World Cup penalty spot becomes football's newest classroom

NEW YORK, July 2 : Penalty shootouts have always been football’s cruellest mind game — a nerve-shredding walk into noise, doubt and national dread. What has changed over recent years is not the pressure, but the preparation — and at this World Cup, players, coaches and goalkeepers are increasingly treating penalties less as a lottery than as a specialist discipline with enormous rewards.

Germany and the Netherlands have already learned that the hard way, exiting in the round of 32 after shootout defeats by Paraguay and Morocco. Belgium’s Youri Tielemans provided the counterpoint, converting a stoppage-time penalty in extra time to complete a stunning comeback victory over Senegal.

For Geir Jordet, professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and author of "Pressure", a book on penalty psychology, the old line that penalties are a lottery should be locked in a cupboard with old leather balls.

In a successful World Cup campaign, facing a penalty shootout is almost inevitable, Jordet told Reuters. "To not spend time on that is very strange," he said.

"Ultimately there will be a young player whose legacy will be defined by the failure in a penalty shootout, which is a massive negative emotional trauma that we're inflicting on this player as a coaching staff, as an FA, and even as a football industry."

Penalty shootouts are unforgiving and ruthless. In "Pressure", Jordet gathered video of all 718 shots from every men's penalty shootout at the World Cup, European Championship and Champions League from the introduction of shootouts in 1970 through 2023.

ENGLISH TRAUMA

His research found that 53 per cent of players who missed behaved in a similar way afterwards: making themselves look smaller, falling to the ground, hiding