England Penalty Shootout History and the Wembley Misses
England's penalty shootout record at World Cups and Euros, shoot-out by shoot-out — the misses, the Wembley nights, and how England started winning them.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished England National Team18 min read
- First tournament shoot-out
- 1990
- Shoot-outs at World Cups and Euros
- 10
- Won
- 3
- Kicks before sudden death
- 5
The Stadio delle Alpi in Turin had a running track, a shallow bowl and poor sightlines, and on 4 July 1990 it staged the first penalty shoot-out England had ever taken part in at a major tournament. Chris Waddle's kick went into the night above the crossbar. Stuart Pearce's was blocked by Bodo Illgner's legs. Bobby Robson had not asked his players to rehearse a shoot-out because, as he said afterwards, you cannot recreate the circumstances — a position widely shared at the time, and one the Football Association spent the next thirty years quietly abandoning.
England's men have since taken part in ten shoot-outs at World Cups and European Championships. Seven were lost. Two of the last three were won. Both of those numbers matter, because the story that hardened into folklore in the 1990s — that England are constitutionally incapable of winning one — was built on a genuinely dismal run that has now been interrupted three times, at Wembley in 1996 and then in Moscow and Dusseldorf under Gareth Southgate.
Turin, 1990: the shoot-out England were not ready for
West Germany scored all four of their kicks. England scored the first three, through Gary Lineker, Peter Beardsley and David Platt, and then Pearce struck his low and central at a goalkeeper who had barely moved. Waddle, taking the fifth with England already behind, put his over the bar and into the crowd.
What made Turin formative was the absence of any process behind it rather than the result itself. The order was assembled on the pitch. No player had been assigned a kick before extra time ended. Pearce, a left-back with one of the hardest shots in English football, chose power over placement and finished with neither. That approach was normal across most of Europe in the period, but West Germany had already won a World Cup shoot-out in 1982 and treated the exercise as a routine with a technique attached rather than a lottery to be endured.
- 10Shoot-outs
- 3Won
- 7Lost
- 1990First one
Completed shoot-outs at the two major senior tournaments only; the 2019 Nations League win over Switzerland is counted separately in the text.
The complete men's shoot-out record at major tournaments
Ten shoot-outs across nine tournaments, because Euro 96 produced two inside five days.
| Year | Tournament | Round | Opponent | Venue | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | World Cup | Semi-final | West Germany | Turin | Lost 4-3 |
| 1996 | European Championship | Quarter-final | Spain | Wembley | Won 4-2 |
| 1996 | European Championship | Semi-final | Germany | Wembley | Lost 6-5 |
| 1998 | World Cup | Last 16 | Argentina | Saint-Etienne | Lost 4-3 |
| 2004 | European Championship | Quarter-final | Portugal | Lisbon | Lost 6-5 |
| 2006 | World Cup | Quarter-final | Portugal | Gelsenkirchen | Lost 3-1 |
| 2012 | European Championship | Quarter-final | Italy | Kyiv | Lost 4-2 |
| 2018 | World Cup | Last 16 | Colombia | Moscow | Won 4-3 |
| 2020 | European Championship | Final | Italy | Wembley | Lost 3-2 |
| 2024 | European Championship | Quarter-final | Switzerland | Dusseldorf | Won 5-3 |
Three of those deserve a note. The 2004 defeat in Lisbon ran to seven kicks each and opened with David Beckham slipping as he struck, sending the ball over the bar; Ricardo, the Portugal goalkeeper, removed his gloves before saving from Darius Vassell and then took and scored the winning kick himself. In 2006 in Gelsenkirchen, England scored one of four, Owen Hargreaves the only man to beat the same goalkeeper, which remains the worst return of any England shoot-out.
The Euro 2020 final at Wembley was the only one England have contested for a trophy. Harry Kane and Harry Maguire scored, Marcus Rashford struck the post, and Gianluigi Donnarumma saved from Jadon Sancho and Bukayo Saka.
What Law 10 actually requires
Kicks from the penalty mark are not a tie-break bolted on to the end of a match. They are set out in Law 10 of the Laws of the Game, maintained by the International Football Association Board, and the detail settles more ties than most supporters assume.
- Choose the goalThe referee chooses which goal is used, taking account of safety, pitch condition and where the crowd is.
- Toss for orderA coin toss decides the order, and the winner of the toss chooses whether to take the first kick or the second.
- Equalise numbersIf one side has more players on the field than the other, it must reduce to equate before any kick is taken.
- Five kicks eachBoth teams take five, alternately, and no player may take a second kick until every eligible teammate has taken one.
- Stop early if decidedThe shoot-out ends the instant one team cannot be caught, however many kicks are nominally left.
