From the Euro 1996 semi-finals to the start of the 2018 World Cup, the penalty record of the England men’s national team was famously messy. Five matches went to penalties, five were lost.
Penalties had become a weight around England’s neck. Their nemesis.
Then, at the World Cup in Russia, they ended that terrible run, beating Colombia on penalties to reach the quarter-finals.
In this exclusive extract from Geir Jordet’s new book, Pressure: Lessons from the Psychology of the Penalty Shootout, we learn about an unsung hero who worked for 18 months to help make it possible…
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The England 2018 story
In the round of 16 at the 2018 World Cup, England faced Colombia. The game ended 1-1 after extra time and went to penalties. Most England fans had a strong idea about how this was likely to end.
Since 1996, they had featured in five critical shootouts and lost them all. Moreover, my analyses had revealed that England players adopted more avoidance-oriented coping strategies in those shootout situations than any other players in Europe.
Chris Markham watched the Colombia game with colleagues in the in-house bar at St George’s Park, the Football Association’s headquarters. When Eric Dier converted the penalty that sent England into the quarter-finals and ended a 22-year era of consecutive shootout nightmares, everybody was, understandably, elated. About 30 minutes later, Markham’s phone pinged. It was a text message from Gareth Southgate, the England manager, thanking Markham and his team for everything they had done, without which the win would not have been possible.
Later, there would be a number of people who received and/or took credit for this penalty shootout success. In addition to the players and the coach, some people pointed to the FA’s technical director, some to the performance director, others to the psychologist. But Chris Markham’s name never seemed to come up. Why then did Southgate text Markham? Who is Markham anyway, and what did he do?
Allow me to tell the full story of what happened behind the scenes leading up to that penalty shootout win, and of how England regained control of something that had been eluding them for decades.
Chris Markham is currently the sporting director at Bolton Wanderers, but from January 2017 until February 2021, he was the game insights lead analyst at the FA. This new department, the brainchild of Rhys Long, head of analysis at the time, was tasked with finding and developing the types of match analytics insights that could be important for the England national teams’ performances, insights that those working directly with the teams did not have the time to pursue.
However, although Markham came to the FA from a job as head of performance analysis at Huddersfield Town FC, he was not an ordinary match analyst. His education was in sport psychology, completing his master’s degree in 2009.
“The first thing from the FA that landed on my desk,” Markham told me, “was: ‘How do we win a penalty shootout at a major tournament?’.” From January 2017 until the World Cup in Russia 18 months later, Markham led a team of four analysts, and eventually a data scientist, all working with one goal: to help England overcome the dreaded penalties.
I was introduced to Markham in January 2018 and met him for the first time in April that same year. He wanted to pick my brain about everything to do with penalties, and also show me what he and his team had done so far, and how they had used my research. What he showed me then, and what I later learned about the project, blew me away. I can safely say that no other team in the history of football has ever prepared as thoroughly and diligently for penalties as England did before the 2018 World Cup.
When I later sat down with Markham while writing this book, he shared a lot more detail about what they did leading up to that World Cup. The contrast with previous England management regimes was unmistakable. Markham: “I found quotes from each of the last five England managers before Gareth (Southgate), not including Sam (Allardyce), that said either the penalty shootout was a lottery, penalties are all down to luck, or that you can’t practise that kind of pressure.”
England after losing to Italy on penalties at Euro 2012 (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Over time, the “lottery” narrative had built a fundamental belief that penalties cannot be controlled or trained for, creating a pervasive feeling of helplessness. Markham was very aware of those consequences: “From a psychological perspective, speaking about a lottery takes ownership away from the players. And that was the thing for me to give them back. To take control of not just the kick itself but the whole process. Initially, it was about the perceived control. How can we increase the level of perceived control for the players and the staff and everybody?”
With that objective in sight, different steps were taken. Here are some of the key ones:
A presentation for Southgate: ‘Gaze masks and goggles’
At first, the team had six months to prepare one presentation for the manager, to convince him they could have an impact.
“Luckily for us, Gareth and his staff were extremely open-minded and respectful of good-quality work. But they don’t suffer fools gladly, so we knew it had to be at a really high standard.”
However, Markham was very aware that they were presenting a level of detail that Southgate and his staff had probably never seen before. “Talking about run-up steps, angle, pace, you know… everything from breathing techniques, optimal areas of aiming, goalkeepers, looking at gaze masks and goggles. And that was just on the technical bit. And then player selection, gambler’s fallacy, action biases and the centre of the goal being under-used… all these things could have easily blown them away, so I remember I went into Gareth’s office, and we basically printed out and cut into bits of paper all the different topics and Gareth then prioritised, literally on the floor and table, which ones he thought were important and which ones he thought were less of a priority.”
