Nobody misses penalties any more - and how an expert thinks it could impact the play-offs
Huw Davies dives into the curious disappearance of the off-target penalty, with help from penalty expert and author of Twelve Yards, Ben Lyttleton.
Huw Davies
When I think of a famous failure to convert a penalty, my mind goes to Paul Bodin in 1993, obviously, but then almost as immediately to Roberto Baggio, Chris Waddle, Diana Ross, Gareth Southgate and John Terry. They’re such powerful visuals, it doesn’t matter that I was only three and seven years old respectively during Italia 90 and USA 94. And five of those six have something in common: they were actual, genuine misses.
Whether it’s due to those examples, or the language of football declaring that an accurate penalty that’s saved is nonetheless a ‘penalty miss’, we tend to associate spotkick failures with efforts blazed over the bar or hitting the woodwork rather than penalties that are saved. It’s not an age thing: I asked around and other football fans’ memories conjure up images of David Beckham skying his kick at Euro 2004, or Asamoah Gyan hitting the bar in 2010, or Harry Kane missing his second penalty of the game against France in Qatar. (The fact that it’s so often international football is a whole other subject.)
That’s probably why, as I was sitting watching EFL highlights a few months ago, it suddenly occurred to me: nobody’s missing penalties any more. Anecdotal evidence, at least, suggested they were all being scored or saved; any failures to score seemed to be when the goalkeeper parried or even held onto a tame effort, perhaps following a slow run-up that’s almost as excruciating as the resulting embarrassment several seconds/hours later. So, I went looking through every penalty taken in the EFL this season.
And imagine my shock at what I found. Then imagine my consternation as I continued to keep track and the pattern remained.
In all, there have been 310 penalties across the Championship, League One and League Two in 2025/26. Of those, 229 were scored, 73 were saved, seven hit the woodwork and one missed the whole thing altogether.
