Every captain wants to win the coin toss before a penalty shootout. It's football folklore — kick first, win more. The 2010 study that cemented this belief reported a 60-40 split in favour of the team that goes first. Coaches believed it. Players believed it. Bookmakers priced around it.
They probably shouldn't have.
Research published since then has steadily eroded that number. Studies from 2012, 2019, 2023, 2024, and 2025 have each chipped away at the claimed advantage. The most exhaustive analysis to date — drawing on nearly 7,000 shootouts and 74,000 individual penalties — found no statistically meaningful evidence that the first team wins more often. If any edge exists at all, the authors put it at under 1.8 percentage points. That's a long way from the 20-point gap that shaped a decade of tactical thinking.
It's not about order — it's about the moment
A study published in Football Studies makes an argument worth paying attention to: the whole debate has been framed around the wrong question. Instead of asking whether going first gives you an advantage, ask what kind of pressure situations each team faces across the shootout — and how often.
The data is stark. When a penalty kick would immediately secure the win, players converted 89.1% of the time. When a miss meant immediate elimination, that figure collapsed to 60.4%. Nearly a 30-point swing, driven entirely by the nature of the moment rather than which team took the kick.
The key finding: once you account for those elimination and victory penalties, the order of kicks stops explaining the difference in performance. The first team doesn't win more because they go first. They win more — when they do — because the structure of the shootout routes them into fewer elimination situations and more victory moments. The rule format, not the coin flip, is doing the work.
What this means tactically
The strategic implication is straightforward and largely ignored by most managers. If the highest-pressure moments are elimination kicks rather than opening kicks, why are the calmest, most technically reliable penalty takers buried at positions one and two? Saving your most ice-blooded player for the moment that kills or saves a campaign might be the smarter call.
This year's World Cup has already served up two shootout eliminations in the round of 32 — Paraguay over Germany, Morocco over the Netherlands — with almost certainly more to come. Managers will keep agonising over the order. The research says they should probably be thinking harder about the player, the moment, and the specific pressure that comes with it.
The study doesn't pretend to have the full picture. Goalkeeper strategy, crowd noise, accumulated fatigue, the psychological profile of each individual shooter — none of those are in the model yet. But it has at least shifted the conversation somewhere more honest: away from coin tosses and toward the one thing that has always actually mattered in a shootout, which is what happens inside a player's head when everything is on the line.
