There aren’t many moments in football that are more nerve-wracking than stepping up to take a penalty. The whole ground falls silent, your teammates can barely bear to watch and the only two people involved are you and a goalkeeper who is desperate to make you look foolish. Most players deal with that pressure by picking a corner and hitting the ball as hard as they possibly can, but there is another way of doing things that, when it comes off, is about as cool as football gets.
That, of course, is the Panenka, a penalty so audacious that it takes a special kind of bravery to even attempt it.
Most Famous Penalty Style
Antonín Panenka – David Sedlecký, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The skill is named after Antonín Panenka, the Czechoslovakian midfielder who first pulled it off on the biggest stage imaginable. It was during the final of the 1976 European Championship, with his country facing West Germany in a penalty shootout, that Panenka decided to do something that nobody had ever really seen before. Rather than blasting the ball into a corner, he ran up as if he was going to do exactly that, only to gently chip the ball straight down the middle of the goal. The German goalkeeper, Sepp Maier, had already dived off to one side, leaving him with nothing more to do than watch the ball float into the net to win the trophy.
Ever since that audacious moment, the chipped penalty has carried his name. In order to pull it off, the entire move relies on you being able to read the goalkeeper and hold your nerve right up until the very last second. You begin your run-up looking for all the world as though you are going to smash the ball, which is the part that convinces the ‘keeper that they need to commit to a dive. The crucial moment comes as you plant your standing foot, at which point you don’t follow through at all. Instead, you get your foot underneath the ball and gently scoop it, sending it floating into the space that the goalkeeper has just vacated by throwing themselves to one side.
It is worth bearing in mind that this is a real high-risk, high-reward kind of skill. Get it right and you will look like an absolute genius, with everyone in the ground appreciating the sheer audacity of what you’ve just done. Get it wrong, however, and you will look about as silly as it is possible to look on a football pitch, gently passing the ball into the arms of a goalkeeper who can’t quite believe their luck. That is why, despite its simplicity in terms of the actual technique involved, you should only really attempt it once you’ve practised it endlessly and you’re confident in your ability to hold your nerve. Players such as Andrea Pirlo, Zinedine Zidane and Sergio Ramos have all used it in major matches.