Football experts keep preaching that practicing penalty kicks is a waste of time. Cracking the Penalty Code offers a groundbreaking approach to finally win shootouts at major tournaments. Football experts in England and the Netherlands keep preaching that practicing penalty kicks is a waste of time. To them, shootouts are nothing more than a ‘lottery’. Be that as it may, winning a World Cup or European Championship has become almost impossible without surviving at least one penalty shootout. There is compelling evidence that teams perform significantly better when they practice correctly. Vergouw offers a groundbreaking new approach to solving important questions surrounding the penalty shootout. He believes The Three Lions will benefit from this publication and he hopes they win their first trophy since 1966. It goes without saying, after taking perfect penalties. George Vergouw was the first author to publish a book on big data in football in his internationally acclaimed book De Strafschop. He wrote Cracking the Penalty Code especially for English and Dutch football professionals and fans. More than twenty years after his controversial book De Strafschop, George Vergouw (known in the Netherlands as Gyuri Vergouw and 'Professor Penalty', has released a completely new English-language penalty book, aimed at Dutch and English fans and football professionals. Not just figures and analyses, but above all a book about the background of the penalty kick and personal experiences (and collisions) with football professionals. What can we do together, players, coaches, press and fans, to stop the cycle of losing shootouts? Author Vergouw has given hundreds of interviews about the trainability of penalties. In his new book, Vergouw compares the football culture of England and the Netherlands with that of Germany, the Czech Republic and Argentina, countries that are good at taking penalties. The book answers many questions, including: Why do people think, especially in England and the Netherlands, that the penalty cannot be trained? And why does this thought alone leads to missing penalties? Where does the idea of ​​goalkeeper change just before a shootout actually come from? Is Messi or Ronaldo the better penalty taker? Are women better penalty takers than men? When is a penalty shootout a lottery, and when definitely not? How can you deal with stress related to a penalty? These and many other questions regarding the penalty shootout are answered in Cracking the Penalty Code. Contents Prologue Yard 1: Cracking the code Yard 2: Why? Why is this shootout book important? Why are the greatest players not always the best penalty takers? Why do professionals in football keep saying practicing penalties is nonsense? Yard 3: Who? Who is Antonin Panenka and why is he important? Who takes better penalties, Lionel Messi, or Cristiano Ronaldo? Who should take responsibility before, during and after a shootout? Yard 4: What? What are successful ‘psychological warfare’-methods? What are the rules of the penalty shootout? What strategies can goalkeepers use? Yard 5: Which? Which team has the biggest chance of winning, team A or Team B? Which team has the biggest chance of winning, home or away? Which national football teams are good at taking penalties? Yard 6: Where? Where should players aim and place the ball? Yard 7: When? When did the shootout become part of football? When can you honestly say a shootout is a ‘lottery’? Yard 8: What if? What if England and the Netherlands would have been as good at penalties as Germany? What if Artificial Intelligence (AI) would give shootout advice? Yard 9: How? How do women perform in shootouts? How can players learn to cope with stress during shootouts? How can England and the Netherlands win shootouts? Yard 10: How much? How much should players practice? Yard 11: How long? How long should the run-up be? Yard 12: Selected questions Epilogue Glossary References Articles Index of names About the Author