A shootout is the one part of a football match where the whole crowd knows the procedure and almost nobody knows the rules. Everyone can tell you it is five kicks each and that a goalkeeper is not supposed to come off his line. Ask what happens when he does anyway, and the answers stop agreeing with each other, and most of them stop agreeing with the law.
Some of the confusion is structural. Kicks from the penalty mark are not part of the match at all. Goals scored in a shootout do not go into the score, are not added to a player’s tally, and do not turn a draw into a win in the record. The sequence exists only to decide who goes through, and that separation explains several of its odder provisions.
The rest of the confusion comes from mixing two kinds of question. Some have flat answers written down in a document anyone can read. Others are claims about what tends to happen, and those rest on a small number of rare events, which is a far weaker foundation than the confidence of the arguments suggests.
Settled, contested, and simply wrong
- Settled. Part of one foot on or in line with the goal line at the moment of the kick. That is the whole requirement.
- Settled. A keeper’s offence only forces a retake if the kick was not scored. A goal past an offending keeper stands.
- Settled. There is no rebound. The kick ends when the ball stops, leaves play, or the referee stops play.
- Settled. Only players on the field at the end of play may kick, and everyone kicks once before anyone kicks twice.
- Contested. Whether the team kicking first has a real advantage. The early finding has not held up well.
- Wrong. That both of a keeper’s feet must be on the line, that a stutter run-up is illegal, and that shootout goals count.
Where the penalty shootout rules actually live
The procedure sits in the Laws of the Game, maintained and revised annually by the International Football Association Board, in a section on determining the outcome of a match rather than inside the law that governs penalty kicks during play. Most of what applies to a kick is imported from that law. What is added is the part that only a shootout needs: order, eligibility, equal numbers, and what to do when a team runs out of players.
Competition rules sit on top of it. Whether extra time is played first, which rounds go to kicks, and how many substitutions remain available are decisions taken by the organiser, not by the laws. That is why the same sequence can feel different in two tournaments while being governed by identical text.
The practical consequence is that arguments about shootouts are usually settled by reading rather than by debating. The parts that genuinely require judgement are narrow, specific, and not the parts people argue about.
What can a goalkeeper legally do while the kick is taken?
At the moment the ball is kicked, at least part of one foot has to be touching, on, or in line with the goal line. That is the current wording and it is a deliberate loosening of an older version requiring both feet, which was unenforceable in real time and routinely ignored. The change was made so the requirement could actually be judged.
Within that, a keeper has a great deal of freedom. He may move sideways along the line, jump, wave his arms, spread himself wide and make as much noise as the referee will tolerate. What he may not do is stand in front of the line before the kick, touch the goalposts, crossbar or net, or move the goal frame. Anything that crosses from presence into deliberate distraction can be treated as unsporting behaviour.
The reason keepers move before the ball is struck is arithmetic rather than gamesmanship. A firmly struck penalty covers the distance to the goal in a fraction of a second, which is less time than a human needs to see the direction, decide, and travel far enough to reach a corner. A keeper who waits for reliable information has already conceded both corners. So he commits early, and narrows the guess by reading the run-up, the plant foot and the angle of the hips.
When does a keeper’s offence force a retake?
Only when the kick is not scored. If the ball goes in despite the keeper being off his line, the goal stands and nothing else happens. That asymmetry runs through the whole section and it follows one principle: a team should never benefit from its own offence.
If the kick is missed or saved and the keeper offended, the kick is retaken. The law distinguishes a first offence from repeat offences within the same shootout, with a warning available before a caution, because a retake is already a substantial penalty.
Encroachment by anybody else follows the same logic in mirror image. If a teammate of the kicker enters the area early and the kick is scored, it is retaken. If it is missed, it is not retaken and the kick is simply recorded as unsuccessful. If a defender other than the keeper encroaches and the kick is missed, it is retaken. If players from both sides encroach, the kick is retaken whatever happened. Reading that grid once makes almost every shootout controversy legible.
