Pressure vs ability: The science behind the penalty shootouts
The FIFA World Cup 2022 in Qatar is over now, but the football spirit has reached an all-time high. In that thrilling encounter last Sunday in Doha Qatar, Argentina was crowned as kings of the football world for the next four years. Yet all eyes were on Lionel Messi of Argentina and Kylian Mbappe of France. And it just turned out that way, a head-to-head fight between the veteran and a junior. The nail-biting battle between the two sides went on to the penalty shootout stage, where the history of football was waiting to be rewritten. The ‘penalty kick’ became the decider.
The penalty kick was invented in 1890 by an Irish footballer William McGann and at that time the kick could be taken from anywhere along a line parallel to the goal and 12 yards away from it. Then the penalty spot (a point from which a penalty kick is taken) and the D-line (to keep players other than the striker away when a penalty kick is being taken) were introduced in 1902 and 1937 respectively.
The concept of going for a penalty shootout to decide the winner of a match first came in the late 1960s and was presented to the International Football Association Board (IFAB) in 1970. In the early days, there were no exact rules to decide the outcome of a tied match, either a coin toss or a replay was used to select the winners. The coin toss was highly unfair as the result was attributed solely to luck.
On the other hand, watching replays was costly and time consuming. The penalty shootout offered an alternative approach. Each team takes turns shooting at the goal from the penalty spot, with only the goalkeeper in defence. Five different kickers from each team perform this task alternatively. If the score is still tied after five pairs of kicks, then each team has to kick one more time each until one team wins.
Although penalty shootouts were adopted in several tournaments including European Championship, FIFA World Cup qualifying rounds etc. in the 1970s, the first shootout in a FIFA World Cup final took place in the 1982 held in Spain. It was the semi-final between West Germany and France and the penalty shootout paved the way for the West German team to progress to the finals with a 5-4 victory.
Roberto Baggio, who drove Italy into the 1994 final against Brazil but missed his penalty kick
There were two previous occasions in which the world champions were decided by a penalty shootout; in 1994 Brazil won the World Cup by beating Italy 3-2 and in 2006 Italy outclassed France with a 5-3 victory. In the recent tournament, the fate of several teams at the round of 16 and quarter-final stages was also decided by penalty shootouts; for example, Croatia-Japan, Morocco-Spain, Croatia- Brazil, and Argentina-Netherlands matches went to penalty shootouts. Throughout the history of the FIFA World Cup, Argentina, Germany and Croatia appeared as the most successful teams in the penalty shootout.
Penalty shootouts involve large stakes and high pressure and many people consider it a game of chance. They believe that either team has the same probability of winning a penalty shootout irrespective of the ranking. Some world class players have also missed penalties in FIFA World Cups over the years. An unforgettable example is Roberto Baggio, who drove Italy into the 1994 final against Brazil but missed his penalty kick despite being among the top scorers in the tournament and winning the silver ball award.
Suppose you are facing a similar situation, can you ever imagine how you are going to cope with the huge pressure when thousands of people are watching you in the stadium? A penalty shootout is undeniably the most intense component of a football game. Psychological factors like anxiety and pressure are considered critical causes of the mistakes, commonly known as choking under pressure. Several research studies have been conducted to understand the science behind this intense situation.
A study revealed that professional football players face significant changes in biomarkers of physiologic strain during the season, but these values return to normal during the off season. Several biomarkers are used as reflectors of the metabolic and physiological mechanisms underlying physical stress in football. Serum creatine kinase (CK), myoglobin and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) have been employed as standard biomarkers of muscle damage for a number of years. The muscle damage initiates a local inflammatory response which involves the production of specific proteins whose main action consists of regulating the mechanism of the inflammation.
Therefore inflammatory markers like interleukin-6 (IL-6), C-reactive protein (CRP) and tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) as well as some hormonal parameters have also been employed to monitor fatigue and recovery, even for short time periods. A group of scientists in Spain performed a study to determine the biochemical and physical performance responses to a football match after a 72-hour recovery period. Interestingly they discovered that football players have a similar physical performance to the pre-match after a 72-hour recovery period, even with signs of biochemical and physiological stress.
When a physically exhausting game turns psychologically excruciating at the penalty shootout stage, it was not surprising to observe a significant increase in cognitive anxiety, heart rate and respiration rate of the players as reported by a group of researchers in the USA. A Norwegian sport psychologist, Dr. Geir Jordet, has spent five years of his life learning and understanding the complexities of performance under pressure by watching footage of each shootout in major international tournaments of the past half-century. He found that anxiety was the emotion most associated with penalty shootouts, hence, the amount of pressure felt by a player is a reliable predictor of success. Due to the higher expectations, the high-ranked players have faced increased pressure resulting lower penalty conversion rates. That might explain the unexpected performance of Roberto Baggio in the 1994 final.
However, a group of Dutch scientists found that there’s a correlation between the level of expertise and the capability to deal with pressure. Both experienced and inexperienced football players were recruited to their study. It involved a penalty-kick experiment in the field under three different pressure conditions. The comparison of brain activation in each situation suggested that the experience in sports can influence the way to cope with anxiety leading to different patterns in brain activity between experts and novices. Also, some evidence suggests that the order in which teams take turns may have an impact on performance and the outcome, which means there is a possible advantage for the first shooting team.
Research data on 586 shootouts in the national cup competitions of the top five European football nations; Germany, Italy, Spain, England, and France indicated that teams did not have equal probabilities of winning, rather, teams with higher ability performed better. These findings suggested the importance of ability in high-pressure situations contradicting the widespread belief of the ‘game of chance’. Some researchers even suggest that the shooting performance of the penalty kick in football can be improved by providing specific attentional and motivational instructions.
So it seems that apart from technical skill, psychological factors may also have a clear influence on the outcome of a penalty shootout. The grand finale of the 2022 FIFA World Cup went to the penalty shootout stage, and the legendary players Messi and Mbappe didn’t make a mistake. Arguably, it was the ‘ability’ more than the ‘pressure’, that decided the world champions this time.