Delving into the pressures around penalty kicks
Louise Ellis
Senior Lecturer, Department of Allied Health Professions, Sport and Exercise
BASES Accredited Sport and Exercise Scientist (Psychology) Chartered Scientist Senior Lecturer: Division of Sport, Exercise, and Public Health, University of Huddersfield
The agony of the penalty shoot-out has become a staple of watching football in recent years, but what kind of pressures do the players face and what can be done about it with so much at stake? Louise Ellis, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Applied Health Professions, Sport and Exercise, discusses her recent research that involved current professional footballers.
A version of this article appears on The Conversation. The above photo was used for illustrative purposes. Image by Alex Fox from Pixabay
The penalty shoot-out in international football is arguably one of the most highly visible and high-pressured sporting situations in the world. More than 3.5 billion people viewed the FIFA 2018 World Cup and a record breaking 1.12 billion watched the final. The magnitude of the occasion has been articulated in autobiographies written by former international footballers who have described not being able to think normally (Michael Owen) or breathe properly (David Beckham) before taking part in a penalty shoot-out in a major tournament.
These thoughts and feelings typically represent cognitive anxiety of the mind (e.g., worry) and somatic anxiety of the body (e.g., increases in respiration, heart rate, muscle tension). The extent to which these symptoms affect performance depends on how a player perceives the situation. Do they feel under control? Are they under threat?
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Researchers have shown that when faced with high-pressure in a penalty shoot-out, players often perform sub-optimally. This phenomenon has been colloquially termed choking under pressure. In sport psychology, two prominent explanations (i.e., distraction and self-focus) have evolved which explain the phenomenon of choking under pressure.
Distraction models imply that as pressure increases, the athlete becomes sensitive to threat which causes attention to redirect to internal stimuli (e.g., worry about missing) and external stimuli (e.g., over focusing on the goalkeeper). In contrast, self-focus models (also known as skill-focus) argue that high-pressure causes an athlete to consciously focus on the processes or mechanics of the skill. Subsequently, this increased conscious attention disrupts the automatic nature of a well learned skill. Ultimately, being either distracted, self-focused or both causes performance to deteriorate.
Many of us who have played sport to a high level can sympathise with the phenomenon of choking or sub-optimal performance. As a former international hockey goalkeeper and BASES Accredited Sport and Exercise Scientist (psychology), I was keen to undertake research on creating a pressure protocol for penalty taking and assess the effect on psychological and psychophysical response, and performance.
In this research with professional academy footballers, the main purpose was to create a single pressure protocol that would simulate the dynamic nature of stress and emotions reported by professional football players when taking a penalty kick in a quarter final UEFA European Championship shootout (i.e., solitude of the walk, crowd noise, worry about the goalkeeper’s performance), and include known causes of choking reported in sport psychology research (e.g., evaluation, direct competition).
Indeed, worry about the goalkeeper has also been reported by Steven Gerrard, who expressed concern on whether the Portuguese goalkeeper knew his preferred choice when executing a penalty in the World Cup, and subsequently he missed his penalty. In sum, this insightful information indicated that similar stressors should be considered as part of a high-pressure penalty protocol.
Watch some enthralling FA Cup penalty shoot-outs.
What were the professional football players asked to do?
Players took penalty kicks to four targets in the goal under low and high-pressure conditions. In the low-pressure condition, players were instructed to execute penalties to a target of their choice and repeat this process from the penalty spot (i.e., without walking from the halfway).
In the high-pressure condition, players were informed they would:
i) commence this test on the halfway line and return to the halfway after each penalty shot;
ii) listen to crowd noise from previous televised penalty shoot-outs throughout the high-pressure condition;
iii) be in direct competition with each participant in the team and results would be ranked by the coach in order of success;
iv) be subjected to video evaluation by the coach post performance;
v) execute penalty shots to enforced targets (i.e. no shot choice), and finally...
vi) execute the two final penalty shots with the goalkeeper knowing shot location. Additionally, players were interviewed about their thoughts, feelings and experiences under low and high-pressure.
What were the findings and implications?
Under pressure, players’ pressure, cognitive anxiety (i.e., anxiety in the mind) and respiration rate significantly increased, and players were more inconsistent in their grouping of shots around the target under stress. The interview data identified a range of individual responses, but generally, the players’ attentional focus shifted from being enhanced focused under low-pressure to distraction based (e.g., worry, concern) under high-pressure.
Whilst we can always debate the magnitude of these stressors compared to those experienced in a major tournament, this research revealed that knowing about the other stressors, coupled with the walk from the halfway caused players to experience distractions (e.g., , thinking I have to score) and are similar to thoughts (i.e., distractions) experienced by professional footballers during the walk from the halfway in a major tournament (e.g., the ball must go in). Whilst distraction was the most reported overall, some players became self-focused (i.e., skill-focused) and/or both under high-pressure (i.e., particularly when the goalkeeper knew shot placement - replicating worry about the goalkeeper).
Interestingly, although players were significantly more variable in their average grouping of shots under pressure (i.e., more inconsistent), shot accuracy improved (i.e., players were minimally more accurate in response to stress), albeit this was non-significant.
This six-step procedure outlines the importance of practicing to small targets under pressure conditions and individually profiling players (under investigation by the first author) to enable specific interventions to be provided according to their individual mechanisms reported (i.e., whether distracted or self-focused).
The full research article can be viewed here.