For more than 20 years, Lionel Messi has been able to do anything he wants on a soccer pitch, bending the game to his will and conjuring otherworldly moves out of thin air. But there’s one skill that seems to leave this 5-foot-7 maestro looking up at everyone else.
It just happens to be one of the easiest shots in soccer.
When Messi stands over the ball to take a penalty kick, he is only 12 yards out, with 196 square feet to aim at, and only the goalkeeper to beat. Yet somehow, this is the one situation where his superpowers suddenly desert him.
On Tuesday, in Argentina’s World Cup round-of-16 nail-biter against Egypt, Messi missed another one. With his team trailing 1-0, he placed his shot low to the goalkeeper’s left, only to see his attempt parried away like a beachball. It was Messi’s second penalty miss of the tournament and his fourth in eight career attempts at the World Cup.
Messi has converted only 114 of his 148 penalty kicks for club and country (outside of shootouts) for a success rate of 77.0%. That’s right around the average success rate for all players over the past two decades, which means that the penalty spot is the one place where Messi goes from extraterrestrial to strangely mortal. In fact, in the 96-year history of the World Cup, no one has missed more penalties.
Which helps explain why Messi reacted to Tuesday’s latest failure from the penalty spot with a raw show of emotion rarely displayed by superhuman athletes. He burst into tears.
“I cried because I felt that I let my teammates down because of the penalty I missed,” Messi said afterward, “and the way I took it.”
It turns out that the way he took it may be part of the problem. The world’s leading penalty takers, such as Harry Kane, who holds the World Cup record with six penalty goals, has scored 111 of his 124 career spot kicks—or more than 89%—by relying on the same approach, over and over.
Messi, however, doesn’t have a standard, go-to technique from the spot. Instead, he varies his approach depending on how he feels and which goalkeeper he’s facing.
In a FIFA study of his seven penalties at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, there was a significant disparity in speed (24.9 mph vs. 66.9 mph), direction of shot, and which part of his foot he used to strike the ball, between his various efforts. But Messi’s most common strategy is also one of the riskiest: He waits to see which way the keeper commits and then simply sends his penalty in the opposite direction.
But beyond his personal game theory, there is another factor at play. The very exercise of the penalty kick strips away many parts of the game where Messi usually flexes his genius. There’s no dribbling here, no sudden change of direction, or blur of delicate touches. Messi still has a wide array of tricks available to deceive the goalkeeper—and he remains one of the greatest strikers of the ball to ever live—but he is distinctly less terrifying when all he can do is touch the ball one time.
That’s why some of the most miserable moments in his glittering career have come from the penalty spot. In 2016, his miss contributed to Argentina’s defeat against Chile in the final of the Copa America Centenario. He was so distraught that he retired from the national team immediately after the game. Two years later, having un-retired, Messi flubbed another one at the World Cup in Russia in an embarrassing 1-1 draw against Iceland.
But when the Qatar World Cup rolled around, in 2022, he found himself on a rare hot streak. And it couldn’t have come at a better time. Messi took seven penalties during the course of the tournament and converted six of them, including a crucial one in the victorious shootout against France in the final.
“It’s the most beautiful thing,” he said at the time. “I felt this was the one for us.”
Write to Jonathan Clegg at Jonathan.Clegg@wsj.com and Joshua Robinson at Joshua.Robinson@wsj.com
