Penalties during matches: 77.4% scored in six leagues up to 2025/26

About 3 in every 4 penalties taken during a match end in a goal: 77.4% (5,353 of 6,916), in six leagues, from 2015/16 to 2025/26. The other 1,563 were missed. If you have heard that a penalty is a lottery, the numbers disagree. A kick that scores 3 times in 4 is closer to routine than to a raffle.

This is an analysis of the Soccer Addicted archive, measured on 2 October 2026. It answers two questions: how much a penalty is really worth and what changes its chances of going in. The home team gets 58.0% of the penalties, and the conversion rate does not change in any detectable way with the minute. The penalty shootout, the decider after a draw, has its own guide, with the rule step by step. It does not belong here.

Six leagues, 21,921 matches and 6,916 penalties: what went into the count

The count gathers 6,916 penalties from 21,921 matches in six leagues: the Premier League, LaLiga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, Ligue 1 and the Brasileirão. The window runs from 2015/16 to 2025/26 (in the Brasileirão, from 2015 to 2025). The conversion rate is the share of penalties, scored or missed, that end in a goal. The match record does not mark a kick that was ordered to be retaken, so the archive does not measure retakes.

Two sets of matches were left out of the count. In the 739 matches from 14 September to 18 December 2024, the match record of the six leagues does not separate a penalty goal from an ordinary goal. One of them is Wolverhampton v Bournemouth, on 30 November 2024. Justin Kluivert scored three penalties there, the Premier League record for penalties scored in a single match (official page checked on 2 October 2026). The archive marks none of them as a penalty.

The second set is LaLiga 2016/17, which had 380 matches: the archive has 361 of them, with an events record in only 43. The 2023/24 half-season is in the count, and declared. In the five European leagues, the archive has only the matches up to 31 December 2023. Without it, the rate across the six leagues is 77.3% (5,131 of 6,637).

Against Understat, a data-analysis site and not an official source, the archive matches on converted penalties in 43 of 55 league-season pairs of the five European leagues. The Brasileirão has no outside comparison. The 12 pairs that differ are the two sets above, the half-seasons and LaLiga 2025/26, with 104 against 105.

How many penalties go in: 77.4% across the six leagues, 80.4% on the official Premier League count

The six leagues convert between 76.1% (LaLiga) and 79.9% (Premier League), and the difference could be chance. The six leagues together, 77.4%, have a 95% confidence interval of 76.4% to 78.4%, the range where the true rate probably sits. The Premier League's own site uses 0.78 xG per penalty, because, historically, about 78% of them go in (an Opta analysis published on the league's site on 2 June 2024). xG is the probability that a model gives a shot of ending in a goal.

What this tells us: in the archive, the six leagues convert between 76.1% and 79.9%, and the test of the six rates gives p = 0.41: a gap this size could be chance. The possible reading is that it cannot be claimed that the Premier League converts more: it stands out in volume (0.258 penalties per match against 0.300 to 0.345 in the other five), and chance does not explain that.

On the official Premier League count, 869 of 1,081 penalties went in (80.4%) over the 11 seasons, from 2015/16 to 2025/26. The archive matches the official total of scored penalties in 9 of those 11 seasons. The rate of a single season swings a lot. It was 70.0% in 2017/18 (56 of 80) and 89.7% in 2023/24 (96 of 107), the highest in the league's history, according to the Premier League's website on 2 June 2024.

What this tells us: the official count gives the Premier League 80.4%; in the archive, the figures are 79.9% (797 of 998) without the 2024 window, as in the six-league count, 79.5% (804 of 1,011) with the whole of 2024/25 and 79.6% (755 of 948) without 2024/25. The possible reading is that the 2024/25 gap, with 63 penalties in the archive against 83 for the league, changes the count and barely moves the rate.

The minute of the penalty: 35.0% come between minutes 61 and 90

Between minutes 61 and 90, the last third of normal time, 2,419 of the 6,003 penalties in normal time are awarded (40.3%). That is 35.0% of the total (2,419 of 6,916), and stoppage time, the time the referee adds at the end of each half, adds 913 (13.2%).

