This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
When Germany play Côte d’Ivoire in the World Cup on 20 June, it will be 50 years to the day since what was then West Germany found themselves undone by the most famous penalty of all. Antonín Panenka’s sublime dink not only won the 1976 European Championship for Czechoslovakia: it placed him alongside men like Ulrich Salchow and Dick Fosbury, whose names have become synonymous with an entire aspect of their sport.
The penalty’s genesis came in training at the Bohemians club, where Panenka and goalkeeper Zdenek Hruška had a daily challenge. Panenka had to score five penalties in a row and Hruška save just one, with a forfeit for the loser. “I always lost, and I got poorer buying chocolates and beer every day,” Panenka said. “I kept thinking about what I could do to turn it around. I had this idea that if I took a long run-up, the goalie would be convinced that it was going to be a hard kick into the corner. I would slow down a bit, just chip the ball and float it into the middle. So I started trying it.”
He practised for two years — “Suddenly I was beating Hruška, but I was also getting fatter because of all the chocolates I won off him” — and then used the technique in a match against Dukla Prague, whose keeper Ivo Viktor played with Panenka for the national team. “He knew about it, but it still fooled him. That convinced me it was the right thing to do.”
Only four teams competed in Euro 1976, and the shootout after the final had ended 2-2 was the first in a major international competition. