Best penalty takers in the world by percentage (as of 1 Mar 2024)
One man to shoot a penalty kick to save your life? Have you picked one of these top 10 best penalty-takers in the world? Percentages say you should've.
www.insidesport.com
"To ensure some validity, we drew the line at
including only players who have score more than 30 penalty goals in their careers. That is, 31 being the cut-off point. Of course,
penalty shootouts are not included in the count."
Haaland - 91.11
Lewandowski - 89.53
Fernandes - 89.47
Ramos - 86.48
Kane - 86.41
Lukaku - 85.71
Jorginho - 85.51
Ronaldo - 84.73
Immobile - 82.63
Benzema - 82
"
(between 27 Jun 2023 to 1 Mar 2024) While
Salah did score seven new penalties, he missed three and his overall record is 39 made out of 49 attempted.
A percentage of 79.59%, coming down from 82.05%."
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Why left-footers are behind record penalty conversion rate in the Premier League
Dated 21 Dec 2023
If you’ve ever wondered why a penalty has an expected-goals value of 0.78, it’s because on
average 78 per cent of penalties are scored.
But
in the Premier League this season, the conversion rate is almost 92 per cent — 44 goals from 48 penalties. Earlier this month, Chelsea’s Robert Sanchez saved Bruno Fernandes’ penalty to end a run of 32 successful penalties in a row.
Premier League penalty conversion rates have been as low as 65.5 per cent in 2001-02 and as high as 83.9 per cent in 2013-14. There are periods when players score or miss more. In fact,
three of the last five seasons have seen above-average conversion rates.
That recent spike might owe to a law change ahead of the 2019-20 season, which required goalkeepers to be on the line — preventing them from starting behind it to jump forward — and minimised their movement. It takes skilled goalkeepers 0.6 to 1 second to dive to the corners from the centre of the goal, and penalties can reach the goal as quickly as 0.4 seconds, so being pinned to the line compounds the attacking advantage.
Additionally, penalty takers may be getting used to long VAR delays, which have been attributed to lower conversion rates (as anxiety goes up). An influx of quality penalty-takers might explain the phenomenon, as would the departure of the league’s best penalty-saving goalkeepers (or the reverse for bad takers/savers), but neither has happened.
But
since the start of 2021-22, Premier League goalkeepers have dived the right way 41 per cent of the time against right-footed penalties — regardless of the shot outcome — compared to 30 per cent against left-footers. That sample feels big enough: inclusive of penalties under the new penalty laws but also excluding behind-closed-doors games during the pandemic, given the psychological nature of penalties.
Left-footers, like left-handers, are a minority in football but are often overrepresented compared to the general population. Football pitches are symmetrical, and the Eurocentric modern positional styles require left-footers, Pyzdrowski explains. “Especially in today’s game, the desire for most teams to want to play out of the back, you see more left-footed players,” he says. “You don’t just see them on the wings, guys in the middle, left-footed centre-backs — a hot commodity. I think that applies to penalties too.”
Critically, this trend is not the result of a few quality left-footed penalty-takers (or bad right-footers) skewing overall trends. Chelsea’s Cole Palmer (four out of four penalties scored this season), Brentford’s Bryan Mbeumo (three out of three) and Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah (three out of four) are left-footed right-wingers; Alexis Mac Allister (right-footed) who joined Liverpool in the summer, scored six of seven penalty attempts last season for Brighton & Hove Albion but is behind Salah in the pecking order.
Arsenal’s Bukayo Saka is their primary taker and another left-footed right-winger — in fact, all six of Arsenal’s Premier League penalties this season have been scored by left-footers: Saka, Fabio Vieira, Martin Odegaard and Kai Havertz. Manchester City used to have Riyad Mahrez on penalties, another left-footed right-winger, though he only scored 13 out of 21 penalties for City. He has been replaced by Erling Haaland (three out of four this season), a left-footed No 9.
