The stadium falls silent. A player places the ball on the penalty spot and steps back.
If he scores, his team stays alive. If he misses, the match is over.
For years, players and coaches believed that the team taking the first penalty had an important advantage. The idea sounded reasonable: if the first team scored, the second team would immediately feel pressure to catch up.
An influential study published in 2010 seemed to confirm this belief. After examining 129 shootouts, researchers reported that the team kicking first won almost 60% of the time.
But 129 shootouts may not have been enough to reveal the true pattern.
A much larger study published in 2025 analyzed around 7,000 shootouts and 74,000 individual kicks. It found that teams going first won 50.2% of the time — almost exactly half.
The researchers concluded that taking the first penalty does not provide a meaningful overall advantage. If any advantage exists, it is probably very small.
So does pressure not matter after all?
It does — but the order itself may not be the most important part. What matters more is the situation a player faces when walking toward the ball.
A recent study divided high-stakes penalties into two types.
The first is a "score to win" kick. If the player scores, the shootout ends in victory.
The second is a "score to survive" kick. If the player misses, the team is immediately eliminated.
Players converted 89.1% of the penalties that could secure victory. But when missing meant instant elimination, the success rate fell to 60.4%.
The difference suggests that opportunity and danger create very different kinds of pressure. A player thinking "I can win this" may perform more freely than one thinking "I must not miss."
Because teams alternate their kicks, the team going second encounters more "score to survive" situations. That helps explain why kicking second can feel more stressful — and why earlier research sometimes appeared to find an advantage for the first team.
However, the larger study shows that this extra pressure is not strong or consistent enough to produce a clear difference in the final result. Across thousands of shootouts, the two teams still win at nearly equal rates.
The practical lesson is not simply "always kick first." Coaches may gain more by thinking carefully about which players take the later penalties. Someone who remains calm when a miss means elimination could be more valuable near the end than at the beginning.
The coin toss may decide who shoots first. It does not decide who wins.
In a penalty shootout, the greatest advantage may be having a player who can face the most frightening version of one simple task: put the ball in the net.