- Sudden deathLevel after five, the kicks continue one for one until one side scores and the other does not.
The procedure as set out in the Laws of the Game; individual competition regulations add their own conditions on extra time before this point is reached.
Several points are routinely misunderstood. Only players on the pitch at the final whistle may take a kick, which is why late substitutions in extra time are made with the shoot-out already in mind, and why a manager who wants a particular taker has to keep him on. A goalkeeper injured during the shoot-out may be replaced only where the team has a substitution left. Since a 2019 amendment the goalkeeper must have at least part of one foot touching, in line with, or behind the goal line at the moment the ball is kicked, a stricter standard than the old requirement to stay on the line, and one that has produced retakes and cautions in English domestic cup ties. The 2017 trial of the ABBA order, designed to strip out the advantage of kicking first, ran in a handful of competitions and was then dropped.
Is it a curse, or is it a sample?
Ten shoot-outs is a thin base for a national theory. Spread across thirty-four years, three wins and seven defeats is worse than a coin toss, but the gap is not vast, and any country that plays enough of them will throw up a run that looks like destiny from the outside.
The stronger argument against the curse framing is that the defeats cluster in one period and one approach. Between 1990 and 2012 England lost six of seven. Since 2018 they have won two of three, and the one they lost went to five kicks in a final against the side that won the tournament. Something changed, and what changed was preparation rather than personnel.
Three of them were at Wembley
Two shoot-outs at the old Wembley inside five days in June 1996, and one at the rebuilt stadium in the Euro 2020 final. No other national team has taken three at its own ground in the modern tournament era, largely because no other national team has hosted as much knockout football.
Home advantage in a shoot-out is not the simple asset it sounds. The crowd behind the goal is yours for your kicks and a silence for theirs, which helps. Against that, the consequence of missing is being watched by eighty-odd thousand people who will not forget, and Jordet's work on public reputation suggests that is exactly the pressure that degrades performance. England won one of the three. The full history of the ground and what an England home fixture there involves is in our guide to Wembley and England's home games.
There is a selection effect that rarely gets mentioned. A shoot-out requires reaching a knockout tie and then playing 120 minutes without settling it, so a country only accumulates shoot-outs by being consistently good enough to keep arriving in quarter-finals. Nations with the ugliest-looking records tend to be the ones who keep getting there. Not much comfort on the night.
Preparation under different England set-ups
Robson's position in 1990 was that a shoot-out could not be simulated, so rehearsing it had limited value. Terry Venables took the opposite view before Euro 96 and had his squad take kicks at the end of sessions, which is part of why Pearce, Alan Shearer, Platt, Paul Gascoigne and Teddy Sheringham all converted in the semi-final against Germany. England scored five of six that night and still went out.
Glenn Hoddle asked players to nominate themselves. Sven-Goran Eriksson's squads practised, though the practice mostly amounted to taking kicks rather than rehearsing the surrounding ten minutes. The change under Southgate — a man who had missed one at Wembley — was to treat the shoot-out as a chain of events that begins long before the final whistle.
What the modern routine covers
Players take kicks at the end of training when they are tired, because that is the physical state they will be in when it counts. They walk the full distance from the halfway line, alone, and the walk is timed. Each player settles on one kick, a side and a height and a run-up, and repeats it rather than deciding in the moment. Staff record where each player puts the ball under fatigue and build the order from that rather than from reputation. Individual routines are allowed to be idiosyncratic, because the whole point is that the routine belongs to the player and is therefore repeatable at midnight in a foreign stadium.
None of it guarantees anything. It shortens the list of things that can go wrong.
What the research actually found
Geir Jordet, a Norwegian sports psychologist, analysed footage of every shoot-out at World Cups, European Championships and European Cup finals, and published findings that made uncomfortable reading at the FA. Two stood out. English players took less time between the referee's whistle and the start of their run-up than players from most other nations, hurrying in his terms, which reads as a way of getting an unpleasant experience over with. And English players were more likely to look away from the goalkeeper, or to turn their back while placing the ball, behaviour he associated with avoidance rather than control.
Jordet also reported that players with the highest status, measured by recent individual awards, converted at a lower rate than less decorated teammates. His explanation was reputational. The more a player has to lose, the more the kick stops being a technical task and becomes a public test of self.
Ben Lyttleton's book on penalties documented the same pattern from a different angle, comparing national training cultures and finding that the countries with the best records were the ones that had turned the shoot-out into a coached skill decades earlier.
A third strand of the work looked at what happens after the whistle sounds and before the ball is placed. The interval is short and largely unmanaged: the taker separates from the group at the centre circle, covers roughly forty metres alone, and then waits for the referee. Jordet's coding found meaningful national differences in how that interval was used, with some squads sending each taker off with a physical cue from a teammate and others leaving the walk entirely to the individual.
