Socceroos' Penalty Shootout Strategy: Science vs. Nerves Ahead of Egypt Clash

Germany know it. So do the Netherlands. The pain of the penalty shootout is the cruellest fate in football, the individual spotlight on the kickers serving only to embarrass those who fail the sport’s most basic test.

Australians understand the stakes well too. Though the Socceroos have never faced a shootout in a World Cup, the most replayed moment in the history of men’s football in Australia is John Aloisi’s penalty to defeat Uruguay in the World Cup playoff in 2005. The memory of Cortnee Vine’s 2023 winner for the Matildas against France perhaps exceeds even Aloisi’s spot kick.

The double-sized World Cup knockout rounds started this week and after two shootouts in the first four matches, their significance appears to have doubled as well. Ahead of the showdown on Friday against Egypt in Dallas (Saturday AEST), the Socceroos have already started thinking about who will step up in case penalties are needed.

Midfielder Connor Metcalfe says spot kicks will be part of their preparations. “We’ll probably practise it towards the end of the week because it’s always a possibility,” he says.

Some will need the practice. Socceroos full-back Jordy Bos says he has never stepped up to the spot before. “I haven’t actually taken a penalty professionally, but maybe that gives the keeper nothing to go off, so [it could be] a little secret,” he says. “I’ve practised penalties in the past and yeah, they’re not bad, so we’ll see what happens.”

They are answers that make Prof Robbie Wilson, a University of Queensland academic and Socceroos fan, nervous. “No one bloody listens to me at the moment, because – despite what everyone thinks – football is a very, very conservative industry,” he says.

Wilson is an ecologist, but has also turned his mind to the science and probability of football, most recently in a paper he co-authored on the optimal strategies for penalty shootouts.

Using hundreds of thousands of simulated shootouts, they found that if a team kicks first they should order their penalty-takers from best to worst. It’s simple confirmation that teams should not risk having their most reliable scorer be unable to take a kick, if a shootout ends before the allotted five attempts each.

Wilson’s work also measured the increase in the win probability of a team that follows this strategy, against one that uses a random order. “That increases your probability of winning a penalty shootout by about 5% to 10%,” he says. “Now, that might not seem a lot, but that’s a massive amount when the status quo is 50%.” (The success rate of the team going first, and especially winning the toss, is higher than 50% in recorded elite shootouts.)

One problem, however, is that high-pressure penalties – let alone full-blown shootouts – rarely come around and are impossible to practise, and the actual effectiveness of a penalty-taker can be difficult to measure.

Wilson argues that’s no excuse, however, and players should put in the work with coaching staff diligently recording their best strategies for placement, power and degree to deceive the goalkeeper. “We’re talking hundreds of penalties to get this information and replicate it well, even before we put on the psychological issues and measuring that as well,” he says.

Players stepping up to the spot under the most pressure fare the worst. The paper looked at World Cup and European Championship shootouts and found that attempts in which a miss would immediately eliminate the kicking team were converted at a rate of 60%, about 15 percentage points lower than early, low-pressure penalties.

It also found players are most likely to face “shoot to win” or “miss and lose” moments earlier if they are the second team taking penalties. As a result, coaches should identify the most mentally resilient players and tap them for not only the fourth and fifth kicks, but also the third if they are kicking second.

The research concluded that if the best penalty-takers on the team are also the players with the coolest heads, it could be worth saving them for the positions that are often high leverage, especially fourth and fifth, complicating a coach’s temptation to order his takers best to worst.

“Having knowledge about the psychological robustness of each individual player adds another level of being able to be in control of your destiny,” Wilson says. “The lesson from all of the millions of simulations that we ran, is that you are better off in a penalty shootout knowing something about the probability of your player scoring under certain circumstances.”

The paper acknowledges there are limitations to the analysis, including the complexity about pressure factors and how individual players respond. There are also hurdles to overcome in quantifying players’ penalty effectiveness. How can a coach measure in advance how a player responds, for example, to a must-win kick in a World Cup final? But Wilson says by creating some incentives or punishments in training can help replicate at least some of the pressure.

In the secretive Socceroos camp, no one can be sure exactly how much emphasis Tony Popovic is putting on penalties, or how much scientific literature he has been reading at night at the Claremont Resort in Berkeley. But after watching even early kickers struggle in the two shootouts on Monday (Tuesday AEST), Wilson’s arguments may carry weight.

Of course, the Socceroos last-32 match against Egypt may not go to penalties, if Bos’s confidence is anything to go by. Socceroos fans can expect the team to score, he says, even if they have not found the net in the past two matches. “We’ve had a couple of chances and on a different day I think we will score,” Bos says. “I think the goals will come.”