What is the kicker allowed to do in the run-up?
Feinting during the run-up is permitted. A stutter, a change of rhythm, a slow approach followed by a burst: all legal, and all long-standing parts of the craft. What is not permitted is feinting after the run-up has been completed, at the point of striking, which is treated as an offence rather than a technique. The kick is recorded as missed and the kicker is cautioned.
The ball must be kicked forward, and the kicker may not play it a second time. This is the rule that surprises people most. There is no follow-up: if the ball rebounds off the post, the crossbar or the goalkeeper, the kick is over. It is complete when the ball stops moving, leaves play, or the referee stops play, and a ball rolling loose in front of an open goal is one nobody may touch.
Excessive delay in taking the kick is also an offence, and so is celebrating in a way that delays the restart. Neither is common, and both are examples of the law closing a gap that was being exploited rather than inventing a problem.
Who kicks, in what order, and who chooses to go first?
The referee tosses a coin to decide which goal the kicks are taken at, a choice governed by practical considerations such as the state of the pitch, the lighting and safety rather than by fairness to either side. A second toss decides the order, and the team that wins it chooses whether to kick first or second rather than being assigned the first kick, which is a change from older practice.
Eligibility is narrower than most people assume. Only players who were on the field of play at the end of the match, including any added time, may take a kick. A substitute who never came on cannot kick. A player who was substituted off cannot kick. A player who was temporarily off the field receiving treatment may return and take one.
Order within the team is free, but the rotation is not. Every eligible player has to kick before any player takes a second, which prevents a side from feeding its best striker four of the first five. Once everyone has kicked, the sequence begins again in whatever order the team chooses. The referee keeps a written record of who has kicked and what happened, which is the least glamorous and most consequential administration in the stadium, and the reason there is little scope for the kind of dispute that used to shape the memory of a final.
What happens when the teams have different numbers of players?
They are made equal before the kicks begin. If one side finished the match with more players on the field, because the other had somebody sent off or lost a player to injury with no substitutions remaining, the larger side must reduce to the same number and tell the referee which players are excluded.
This is the most-forgotten rule in the sequence and it decides who may kick at all. It is also where a manager makes a genuinely difficult decision under pressure, since the excluded player might be a good kicker and the choice has to be communicated within a short window.
The same balancing applies if a player is sent off during the kicks themselves. Fairness here is defined as equal numbers of eligible kickers rather than as equal opportunity, which is a narrower idea than it first appears and one of the more interesting design choices in competitive rulemaking. A side reduced to very few players is not given any relief beyond parity.
Can a goalkeeper be replaced during the shootout?
A keeper injured during the kicks may be replaced by a named substitute if the team still has substitutions available. If it does not, the team plays on with whoever is on the field, which is why substitution management late in extra time is partly a shootout decision.
A keeper sent off during the kicks is different. No additional substitution is granted for a dismissal, so he has to be replaced by one of the players already on the field and eligible to kick. That player then keeps goal for the remainder of the sequence, which occasionally produces the unusual sight of an outfield player facing kicks in a decisive tie.
There is also the general provision that a field player may change places with the goalkeeper as long as the referee is informed beforehand and the change happens during a stoppage, which is the mechanism behind the occasional late change of keeper. Meanwhile the goalkeeper of the kicking team does not leave the field: he waits on the goal line where it meets the boundary of the penalty area, while every other player from both sides stands inside the centre circle.
Does the team kicking first actually have an edge?
The claim in circulation is that the team kicking first wins meaningfully more often, and the proposed mechanism is pressure: the second kicker in each pair is more frequently kicking to stay alive rather than to go ahead. It is a tidy story, it has an obvious psychological logic, and it moved into commentary very quickly after it first appeared.
What rarely gets repeated is what happened next. Later work using larger samples and different construction did not reproduce the effect at anything close to the size originally reported, and several analyses found no reliable advantage at all. The current honest position is that if an edge exists it is small enough to be difficult to detect, which is a very different statement from the one usually made on air.
