Penalty Shootout Rules: How the Tiebreaker Works Step by Step

A penalty shootout (properly called kicks from the penalty mark) is the procedure used to decide a knockout tie that remains level after normal time and, where the competition allows it, extra time. Crucially, it is not part of the match. The result is officially recorded as a draw, and the goals converted in the shootout do not count towards any player's or any team's scoring tallies. Its single purpose is to establish which side advances, and the Laws of the Game describe the sequence in precise, almost bureaucratic detail.

Before the first kick, the referee tosses a coin to choose the goal at which all the kicks will be taken; a second toss decides which team kicks first, and the winner of that toss may elect to go first or second. Only players who were on the field of play when the match ended are eligible, including anyone temporarily off the pitch with the referee's permission. Unused substitutes cannot take part. If one team finished with fewer players, the other must reduce to the same number before the shootout begins.

Equalising the number of players has a consequence that gets lost in the stands. The player excluded to match the opponent's headcount does not simply vanish from the tie: Law 10 is the only place that allows a team to bring back an excluded player, and only to replace a goalkeeper who cannot continue. There is also a swap available at any point, with no injury or card required: any eligible player already on the pitch can simply change places with the goalkeeper, without having to justify the choice to the referee. The rule has existed as long as Law 10 itself, and most coaches only reach for it in an emergency, which is habit rather than obligation.

Five kicks each, then sudden death

Each team takes five kicks, alternating, with a different player for every attempt. The shootout stops the moment one side cannot be caught: if a team leads by three after three rounds, the remaining kicks are pointless and are never taken. If the score is still level after five kicks each, the contest moves to sudden death, one round at a time, until one team scores and the other does not in the same round. Every eligible player, goalkeepers included, must take a kick before anyone may kick twice.

Once every listed kicker on both sides has taken a turn and the score is still tied, the cycle restarts, and the order rule confuses even experienced commentators. Law 10 says the team that opened the very first round keeps opening every fresh cycle of sudden death; what changes is that each side may reshuffle its own lineup of kickers before every new cycle, without telling the referee. Officials, in fact, never know in advance who is stepping up next: the record is only filled in after the ball has been struck, which makes any talk of a announced "psychological pattern" pure guesswork from the stands.

The individual kick has its own rules. The ball is stationary on the mark, the kicker is identified to the referee, and every other player waits inside the centre circle. The defending goalkeeper must have at least part of one foot on, above or behind the goal line when the ball is struck, and may not touch the posts, crossbar or net. The kicker may feint during the run-up but not once the run-up is complete. There are no rebounds: the attempt ends when the ball stops, goes out of play or the referee halts play.

One detail broadcasters almost never show is where the kicking team's own goalkeeper has to stand. Law 10 requires him to stay on the pitch, outside the penalty area, exactly on the goal line where it meets the edge of the box, nowhere near the bench and nowhere near his team-mates, who wait dozens of metres away inside the centre circle. It is a deliberately isolated spot, meant to rule out any shouted instruction during the kicker's run-up, even though the letter of the law only bans interference that disturbs the opposing goalkeeper, not silent gestures.

The most misunderstood retakes

Retakes are the most misunderstood element. If the goalkeeper commits an offence and the kick is missed, it is retaken; but there is no retake for a team-mate or a defender encroaching: Law 10 keeps both groups inside the centre circle and does not treat that encroachment as an offence in a shootout, unlike a penalty taken during play. Shootouts were written into the Laws in the early 1970s to replace replays and the indignity of drawing lots. The 1994 World Cup final became the first to be settled this way, and European finals from the mid-1980s onwards have repeatedly turned on the same lottery.

The confusion has a simple root: a penalty taken during play and a kick taken in a shootout answer to two different laws, 14 and 10, and the second does not inherit the first's full list of offences. During the match, team-mates and defenders crowd into a live penalty area, chasing a rebound, fighting for space. In a shootout, the nine outfield players who are not the one striking the ball wait inside the centre circle, more than 40 metres from goal, and the current text of Law 10 simply does not treat their movement as an offence that triggers a retake.