The honest caveat is that samples this small resist statistical proof, and the behavioural findings describe correlations in filmed behaviour rather than a demonstrated cause. What they gave a coaching staff was something concrete to work on, which is a great deal more than "handle the pressure better" had ever offered.
Deciding the order of takers
The order belongs to the manager, but it is not arbitrary. Modern practice starts with a volunteer list, players putting themselves forward rather than being conscripted, and is then shaped by conversion rates in training, by what the analysts have seen that week, and by who is still standing after 120 minutes.
The old wisdom held that the strongest taker goes fifth. That has largely been reversed. Kicking first confers a measurable advantage in most datasets, so the first kick tends to go to a player who is close to certain, in order to bank that advantage while it exists, whereas the fifth may never be taken at all. Third and fourth are where shoot-outs are frequently lost, because that is the point at which a team is most likely to be behind and taking a kick it cannot afford to miss.
Two practical constraints govern everything. Eligibility is limited to the eleven on the pitch. And a player who has cramped, or who has been booked and rattled in the last minute of extra time, can be quietly moved down the list in the walk from the touchline to the centre circle.
Why the fifth-kick myth survived so long
The fifth kick makes a better story. It is the one that gets replayed, because a shoot-out that reaches it is a shoot-out that has been level for four rounds, and the deciding kick carries the whole match on it. That narrative weight persuaded a generation of managers to hold their best taker back for a moment that arrives in fewer than half of all shoot-outs.
The counter-argument is arithmetic rather than psychological. If the first kick is missed, the team spends the rest of the shoot-out chasing, and every subsequent taker walks up knowing that a miss ends it. Converting first inverts that burden and hands it to the opposition. England's 2024 order in Dusseldorf put Palmer, a player with a cold record from the spot but limited international experience, first — a choice that only makes sense if the staff had decided the opening kick was where the certainty was needed most.
There is a further wrinkle in the rule that no player may take a second kick until all his eligible teammates have taken one. In sudden death, that means a manager cannot simply return to his best takers; by the eleventh kick, a goalkeeper or a centre-back who has never taken a penalty in his career is walking up. Squads are now built with that in mind, and it is one reason substitutions in the 118th minute occasionally look strange from the stands.
The goalkeeper's half of it
Peter Shilton had no dossier in Turin. Jordan Pickford in Moscow in 2018 had a water bottle with the Colombia takers' tendencies printed on it, compiled by the goalkeeping staff from footage of every penalty those players had taken in club football. He saved from Carlos Bacca. Eric Dier scored the next one and England were through.
Preparation on the goalkeeping side covers run-up length, the angle of the standing foot at the moment of contact, whether a taker's eyes go to the ball or to the corner, and placement history broken down by scoreline. It is imperfect. A taker who has decided in advance and never looks up gives away almost nothing, which is exactly why that technique is coached.
The goalkeeper is also the only person in a shoot-out with nothing to lose, and the behaviour that follows — the delay, the arms, the walk along the line — is legal within limits. Law 10 forbids behaviour that unfairly distracts the kicker and a caution is available, but the boundary is drawn generously and referees rarely intervene.
Pickford's record is the most concrete evidence that something in the English approach altered. He saved in Moscow. He saved in Guimaraes against Switzerland in the 2019 Nations League third-place match, and scored a kick of his own in the same shoot-out. He saved from Manuel Akanji with Switzerland's first kick in Dusseldorf.
The three wins and what each one changed
Wembley, 22 June 1996. Spain had a goal wrongly ruled out during the match and hit the bar in the shoot-out. Pearce, six years after Turin, scored his kick and produced the roar and the clenched fists that became the defining image of the tournament for English supporters. David Seaman saved from Miguel Angel Nadal. England won 4-2, and Pearce's rehabilitation, from national punchline to the emotional centre of a home tournament, showed how fast the story around a missed kick can be rewritten when the next one goes in.
Moscow, 3 July 2018. England had lost every World Cup shoot-out they had contested. Jordan Henderson's kick was saved, Colombia hit the bar, Pickford saved from Bacca, Dier scored. The significance was structural rather than sentimental. It was the first evidence that the preparation work produced anything at all.
Dusseldorf, 6 July 2024. Five kicks, five goals: Cole Palmer, Jude Bellingham, Saka, Ivan Toney and Trent Alexander-Arnold. Saka taking and scoring one three years after the Wembley final was the part that carried beyond the result. A perfect shoot-out is rare in any competition, and it remains the clearest single piece of evidence that the process holds.
