English goalkeepers are not responsible for England’s poor performance in penalty shootouts in the past

Abstract

Scrutinizing public opinion is one of the central goals of science as the divergence between public opinion and scientific evidence can have negative consequences. The present study aims to further investigate the alleged English ‘penalty curse’ and determine if it can be linked to the prevalent stereotype of the ‘English goalkeeper problem’. We analyzed a large sample of 2379 penalty kicks that 629 different goalkeepers faced in World Cups and European Championships, as well as in the Champions and Europa League by comparing the goalkeeper success rates of different nations by fitting a generalized linear model (binomial regression) to the data. However, the results do not reveal meaningful differences between the success rates (on average 22.23%). Consequently, we conclude that English goalkeepers are not responsible for England’s poor performance in penalties in the past as they perform as well as goalkeepers from other nations and, in turn, provide a counterargument to the widespread stereotype that ‘England has a goalkeeper problem’.