What actually forces a retake in a shootout is shorter than the popular myth suggests. First, a goalkeeper offence that causes the kick to be missed: he is warned the first time and cautioned for any repeat, and the kick comes back. Second, an accidental double touch by the kicker himself when the ball still goes in, covered in detail below. Outside those two cases, and an offence by the kicker committed after the referee has already signalled for the kick (recorded as a miss, with a yellow card for the kicker), Law 10 lists no further reason to retake a kick.

The table exposes something that escapes even seasoned commentators: the two laws line up exactly where the ball has already touched the kicker's foot twice, and they split on everything that depends on other players moving. That tracks with the logic of each moment. During the match, the area is a contested space, full of players fighting for position; in a shootout the ground between the mark and the centre circle sits practically empty, and policing the movement of someone 40 metres away would be policing nothing at all.

The accidental double touch: the Julián Álvarez case

The accidental double touch rule is recent in the form it takes today, and the two scenarios it covers are worth separating. If the kicker touches the ball with both feet at once, or the ball hits his own non-kicking foot or leg immediately after the strike, and it still goes in, the kick is retaken, in a penalty during play (Law 14) as much as in a shootout (Law 10). If the ball stays out, the two laws part ways: during the match, the defending side gets an indirect free kick; in a shootout, the kick is simply recorded as missed, because there is nothing left to restart once the series has moved on.

The case that pushed the IFAB to spell this out happened on 12 March 2025, in the second leg of the Champions League round of 16 between Atlético Madrid and Real Madrid, at the Metropolitano. The shootout was already under way when Julián Álvarez slipped as he struck the ball; his standing foot brushed it again almost at the same instant it crossed the line. The video assistant flagged the double touch, and the referee disallowed the goal under the reading of the rule then in force, which treated any second touch, deliberate or not, as an offence that voided the kick. Real Madrid won the shootout 4-2.

UEFA publicly questioned the call the same day and took the case to the IFAB. On 2 June 2025, the body issued a clarification pointing to Circular 31: when the second touch is clearly accidental, whether both feet at once or the trailing leg right after the strike, and the ball goes in, the kick is now retaken instead of disallowed. Lukas Brud, the IFAB's secretary, wrote that the old reading "is not directly covered in Law 14" and that referees had been penalising a kicker for a touch that "usually occurs because they have slipped." The change was due to take effect on 1 July 2025, but UEFA applied it immediately, from the Nations League semi-final between Germany and Portugal on 4 June. FIFA adopted it at once for the Club World Cup, which kicked off on 15 June 2025 in the United States with both Madrid clubs among the 32 entrants.

Two enduring myths are worth dismantling. First, the shootout is not pure chance: goalkeepers are permitted to move along their line, kickers are studied and profiled, and the Panenka (the delicately chipped penalty made famous at the 1976 European Championship final) proved that nerve and imagination beat power. Second, a goalkeeper injured during the shootout may only be replaced if the team still has a substitution available; otherwise an outfield player takes the gloves. The IFAB trialled an ABBA kicking order between 2017 and 2018, in youth tournaments and English cup competitions, and dropped it for lack of support.

The full step-by-step, and who pulls on the gloves

Law 10's list of eligible kickers is shorter than most coaches would like. Only a player who was on the pitch, or briefly off it with the referee's permission, at the final whistle of the match or extra time can step up; an unused substitute stays on the bench, no exceptions. An outfield player injured during the shootout itself and unable to continue cannot be replaced once the team has used every substitution the match allowed: the side simply carries on a kicker short, and that gap tends to weigh heavier than any tactical detail debated before the series began.

For the goalkeeper, Law 10 is more generous, and more misunderstood than it gets credit for. There are three routes open when he cannot continue. The first is recalling a player the team had already excluded to match the opponent's headcount, when that applies. The second is a normal substitution, if the team has not used up its allowance for the match. The third, available even when neither of the first two exists, is a straight swap: any eligible player already on the pitch puts on the gloves, and the injured goalkeeper steps out. None of the three needs more than a word to the referee, and the third does not even require an injury: any side can send an outfield player into the shootout goal if it wants to, with no necessity at all.

