Penalty kicks, to people who love soccer, are something of a necessary evil. They’re not reflective of the sport itself — as others have pointed out, they’re like baseball replacing extra innings with a home run derby, or settling NBA overtime with a dunk contest — and their result is mostly arbitrary. It’s a terrible way to decide the best team in a hard-fought match.
But you have to end the game somehow: In a sport in which scoring can be sparse, you can’t let the players just run around out there forever. They could end up playing all night. At the very least, a penalty kick provides an answer, even if it’s an inconclusive one. Eventually someone has to win.
But as exciting as penalty kicks are — and the World Cup knockout round led off with some truly jaw-dropping ones, from Paraguay’s stunner over Germany to a wild Moroccan victory over the Netherlands — I think they’re more than just some cheap thrills to finish up a game that otherwise might never end. I believe penalty kicks are the closest thing sports has to a metaphor for life. Penalty kicks reflect the randomness of life — in all its ridiculous glory — better than anything else I’ve found in sports.
If you don’t mind getting a little nostalgic with me, look back at the most pivotal moments in your life. Maybe it was the moment you met your spouse. Maybe it was when your children were born. Maybe it was getting a job opportunity that changed your life. Maybe it was a time when a friend, or a mentor, or even a great work of art altered the way your mind works, opening a whole new world of possibilities. Maybe it was your first great piece of pizza.
Whatever that pivotal moment was … how much of it was luck? Fortune? Chance? That you just happened to be standing at the right place at the right time? This doesn’t mean you lacked autonomy or agency, that you just sat there as life happened to you, that you did nothing. Such moments are pivotal because of what we do with them, how we react to them; our lives are what we make of them.
But they had to happen to us first. And we don’t have a lot of control over that. I didn’t choose to meet my wife; we just were at the same engagement party for a mutual friend. When that opportunity presented itself, I was ready for it, and so was she. We took advantage of it, and now we have two children and a house and careers and all the things that we’ve built out of that moment. But that moment, the moment itself? We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. It was dumb luck.
And nothing in sports is more consistently decided by dumb luck than a penalty kick. Sure, there is skill involved, like there is skill in everything: You have to be able to kick a ball hard to score, and you have to be able to block a hard-kicked ball to stop someone from scoring. But the reason penalty kicks are so exciting is that you can do everything right and still lose, and you can do everything wrong and win.
The penalty taker is guessing which direction the keeper will dive; the keeper is guessing which direction the penalty taker will kick. They’re both just flipping a coin. Some keepers are better at stopping penalty kicks than others, and some penalty takers are better at scoring than others. (This is famously, and oddly, one of Lionel Messi’s few weaknesses.) You can be in the right position to succeed, you can try your best, you can practice every possible move, but the result is mostly out of your control.
But the reason you are there, in a position for dumb luck to deliver you a win, is because you have put yourself there. I know it is super cool to quote Woody Allen these days, people love it, he’s never been more universally respected and beloved, but I’ve always thought one of the smartest things he ever said was “80 percent of success is showing up.” What he meant was that all the successes we have in our lives are simply a product of putting ourselves in the correct position — by putting one foot in front of the other and being available when life aligns exactly right. It won’t always align right: Most of the time it doesn’t. But the only thing you can control is being ready in those rare moments when it does. That’s what being alive is.
And that’s why I love penalty kicks. Every time a keeper guesses right, every time a penalty taker gets just the right bounce, every time one team has all their dreams come true simply because a ball landed one millimeter to the left of where it could have landed for no other reason than the random whims of the universe — it reminds me of my life, and your life, everyone’s lives on this planet. Successful people like to claim they make their own luck, but that’s not quite right. It’s that when luck finds them, they run with it.
Is Paraguay a better team than Germany because they won in penalty kicks? What does better have to do with anything? They won because they put themselves into position to win, and then the fates did their work. It was just dumb luck. Isn’t that what life is all about? Isn’t it wonderful?
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