really seriously. So how do you take the perfect penalty? Step 1. Selecting the players. Picking the right players for a penalty shootout is a vital task. It's the responsibility of the coach, and emphatically, not the players themselves. In fact, the only thing that should rule a player out at that critical point is injury. Too often in the past, we've seen England coaches wandering around at the end of extra time asking, who's up for a penalty? Coaches should know the success rates of penalty takers in their squad and pick from this list for the actual shootout. And finally, coaches should think about the order in which their players will take a penalty in the shootout. Research has shown that there is an advantage if you play your less experienced players first and save the most experienced to last. Step 2. Optimum placement. When a player's turn to take a penalty comes round, he or she must be focusing strongly on the optimum placement of the shot. Our research at Bath shows that goalies have only a finite reach in attempting a save. We call this limit the diving envelope, which is about as far as a goalie can reach in a full-blooded dive. But this is really the limit of a fingertip save. And so strikers can place the ball close to the diving envelope or even a little inside with reasonable chances of success. We call the area outside of the diving envelope the unsaveable zone. Our research shows that just over 80% of shots played into this area succeed. But that doesn't mean, of course, that shots played inside the diving envelope will all be saved. In fact, the success rate here is around 50%. But why take the risk of a 50-50 shot when there's such an attractive and easy-to-reach placement for a reasonably skilled performer? You might just as well duck out of taking the penalty altogether and ask the ref to spin a coin instead. Step 3. Mental focus. Psychologists know that stress affects sporting performance. There are two kinds of stress. Somatic stress is very familiar. When the pressure's on, the throat becomes dry, heart rate increases, the palms become sweaty, and so on. Cognitive stress is different. It means that negative thoughts of failure come crowding in once a demanding performance is needed. And what could be more demanding than a penalty kick? There are several ways of dealing with the problem, and one of the most powerful is to use the technique of mental imaging. A player imagines taking a successful penalty kick outside of the stress of an actual game. He or she runs through a mental movie of a perfectly executed shot placed in the optimum position in the unsaveable zone. This, in fact, is the mental imaging all players should be scrolling through before their turn arrives in the shootout. From my research, I've shown that there are really three key points to take the perfect penalty. Number one, choose from the best available group of players when the shootout comes round. Number two, ensure they use good placement technique. And number three, ensure that they are mentally well-prepared. Never take a gamble with a penalty kick.