England's women, meanwhile, won the European Championship in 2025 on penalties, having come through a quarter-final shoot-out in the same tournament. That story runs alongside this one and is told properly in our guide to the history of the Lionesses.
The players who missed, and what was done to them
Pearce and Waddle were treated in 1990 as figures of tragedy and then, quickly, of comedy. Southgate's miss in 1996 produced a pizza advertisement in which he wore a paper bag over his head, which he agreed to do, and which says something about how a young player is expected to metabolise public failure in England.
The Euro 2020 final was different in kind. Rashford, Sancho and Saka were subjected to racist abuse online within minutes of the last kick, a mural of Rashford in Withington was defaced, and the FA, the Metropolitan Police and the Crown Prosecution Service pursued cases that led to convictions. Filing that alongside the paper bag as another chapter of penalty folklore would be wrong. It was a criminal response to three young men taking a kick their manager had asked them to take, and the reaction from clubs, supporters and the wider public was the part worth keeping.
There is a broader point about how English football talks about individual failure. A missed kick has one visible author, which makes it a convenient explanation for ninety minutes of collective shortcoming. The stronger reading, and the one Southgate pressed repeatedly in public, is that a team outplayed for an hour has already spent most of its chances by the time the shoot-out begins. That argument gets a full airing in our guide to why England underperform at tournaments.
Where shoot-outs sit in the English domestic calendar
English footballers now arrive at international camps having taken far more competitive shoot-outs than their predecessors did, and that is a change in the domestic rules rather than in the players.
The EFL removed extra time from the Carabao Cup in every round except the final, so a tie level after ninety minutes goes straight to kicks. The Community Shield has been settled the same way for decades, with no extra time at all. In the EFL Trophy group stage, a drawn match is followed by a shoot-out for a bonus point, which means academy players and lower-division professionals take meaningful kicks in front of a crowd several times a season. The full detail on those formats is in our guides to the Carabao Cup format and the Community Shield.
The FA Cup change matters most. Replays have been progressively removed from the competition proper, which means a drawn tie that would once have gone back to the other ground for a second match now goes to extra time and, if needed, penalties on the night. The financial and sporting arguments about that are covered in how FA Cup replays work, and the mechanics of extra time and kicks in cup ties are set out in cup-tie extra time and penalties rules.
The practical consequence for the national team is that a squad assembling for a tournament contains players who have already stood on the halfway line in a stadium waiting for their name. That is not nothing, and it is the sort of quiet structural advantage that Germany and Italy enjoyed for years without anyone in England noticing where it came from.
Club penalties and international penalties are not the same test
Conversion rates in normal play are high. Both the Premier League and the EFL run at roughly three quarters of penalties scored across a season, and a specialist taker at a big club will spend a career comfortably above that.
Shoot-out kicks are a harder task and convert at a lower rate everywhere in the world. The kick is isolated, the wait before it is long, elimination is immediate, and the taker has usually just played 120 minutes. English clubs have won shoot-outs on the biggest stage available — Liverpool in the 1984 European Cup final in Rome and again in Istanbul in 2005, Manchester United in Moscow in 2008, Chelsea in Munich in 2012 — which is a serious argument against any idea of a national technical deficiency. Largely the same players.
What differs is the week that follows. A club takes a shoot-out in front of its own supporters and is back at work on Monday. An international shoot-out at a tournament is followed by a flight home, a month of newspapers and, for most of the period covered here, a national conversation about character. That was the variable England spent thirty years failing to manage. For the money that rides on a knockout tie in the club game, our guide to Premier League prize money sets out the mechanism.
What English coaching now teaches
FA coach education treats penalties as a technical skill with a psychological wrapper rather than a matter of nerve. Four things are taught consistently through the FA coaching badges pathway and reproduced in academy work under the EPPP academy system.
Decide before you walk. A taker who chooses a target at the halfway line and refuses to revise it removes the goalkeeper's main weapon, which is late information.
Own the tempo. The gap between the whistle and the run-up belongs to the kicker, and using it deliberately — a breath, a fixed routine, eye contact re-established with the ball — reverses precisely the hurrying Jordet identified in English takers.
Practise tired, and practise the walk, because the strike itself is the easy part.
And fund the goalkeeper's preparation as a separate discipline with its own analyst time, since a save counts for exactly as much as a goal and is far more likely to be produced by study than by instinct.
Whether any of it survives the next semi-final is unknowable, and one shoot-out will not settle the question either way. What can be said is that the current approach has produced a five-for-five shoot-out and two wins in three, which is not the record of a team that treats the thing as fate. For the wider context of how England tournament squads are built and prepared, start with how England squad selection works; the tournament-by-tournament England European Championship record sits alongside this page. More explainers are collected on the England guides hub and in our football section.