How to Save a Penalty as a Goalkeeper

Your team gives away a soft penalty. Everyone turns and looks at you.

Your heart is going. The whole pitch has gone quiet.

And here is the thing nobody tells you at that moment: the pressure is not on you at all.

Why is there no pressure on you?

Look at the actual numbers.

A football goal is roughly 18 square metres. Diving your absolute best, you cover about 4 of them. That leaves 80% of the goal wide open for someone standing 11 metres away with a stationary ball.

Around four out of every five penalties end up in the net.

So you are in a win-win. Save it and you are the hero. Concede and you have done exactly what everyone expected.

I want you to actually feel that before your next one, because a goalkeeper who believes the pressure is on them moves differently. They plant early. They guess in a panic. The striker is the one with everything to lose here. You are the underdog, and everyone loves an underdog.

That does not mean rolling over. It means the odds being against you is the reason to try everything, not a reason to stand still.

Do mind games actually work?

They do, and the best goalkeepers in the world use them openly.

Emi Martinez spent the 2022 World Cup getting inside takers' heads. Dancing on his line, talking, throwing the ball away. Was some of it over the line? Probably. Did it work? Yes.

Jens Lehmann pulled a folded piece of paper out of his sock before every penalty at the 2006 World Cup. Whether he actually read anything useful on it barely matters. Imagine standing over the biggest kick of your life while the goalkeeper studies a note with your name on it.

You do not need to do any of that. There are quieter versions that work just as well:

• Take a sip of water and make him wait
• Pull your socks up
• Retie a boot
• Have a quick word with a defender
• Look at him, smile, and say nothing

Small delays give a nervous person more time to think. A striker who is overthinking a penalty is a striker who mishits it. The rest of the legal ones, from corners to free kicks, are in five legal goalkeeper tricks that win you games.

How do you know which way to dive?

You have less than half a second. The ball arrives at around 90 km/h. That is less time than a blink.

You have probably been told to watch the plant foot or the hips. In theory it is good advice, and most strikers do point their plant foot towards the shot or open their hips to curl it.

In practice, by the time you have read it, the ball is past you.

So stop trying to react. Make an educated guess, commit, and go.

Here is what to build the guess from.

None of these are guarantees. They are clues. With less than half a second to work with, clues are worth a lot.

What can you do on your line?

In 2005 Jerzy Dudek won Liverpool a Champions League final partly by wobbling about on his goal line, waving his arms and making himself impossible to ignore. The Dudek dance.

Back then goalkeepers had more freedom. Now at least part of one foot has to stay on the line when the ball is struck.

You can still do plenty within that:

Fake the dive. Lean or step one way as he starts his strike, then go the other. Works best against a taker who is watching you.

Stand slightly off centre. Move a step to one side and the other side of the goal starts to look bigger. Do it subtly and you can invite him into the space you were already planning to dive towards.

Be big. Bounce on your toes, spread your arms. The bigger you look, the smaller the goal looks from 11 metres.

Hold eye contact and smile. It says "I know where you're going." You almost certainly do not. He does not know that.

The one that actually works

I saved four out of eight penalties in a cup semi-final using this. It is the simplest thing in this whole article.

Watch his eyes.

Somewhere between placing the ball on the spot and starting his run-up, almost every taker glances at the exact spot he is aiming for. Right after he sets the ball down, while he is walking backwards, or in the half second before he moves.

Our eyes wander constantly. Under real pressure, they go where the mind already is.

It sounds too simple to be true. It is the single most reliable thing I have found in twenty years of facing penalties.

What to do before your next penalty

You will not remember eight things while standing on your line.

And if it goes in, walk back, pick the ball out, and let it go. Four out of five do. That one was never yours. If letting it go is the part you struggle with, how you talk to yourself after conceding is the habit to fix first.

Most penalties are decided before the run-up, and so is most of the rest of your game. If you want the whole subject, start with the complete guide to goalkeeper positioning.