In the Premier League, the minute matches the league's official database in 755 of 755 scored penalties (2015/16 to 2025/26, without 2024/25), and the stoppage time in 112 of 112. In the other five leagues there is no outside source match by match: the archive's match record stands.

What this tells us: in the archive, penalties are not spread evenly across the bands, but the conversion rate does not change with the minute (p = 0.74, which could be chance). This suggests, without proving it, that the minute matters for how many penalties are awarded, not for how many go in.

The home team gets 58.0% of the penalties, and the team that is behind gets more per minute

The home team gets 58.0% of the penalties (4,008 of 6,916), more in each of the six leagues, from 53.2% to 60.6%. It converts the same as the away team: 77.2% against 77.7%. This number comes only from the archive, and no outside source confirms it.

The score is also associated with how many penalties a team gets. The count uses 5,860 of the 6,003 penalties in normal time: for 143, the match record does not allow fixing the score at the minute, mostly because the penalty came in the same minute as a goal. For every 1,000 team minutes, that is, time a team spent at that score, a team that is behind gets 1.79 penalties, a team that is level gets 1.37, and a team that is ahead gets 1.41.

What this tells us: in the archive, the ratio between a team that is behind and one that is level is 1.31 (95% interval: 1.23 to 1.39), and a team that is ahead cannot be told apart from one that is level (1.03, from 0.97 to 1.10). The possible reading, without proof, is that the team that is behind attacks more or is the weaker one, and the count cannot separate one explanation from the other.

VAR and the 2026/27 rule: what the count shows and what stays open

The archive does not measure how many penalties VAR awarded: the match record does not link VAR, the video assistant referee who reviews incidents and advises the match referee on the pitch, to the penalty. What can be counted is the before and after of each league's adoption. On the cause, the Premier League wrote on 2 June 2024 that the goalkeeper rule change "coincided" with the arrival of VAR. The text says it cannot be claimed to be the only cause of the drop in saves.

What this tells us: in the archive, from the adoption season used on, LaLiga (+27%), Ligue 1 (+20%) and the Brasileirão (+16%) have more penalties per match, and the other three leagues stay between +2% and +5%, with no detectable difference. This compares two eras and does not prove a cause: in the same period the IFAB changed the handball rule (2019/20 and 2020/21) and the goalkeeper's foot on the line (2019/20 and 2022/23), and there were matches behind closed doors in 2019/20.

The IFAB's Law 14, 2026/27 edition, in force since 1 July 2026, brings two changes. The first confirms the accidental double touch in the text of the law. The kicker accidentally kicks the ball with both feet at once, or the ball touches the standing foot or leg right after the kick. If the ball goes in, the kick is retaken; if not, an indirect free kick is given.

The second change is the end of the automatic yellow card for the kicker when kicker and goalkeeper both commit an offence at the same time. The first, the double touch, already applied under Circular 31, of 2 June 2025, to competitions starting on or after 1 July 2025.

The short answer: about 3 goals in every 4 penalties

The question at the start has a short answer. A penalty is worth about 3 goals in every 4 kicks: 77.4% across the six leagues. Neither the league, nor the minute, nor whether a team plays at home or away moves that rate in any detectable way. What changes is how many penalties are awarded, and the archive does not show why.

On goalkeepers, a study of 286 penalties (Bar-Eli and colleagues, Journal of Economic Psychology, 2007) saw the goalkeeper who stayed in the centre save 6 of 18. The one who dived saved 36 of 268. Those 18 cases are too few to build a rule on.

Harry Kane scored the first 24 penalties he took in the Bundesliga, the longest run in the league on the records page of 12 September 2026. He missed the 25th, against Wolfsburg, on matchday 33 of 2025/26. In my reading, that is what 77.4% means: the 1 in 4 comes for everyone, even for someone on a run of 24.