Penalty shootouts are won at the coin toss

England’s Euro 2020 adventure came to a painful end with a penalty shootout defeat to Italy on Sunday evening, yet in victory the Azzurri once again proved that shoot-outs are won at the coin toss.

There is an increasingly prominent statistic that shows the team who takes the first penalty has a far greater percentage chance of emerging victorious.

All four penalty shootouts won by Italy, Spain and Switzerland at Euro 2020 were significant in that the team which took the first shot ended up winning.

There is a firmly held belief in football that you must opt to go first to give yourself the advantage of putting the opposition takers under more pressure.

Studies have been down to see the legitimacy of this belief and one of the most cited has been one carried out by Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, who determined that in penalty shoot-outs the team that takes the first spot-kick wins 60% of the time, although on Euro 2020 that percentage sat at 100.

Confusion

There was an element of drama just prior to the Italy-Spain shootout in which Giorgio Chiellini and Jordi Alba were unsure who was actually set to shoot first.

In the end, it was Italy who took the first kick, although many people have since called for a chance to the format of a shoot-out in order to make sure that the pressure is distributed evenly between both sides.

The current structure can be boiled down to AB-AB-AB, whilst the switch considered would use A-BB-AA-BB-AA-B.

Source: marca.com