Where the penalty shootout came from

The shootout was born from a coin toss nobody wanted to see again. At the 1968 Olympics, in Mexico, Israel and Bulgaria drew their quarter-final after extra time, and the semi-final place was decided by drawing lots: each captain pulled a slip of paper from a hat, one marked "yes," the other "no." Israel's captain, Mordechai Spiegler, drew the wrong one, and Bulgaria went through without having settled anything on the pitch. The Israeli official Yosef Dagan, angered by the method, proposed to his own federation a format of five alternating kicks followed by sudden death; the federation's president at the time, Michael Almog, called the old lottery "cruel" as he carried the idea forward.

The IFAB approved the proposal on 27 June 1970, closing a stretch of decades in which knockout ties level after extra time were settled by a full replay or, failing that, by the same kind of lottery that had eliminated Israel. The first shootout in professional football followed soon after, on 5 August 1970, in a Watney Cup semi-final, a pre-season friendly competition in England, between Hull City and Manchester United. George Best opened the series by converting the very first kick in the format's history; Denis Law, also of United, became the first to miss, stopped by Hull's goalkeeper, Ian McKechnie. Manchester United won the shootout.

The World Cup waited twelve years for its own debut of the format. It came in the 1982 semi-final, in Spain, between West Germany and France, after a 3-3 draw in extra time that French football still calls the Night of Seville. Alain Giresse scored the very first penalty taken in a World Cup shootout; Uli Stielike, of West Germany, became the first to miss at a World Cup, and sank to his knees on the pitch in the pose that would repeat itself in so many shootouts to come. West Germany won 5-4, with Maxime Bossis missing the decisive kick for France.

The chip that became a legend

The modern repertoire of penalty techniques has a symbolic root in the 1976 European Championship final, between Czechoslovakia and West Germany, level at 2-2 after extra time. The first seven kicks of the shootout all went in, until West Germany's Uli Hoeness put his over the bar. With the score 4-3 to the Czechoslovaks, Antonín Panenka stepped up to take the fifth and decisive kick, and chose the riskiest option available: a soft chip straight down the middle, over the diving goalkeeper Sepp Maier, who had already committed to one side. Czechoslovakia won 5-3, and Panenka's name became shorthand for the gesture itself.

Brazilian football calls that exact movement a cavadinha, and any goalkeeper coach in the English game would recognise the same calculated risk Panenka took in that 1976 final. It works because it inverts the usual duel: a goalkeeper who commits early and dives too soon becomes easy prey for a kicker cold enough to ignore the expected script. It fails, and fails badly, whenever the goalkeeper holds his position or the kicker hesitates on the weight of the touch, which is exactly why it still divides opinion among players who take penalties for a living.

The ABBA experiment

The idea behind ABBA came from tennis, specifically from the serving order in a tie-break: instead of the traditional A, B, A, B sequence, each pair of kicks would follow A, B, B, A, alternating which side kicks last inside every pair. The goal was to reduce the pressure on whichever team historically kicks second, forever needing to match or beat what the opponent has just done. The IFAB authorised a live trial, and the first shootout played under the format came on 11 May 2017, in the Women's Under-17 European Championship semi-final between Germany and Norway.

From there the format spread through UEFA's men's and women's youth tournaments across 2017, the English FA's Community Shield the same year, the League Cup and EFL Trophy in the 2017-18 season, and Dutch domestic cups in 2018-19. A sample of 36 shootouts played under the trial in 2017 came back almost perfectly balanced, 18 wins for the side that would have kicked first under the classic format and 18 for the other side: the balance ABBA had set out to deliver, in exactly the spot where the classic format had historically favoured whoever kicked first.

