Science Debates Advantage of Kicking First in Penalty Shootouts
New research suggests the psychological pressure in penalty shootouts is not evenly distributed, with elimination and victory kicks having different success rates, challenging the long-held belief that the team kicking first has a significant advantage.
In soccer, penalty shootouts often decide the most important matches, and captains vie to win the coin toss for the right to kick first. For years, conventional wisdom held that the team kicking first enjoys a clear advantage, winning nearly 60% of shootouts according to a landmark 2010 study published in the American Economic Review. However, subsequent research has steadily chipped away at that figure.
Studies from 2012, 2019, 2023, 2024, and 2025 have progressively reduced the estimated size of the advantage. The most comprehensive analysis to date, based on nearly 7,000 penalty shootouts and 74,000 individual kicks, found no evidence that the team kicking first wins more often. If any advantage exists, the researchers concluded, it is less than 1.8 percentage points—far smaller than the widely cited 60-40 split.
A new group of researchers argues that the question itself is flawed. In a recent study published in Football Studies, they propose shifting the focus from whether there is an advantage to understanding when and why it occurs. Their hypothesis centers on the notion that not all high-pressure situations are identical. The key distinction lies between penalty kicks where a miss immediately eliminates the team and those where a goal clinches victory.
Current soccer rules, the study notes, do not distribute these maximum-pressure moments equally. The team that kicks second faces elimination on a miss much more frequently, while opportunities to score and win are distributed differently as the shootout progresses. The researchers found that kicks where a goal would secure victory were successful 89.1% of the time, whereas kicks where a miss would mean elimination succeeded only 60.4% of the time. Importantly, once these elimination and victory penalties were accounted for, the order of kicks no longer explained a significant portion of performance differences. The apparent advantage of the first team, according to the authors, stems not from the sequence itself but from the psychological situations that sequence creates.
These findings could have strategic implications. If some players handle extreme pressure better than others, it might be advisable to save them for high-stakes kicks rather than placing them at the start of the shootout. The study acknowledges its limitations: it does not account for goalkeeper strategy, shooter-goalkeeper interaction, crowd influence, accumulated fatigue, or individual psychological traits. Still, it sheds light on one of sports' most dramatic moments—how psychological pressure can sway the outcome of a penalty shootout and, in doing so, determine who lifts the World Cup and who goes home empty-handed.