Dosage
Southgate’s leadership and communication were key. Markham and his team had discovered all this fascinating information about penalty kicks, and were inclined to give as much as possible of it to the players, but Southgate kept everything in perspective.
“Gareth understood there was a huge amount of information here and some of it was really important. However, if you make too much of a deal of this to the players it will have the reverse effect and instead of decreasing the pressure, it will increase the pressure. It will be paralysis by analysis. Gareth was really good, being able to get the right level of detail, the timing of detail, how it was put across to them and just make them aware of these things.”
Southgate and his squad worked on penalty shootouts during training sessions at the 2018 World Cup (Owen Humphreys/PA Images via Getty Images)
Breaking down the shootout into distinct functional units
In the beginning, they read scientific papers to understand not just the penalty kicks, but also the syntax of the entire penalty shootout.
The phases we broke the shootout into were:
Phase 1: The break after extra time
Phase 2: The centre circle
Phase 3: The walk
Phase 4: At the penalty spot
“And that was when it started to come to life — the different areas that we need to be really good at. It is not just the kick, it is not just the psychology, there is a process that we can actually make that will take the pressure away from the players ultimately.”
Process
Southgate notoriously speaks about focusing on the process, not the outcome. The same went for penalties. Markham: “We then spoke about a process we can follow and be better at. The main reason for that was our idea that the main thing we can do here is give the players back the sense that they are in control of this, that it is a skill that they can improve. If we could give the players process and ownership, they could then believe that this was something they could control.”
Analyses of own players
Markham and his team conducted elaborate and rigorous analyses of their players’ penalty kicks.
“One thing that we added was a pressure rating. Why would we look at a penalty in pre-season when John Stones takes two steps and puts it in the top corner as the same as a penalty in the FA Cup final? You have to differentiate between them. We also looked at England’s penalty shootout experience. How many players were on the field in penalty shootout situations? And who took versus didn’t take. We found some interesting things on some of the bigger attacking players who had clearly been avoiding taking them in the shootouts. So that gave us insight.”
Meeting the players
Markham and his team presented a lot of these ideas to the players in a penalty workshop held in March 2018, a few months before the World Cup. “That was when we introduced the idea that the penalty shootout can be broken down into different areas and aspects. And we spoke about each of those in detail.”
A part of this first meeting was to show a video with a lot of details about run-ups, routines, referee behaviours, team behaviours, etc. They did this to “basically say, there’s way more to this than you think”.
This was also the first time the players got to express their views. “Certain players with experience didn’t want to take (a penalty); certain players without experience did (want to take a penalty) and vice versa.”
In the meetings with the players, they attempted to change the mentality around penalties, demonstrating to them, among other things, that England would be better prepared than anyone else.
“Framing was the main bit. All this work was ultimately going into building the perception that we have control over this. It is not something like a lottery; we can be better prepared than the other team because they won’t be thinking about it in this much detail.”
Meetings with referees
In the preparation phase, Markham also held meetings with referees to discuss the opportunities and constraints of the penalty shootout rules and regulations.
“It was all around the logistics of what-if scenarios. We discussed what we could get away with and at what point they would give you a yellow card. Around distraction, how much is the goalie going to get away with? Is he going to get away with scuffing the spot? Is he going to get away with pushing the bar?”
Jordan Pickford pushing the bar before Colombia’s first penalty, taken by Radamel Falcao
These discussions included trying to understand and incorporate the psychology of the referees themselves. “Look, most referees are probably not going to want to be the centre of attention at this point. So we deduced from that: you’re probably going to get away with more than you think.”
Notes on the goalkeeper’s bottle
This was not new, but they had elaborate discussions around the information about opponent penalty takers that would appear on the goalkeeper’s water bottle, which included transferring knowledge from other sports: “We looked at quarterback sleeves for the goalie and all these sorts of things.”
Pickford’s water bottle during a Premier League match for Everton against West Ham (Lindsey Parnaby/AFP via Getty Images)
The reaction to the whistle
They knew our studies on reaction time and performance well but created an elegant communicative spin around it.
“We were really surprised with how quick, overall, players were and how short a time they took. As soon as the whistle went, they started running. I remember telling the players: ‘The whistle is not your cue; it is the referee’s cue. So, you can begin the run-up whenever you like. Your routine doesn’t start on the whistle; it starts when you want it to start’.”
