A penalty shootout is five kicks each, taken alternately, then sudden death if the scores are level. The order is the manager's and can change between rounds, though every eligible player must take one before anyone takes a second. Retakes are forced when the goalkeeper leaves the line and saves it, or when encroachment changed the outcome. Those are the rules in a paragraph; the rest of this explains where they bite.
Everything else is detail — but the detail is where shootouts are actually decided, and almost none of it is explained on the broadcast while it is happening. The 2026/27 rounds that reach this stage will be settled by the same handful of rules that have decided them for years.
The order is not what most people think
There is no requirement to name your takers in advance, and no requirement to stick to a list once you have one.
Managers hand the referee an order, but it can change between rounds, and it routinely does. A player who looked composed in the tunnel and does not look composed on the halfway line gets moved down. The only hard rule is that every eligible player on the pitch must take one before anyone takes a second.
That constraint is why shootouts past ten kicks get strange. The eleventh taker is whoever is left, which is frequently a centre-back who has never taken a penalty in a competitive match, and after that the order restarts from the top with the specialists back on strike.
The coin toss matters more than it sounds. Going first is generally the advantage — the team kicking second is always chasing — though the effect is smaller than the commentary around it suggests, and since 2017 the winning captain has been allowed to choose rather than being forced to take it.
Who is even allowed to take one
Only players on the pitch when the match ends.
Anyone substituted off is finished, and so is anyone sent off. If one side finishes with ten players and the other with eleven, the larger side must reduce to match — a rule called "reduce to equate", and the player left out is the manager's choice.
This is where a late red card can decide a tie hours before the shootout starts. Losing a first-choice penalty taker to a second yellow in the ninetieth minute costs a team twice: once on the pitch, and again when the list is drawn up.
What actually forces a retake
The rule people know is that the goalkeeper must keep at least part of one foot on or above the goal line until the ball is kicked. What people get wrong is the consequence.
If the goalkeeper encroaches and saves it, the kick is retaken. If the goalkeeper encroaches and the penalty goes in, the goal stands — there is nothing to correct. The offence only matters when it changed the outcome, which is the principle running through the Laws of the Game more broadly.
Attacking encroachment works the same way in reverse. A team-mate stepping into the area early only forces a retake if the kick was scored; if it was missed, the miss stands.
Since video review became standard in the competitions that use it, these are checked rather than judged in real time. UEFA applies review to shootouts in its own competitions, which is why the pauses between kicks in a European tie are longer than they used to be.
The goalkeeper problem
A goalkeeper sent off during a shootout — for repeated encroachment, or for something worse — creates the single exception to the no-substitutions rule.
A team that still has a substitution available may bring on a replacement keeper. A team that has used them all cannot, and must put an outfield player in goal. That player is then in the order like everybody else, which has produced some of the odder endings in the competition's history.
Where a shootout is actually decided
The interesting research on shootouts points somewhere other than where the argument usually goes, and it is worth knowing before watching another one.
Conversion is overwhelmingly about the taker's decision, not the goalkeeper's. A penalty struck firmly into a top corner is unsaveable regardless of whether the keeper guesses correctly, and the players who miss are usually the ones who aimed for a saveable part of the goal. The keeper's contribution is real but smaller than the theatre suggests — most saves are of kicks that were poorly placed rather than well read.
What the goalkeeper genuinely influences is the delay. Everything keepers do between the whistle and the kick — arriving late on the line, adjusting the spot, standing off centre, holding eye contact — is aimed at extending the period in which the taker can change their mind. Takers who have decided on a target and do not revisit it convert at a much higher rate than those who choose during the run-up.
That is why the advice given to takers is nearly always about commitment rather than technique, and why the walk from the halfway line is treated as the dangerous part rather than the kick itself.
The order effect, and how strong it really is
The claim that going first wins shootouts is repeated constantly and is weaker than its reputation.
The theory is straightforward: the team kicking second is always behind or level and never ahead, so every one of their kicks carries more pressure than the equivalent kick for the team in front. The effect is real in the data, but the margin is modest — enough to matter across hundreds of shootouts, nowhere near enough to predict a single one.
It was strong enough for the competition's authorities to take seriously. Alternative sequences were trialled, borrowing the serving pattern from a tennis tiebreak so that the disadvantage alternated rather than accumulating. The trials found the format harder to follow than it was worth, and the standard alternating sequence stayed.
What did change, in 2017, was the coin toss. The captain who wins it now chooses whether to kick first or second rather than being obliged to go first — a small correction that costs nothing and removes an arbitrary element from a tie that has already been decided by too many of them.
The preparation that does and does not help
Clubs prepare for shootouts far more seriously than they did a decade ago, and the parts that work are not the parts you would expect.
Practising penalties at the end of training has little measurable effect, because the difficulty is not the kick. What does appear to help is rehearsing the surrounding minutes: who walks where, what the order is, how long a taker waits, and what happens if the referee delays them. Sides that have rehearsed the routine convert better than sides that have only rehearsed the strike.
Goalkeeper preparation is more concrete. Analysts assemble records of where individual opponents have placed penalties, and keepers are given a shortlist rather than a dossier — a note in a bottle holder rather than a spreadsheet. The value is smaller than the coverage suggests, because takers know they are being studied and vary accordingly, but it is not nothing.
The least useful preparation is deciding the order in advance and refusing to revisit it. Managers who ask for volunteers on the pitch get a different and generally better list than the one written in the morning.
Why the format survives the criticism
Shootouts are regularly described as a lottery, and the description is wrong in a specific way worth knowing.
Conversion rates are stable and high — the overwhelming majority of penalties are scored, and the variation between teams is smaller than the variation between individual takers on the night. What makes a shootout feel random is not the mechanism but the sample size: five kicks is too few for the better side to reliably assert itself.
Every proposed replacement has failed on the same objection. Extended extra time exhausts players in a congested calendar, and the calendar has no slack to give. Replays cost a date nobody has. A shootout resolves a tie in fifteen minutes, on the pitch, in front of the people who paid to be there — which is why, for all the complaints, nothing has replaced it.
