Every captain wants to win the coin toss before a penalty shootout. The belief is almost universal: go first, carry less pressure, win more often. A landmark 2010 study seemed to confirm it — teams shooting first won nearly 60% of shootouts, those shooting second just 40%. That 60-40 split became gospel.
It's now being quietly dismantled.
The shrinking advantage
Five major studies published between 2012 and 2025 have progressively chipped away at that figure. The most comprehensive analysis yet — drawing on nearly 7,000 shootouts and 74,000 individual kicks — found no statistically meaningful advantage to going first. If an edge exists at all, the authors put it at under 1.8 percentage points. That's not a decisive tactical lever. That's noise.
None of this means pressure disappears. What the newer research challenges is whether that pressure is strong enough, and distributed evenly enough, to consistently shift the outcome. The psychological burden on the second-kicking team is real. The question is how much it actually moves the needle.
A study published in Football Studies reframes the whole debate. Rather than asking who goes first, the researchers asked: what type of kick are players actually facing when the pressure peaks? Their findings split penalty kicks into two distinct categories — those where scoring immediately wins the shootout, and those where missing immediately ends it.
The numbers that actually matter
The difference is stark. When a goal secures victory on the spot, players convert 89.1% of the time. When a miss means elimination, that rate drops to 60.4%. Nearly 29 percentage points separate the two scenarios — a gulf that dwarfs the old first-versus-second debate entirely.
Crucially, the researchers found that once you account for which team faces more of these elimination kicks versus victory kicks, the order of shooting stops explaining much of the performance gap at all. The apparent advantage of going first isn't really about going first. It's about the fact that the shooting order determines which team faces the most elimination-pressure moments — and that's where the real psychological weight lands.
The practical implication cuts against conventional shootout thinking. Most managers load their best penalty takers at the start of the order. But if the research holds, the smarter move might be to identify which players handle extreme pressure best and save them for the moments that actually break teams — not the opening kicks, but the ones where a miss sends everyone home.
- Success rate when a goal wins the shootout immediately: 89.1%
- Success rate when a miss means immediate elimination: 60.4%
- Sample size of the largest study to date: nearly 7,000 shootouts, 74,000 kicks
- Maximum estimated first-kick advantage per the latest research: under 1.8 percentage points
This World Cup has already served up two shootout eliminations in the round of 32 — Paraguay over Germany, Morocco over the Netherlands. Both decided by the finest of margins, in the highest-pressure moments the sport produces. Whoever is advising on shootout order in the later rounds might want to read up before the quarterfinals.
The coin toss still matters. Just probably not in the way anyone thought.