Even with a favourable result in hand, the IFAB decided not to carry the format forward. At its annual business meeting in Glasgow in November 2018, the technical panel announced that ABBA would no longer be an option for any competition, noting "the absence of strong support, mainly because the procedure is complex." The classic alternating format survived, and most supporters never even noticed it had been under threat.

Does kicking first actually help?

The question became a serious research topic in 2010, when the economists Jose Apesteguia and Ignacio Palacios-Huerta published "Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: Evidence from a Randomized Natural Experiment" in the American Economic Review. Studying 129 shootouts spanning three decades, they found a clear edge for the side that kicks first, a 60.5% win rate, which they attributed to the extra psychological weight carried by whoever always has to answer what the rival has just done.

The finding did not survive the next round of scrutiny intact. In 2012, Martin Kocher, Marc Lenz and Matthias Sutter published a rebuttal in Management Science, titled "Psychological Pressure in Competitive Environments: New Evidence from Randomized Natural Experiments," built on a larger sample of 540 shootouts. The advantage for the side kicking first dropped to 53.3%, a gap statistically indistinguishable from pure chance.

The largest sample published up to 2025 closes the debate, unless a larger database emerges. In 2025, the researcher David Pipke published "No evidence of first-mover advantage in a large sample of penalty shootouts" in the Journal of Economic Psychology, drawing on roughly 7,000 shootouts and 74,000 individual kicks, by far the biggest dataset the question had until then. It found no advantage at all, for either the side kicking first or the side kicking second. Going first may still flatter the ego of whoever calls the toss, but with every larger sample the psychological edge the first wave of research swore it had measured keeps shrinking until it disappears.

The World Cup and the shootout

The 1994 final, at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, finished 0-0 between Brazil and Italy after extra time, the only World Cup final scoreless after 120 minutes. Brazil won the shootout 3-2; Roberto Baggio, runner-up for the tournament's best player behind Romário, put the decisive kick over the crossbar, an image that came to stand for the format's own cruelty.

In 2006, at Berlin's Olympiastadion, Italy and France finished level at 1-1 after extra time, with Zinedine Zidane sent off in the 110th minute for headbutting Marco Materazzi. Italy won the shootout 5-3; David Trezeguet was the only player to miss for France, striking the crossbar, and Fabio Grosso scored the kick that sealed Italy's fourth world title.

In 2022, at Lusail Stadium in Qatar, Argentina and France finished level at 3-3 after extra time, with Kylian Mbappé scoring all three French goals, a hat-trick, and Lionel Messi scoring two of Argentina's three. Argentina won the shootout 4-2; Kingsley Coman and Aurélien Tchouaméni missed for France, and Gonzalo Montiel scored the kick that handed Messi the trophy.

The 2026 tournament, played across the United States, Mexico and Canada in June and July, did not repeat the formula in its own final: Spain beat Argentina 1-0 after extra time, on 19 July, at MetLife Stadium, with Ferran Torres scoring in the 106th minute. Argentina had already been down to ten men since second-half stoppage time in regulation, when Enzo Fernández picked up a second yellow card for a challenge on Pau Cubarsí. The shootout itself still decided four ties earlier in the tournament. Three of them came in the round of 32, the new phase introduced for the 48-team format, between 29 June and 3 July: Paraguay beat Germany 4-3, Morocco beat the Netherlands 3-2 and Egypt beat Australia 4-2. The fourth came in the round of 16, on 7 July: Switzerland beat Colombia 4-3. From the quarter-finals to the final, no match needed penalties.

Three World Cup finals, a reordering experiment trialled for about a year and a half and dropped in 2018, and an academic verdict that shrank from a 60.5% edge to no proven advantage at all tell the same story from different angles. Whoever tried to fix the penalty shootout, with data or with new rules, never found anything worth the trade. Drawing lots looked too arbitrary; a full replay looked too costly and exhausting; a reordered sequence looked too complicated for the very game it was meant to fix.

The format that survived, then, is the classic one: alternating kicks, five each, sudden death after that. It is simple to watch and cruel to take part in, and that tension is precisely why every attempt to reform it has been shelved.