The underlying difficulty is that shootouts are rare. A season produces very few, each contributes a handful of kicks taken by different players under different conditions, and estimating a small effect from a small number of noisy events is exactly the situation in which a first result is most likely to be too large. The behaviour of coaches is not evidence either way: most who win the toss choose to kick first, but a preference is not a measurement, whatever the mental side of elite competition might suggest.
What was the ABBA sequence and why is it not used?
The idea was borrowed from tennis. Instead of alternating strictly, teams would kick in the pattern A, B, B, A, so that whatever disadvantage attaches to kicking second would be shared across the sequence rather than concentrated on one side. It was approved for trial and used in a limited set of competitions, mostly youth tournaments and some domestic cup rounds, over a fairly short period.
The trial was not carried forward. The reasons given publicly centred on administration rather than principle: players, officials and spectators had to track a less intuitive order, the format added complexity to a procedure already running under extreme pressure, and the benefit it was designed to deliver had not been clearly demonstrated.
That last point connects back to the section above. A change designed to correct an effect whose existence is uncertain is difficult to justify, particularly when it makes the procedure harder to run. The episode is a reasonable example of a governing body testing something, finding the case unproven, and stopping.
The shootout rules readers get wrong most often
| Common belief | What the law says | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Both of the keeper’s feet must be on the line | Part of one foot on or in line with it at the moment of the kick | A keeper edging forward on one foot has not automatically offended |
| A keeper off his line means a retake | Only if the kick was not scored | A goal past an offending keeper stands and nothing follows |
| A rebound can be tucked in | The kick ends when the ball stops, leaves play or play is stopped | There is no follow-up, even from a ball sitting in front of an open goal |
| Anyone in the squad can take a kick | Only players on the field at the end of play | An unused substitute is not eligible, however good a kicker he is |
| A stutter in the run-up is cheating | Feinting in the run-up is permitted | Feinting after completing the run-up is the offence, and it is punished |
| Shootout goals count in the score | They do not; the match is recorded as it finished | The sequence decides progression only, not the result or any tally |
| A team can order its kickers freely | Everyone eligible kicks once before anyone kicks twice | The best striker cannot take two of the first five |
Six of those seven are not close calls. They are the text, read once. The retake grid is the only genuinely intricate part of the procedure, and the only place a referee has to apply several conditions at speed under real noise.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens if the score is still level after five kicks each?
The sequence continues in pairs until one team scores and the other does not in the same round. The rotation rule keeps applying, so once every eligible player has kicked, the team starts again in whatever order it chooses. There is no limit on how long this can run.
Can a player who was substituted off take a kick?
No. Eligibility is fixed at the end of play, and a player who left the field as a substitution is no longer part of the team for this purpose. A player who was temporarily off receiving treatment is a different case and may return to take a kick.
Why must the other players stand in the centre circle?
It keeps the penalty area clear, removes almost all opportunity for encroachment, and gives the referee one sightline covering everyone not directly involved. The kicking team’s goalkeeper is the exception and waits on the goal line at the edge of the penalty area.
Is a shootout decided more by the kicker or the goalkeeper?
The mechanics favour the kicker: a well-struck penalty arrives faster than a keeper can react to it, so the keeper guesses more often than he reacts. Beyond that the evidence is thin, because the sample is small and every shootout is different, so precise claims about save rates deserve caution.
Does the referee have any discretion over which goal is used?
Yes, and it is practical rather than sporting. The state of the pitch, the lighting, the safety of the area behind the goal and crowd considerations can all determine the choice. The coin toss settles it when none of those apply.
The next time a shootout produces an argument, notice which kind of question it is. If it concerns what somebody is allowed to do, there is a sentence that settles it. If it concerns what tends to happen, there probably is not one, and the confident answer is the one to distrust.
