How this simulator works (every number shown)
This is a probability model wearing football boots. Each of the six target zones carries three honest numbers, all visible in the game itself:
| Zone | Miss risk | Save chance if the keeper guesses right | Overall conversion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top corners | 12% | 30% | ~76% |
| Low corners | 6% | 50% | ~73% |
| High center | 10% | 55% | ~84% |
| Low center | 2% | 80% | ~89% |
The keeper dives left 44% of the time, right 44%, and stays central just 12% — generous to the keeper compared with the real research below. Corners are harder to save but easier to miss; the center is easy to hit and usually vacated. That tension is the whole game of penalties.
The strangest fact in football: keepers should stand still more
A famous 2007 study by Michael Bar-Eli and colleagues analyzed hundreds of professional penalties and found that keepers dived left or right about 94% of the time — yet staying in the center would have stopped more shots, because a meaningful share of kicks go straight down the middle. Why don't keepers stay? The researchers called it action bias: a keeper who dives and concedes looks heroic; a keeper who stands still and concedes looks asleep. The same psychology shows up in medicine, investing, and management — doing something feels safer than doing the optimal nothing. Penalty kicks are the cleanest natural experiment behavioral economics ever got.
Why the shooter doesn't always aim center, then
If the center converts best, why do pros keep aiming for corners? Partly because the equilibrium shifts: if everyone shot central, keepers would start standing still. Game theorists have shown professional penalty takers mix their targets in close-to-optimal proportions — penalties are a live game of rock-paper-scissors played at 70 mph. And partly it's the mirror of action bias: a striker whose central penalty is saved by a stationary keeper has found the one way to make a missed penalty feel worse.
The live win-probability meter
After every kick, the meter recomputes your chance of winning the shootout from the current state: kicks remaining on each side, the score gap, and the professional average of roughly 75% conversion per kick, with sudden death as an even coin flip. Watch what a first-kick miss does to it — that single number explains why managers agonize over their kicker order. (The consensus from the data: put strong takers first and fifth, and never save your best for a kick that may never come.)
What the model leaves out
Real shootouts have exhausted legs, screaming crowds, gamesmanship on the goal line, and kickers who have studied each other's habits for weeks. Our keeper doesn't read scouting reports and our striker's legs never get tired. Treat the percentages as the honest skeleton of the real thing — and treat your 5-for-5 performance as fully bragging-rights eligible anyway.