Goalkeeper handoff
One of the distinct innovations that Markham and England brought to penalty shootouts was that their goalkeeper always would seek out the ball after having been in action at the goal line, to hand it over to the next teammate penalty taker. Interestingly, the idea for this came from having considered ways that the goalkeeper could engage in distraction of the opposition’s penalty takers.
“Obviously, one of the things we measured in our analysis was distraction. So, we tried to categorise distraction from the goalie from low, to medium, to high. We sub-coded all those goalie distractions: waving, jumping, shouting, pointing, messing with the bar… as part of this, the goalkeeper’s job was to go get the ball if he could. So, after we took a penalty, he would have to try and get it and after they took a penalty, he would have to try and get it. We wanted to mess about with them and not allow their goalie to mess about with us.”
Pickford walking out to meet Marcus Rashford and pass him the ball to take England’s second penalty
Tailored training
The players and team practised penalties, but to a carefully measured degree, which was tailored to the player in question. “Players with little to no experience, such as Kieran Trippier, were treated differently to those with vast experience, such as Harry Kane.
“The dosage was really important and, again, Gareth and Steve Holland were excellent at managing this. Especially since you can’t have too many opposed kicks because of the goalkeeper, it starts getting unrealistic. Because the goalkeeper knows where the takers are going to go. So, you just end up messing about and it becomes more play than training.”
They did their best to simulate the full penalty shootout.
“We did a proper penalty shootout with referees, a huddle, a walk, a centre circle, messing with distractions — all of that. So, a proper dress rehearsal before they left for Russia. I’m sure they would have done another when they were in Russia.”
Also in Russia, the analysis team collected and coded each penalty taken and faced in training to “monitor performance and the development of routines, which ultimately played a part in deciding the order of penalty kickers in a shootout”.
Roles in the break after extra time
Another innovation they introduced was structuring the roles and communication for the team gathering after extra time and ahead of them walking into the centre circle.
The inspiration for this idea came from another sport.
“We spoke to Team GB Hockey about the penalty shootout process as a whole, designating roles and responsibilities for all staff and players, even those not involved in the shootout. Roles were communicated clearly during specific team meetings and practice during training sessions.”
Part of this was to divide the area around the team into different zones.
“We wanted to create clear boundaries that staff and players could or couldn’t cross. You had touchlines, you had the dugout and the technical area. They created a drinking station, a massage station, and players couldn’t go on to the field, or certain staff members were told: ‘You are not needed on the field at this time, because we need you in the technical area’.”
One can see this plan in action in that eventual shootout against Colombia. The atmosphere in the English camp appeared composed, focused and professional. The goalkeeper only spoke to a few select people, and was approached by only one staff member at a time. The contrast with the Colombia team was visible. At one point, David Ospina, the Colombian goalie, found himself being addressed by five staff members or team-mates at once.
England’s squad huddle before the shootout against Colombia (Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images)
Personal impressions
This project was obviously a big experience for Markham, both in the short and the long term.
“When the shootout happened, I’ve never been so nervous. I felt sick.”
Colombia’s Radamel Falcao started it all with a rocket straight down the middle. Goal.
Kane came next. Routine as usual, composed and controlled. Goal.
Harry Kane scoring his penalty against Colombia (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
The next three penalties also went in, including the one from Marcus Rashford, with his pause after the whistle being under one second.
Colombia’s manager, Jose Pekerman, hid his face in his hands for most of the shootout, while Southgate looked as cool and composed as his waistcoat.
Then Jordan Henderson for England. Goalkeeper-independent shot to his right. The goalkeeper went early. Save. A long walk back to the centre circle.
However, the next two Colombians, Mateus Uribe and Carlos Bacca, also missed, while Trippier scored to leave it all up to Eric Dier to send England through.
He did. Goal. England had won their first penalty shootout since 1996.
(Matthias Hangst/Getty Images)
For Markham and his team, one would have expected the party afterwards to go on all night. But in professional football, there is always the next game.
“I stayed up to like 9am that morning because we had to prepare the information on (next opponents) Sweden. So, I still don’t think I’ve celebrated it now.”
Markham remains proud of what they did, though.
“It will still probably go down as the thing I’m most proud of in my career, no matter what I achieve as a sporting director, because of the sheer scale of it. I still don’t understand it now. We were so locked in a bubble at St George’s Park. The good thing was that the brilliant team we had, that had done all the hard work together over the previous 18 months, were all there to celebrate our achievement together. That was the special bit.”
(Top photo: Alex Morton/Getty Images)
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