How to Play Penalty Shootout
Penalty Shootout distils football down to its single most pressurised moment. The ball sits on the spot, the keeper is on the line, and everything depends on one contact. You take five penalties per round, and the goal is simple: score all five.
Controls
Drag backwards from the ball. The direction of the drag sets where the ball goes and the distance sets the power. Release to strike. The keeper then reads, guesses, or dives — sometimes correctly.
The geometry of a penalty
A goal is far wider and taller than a goalkeeper can cover, and this is the entire basis of penalty strategy. The keeper starts in the centre, so the corners are the furthest points from where they begin and require the longest, fastest movement to reach.
The centre of the goal is the worst place to shoot, because it is where the keeper already is. The edges of the frame are the best, because even a keeper who guesses correctly may not physically get there in time.
This sounds obvious and is routinely ignored, because the corners are also where you are most likely to miss the target entirely.
Power controls height
Power in this game is not only speed — it changes the height of the shot. A hard strike rises towards the top of the goal; a softer one stays low.
That gives you four practical targets:
- Bottom corners (low power, wide aim) — the classic penalty. Reachable by a keeper who guesses right, but a good margin of safety above the ground.
- Top corners (high power, wide aim) — statistically the hardest to save, and also the easiest to put over the bar.
The trade-off is genuine: top corners are safer against the keeper and riskier against the woodwork.
Do not aim at the very edge
The most wasteful miss in this game is a shot that beats the keeper completely and goes a fraction wide. Because the keeper cannot reach the outer band of the goal anyway, aiming at the absolute edge of the frame buys you almost no extra safety while dramatically increasing your chance of missing the target.
Aim just inside the corner. You give up nothing against the keeper and you keep a real margin for error.
Mix it up
The keeper does not choose randomly every time — repeated placement gets read. If you score twice in the bottom-left corner, expect the third one to be saved.
Real penalty takers face the same problem and solve it the same way: by being genuinely unpredictable rather than by finding a "best" corner and repeating it. Alternate sides, mix high and low, and occasionally take the low-percentage middle when the keeper is committing early.
Placement over power
The single most common failure among new players is hitting the ball as hard as possible directly at the keeper. Power is worth nothing without placement — a saved shot is saved regardless of how fast it was travelling.
Decide your corner before you begin the drag, then use power only to control the height you want. Players who decide where the ball is going mid-drag tend to end up somewhere in the middle, which is the one place you never want to be.
Why penalties are so hard
In professional football, penalties are converted around 75 percent of the time — which means one in four fails, despite being taken by the best players in the world from twelve yards with no defenders. The difficulty is not technical, it is that the margin between "unsaveable" and "missed the target" is only a few inches. This game reproduces that margin faithfully, which is why a perfect five out of five feels genuinely earned.
Plays on any device
Penalty Shootout runs in your browser with HTML5 on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops. Nothing to install, no signup, and your best round is saved locally.
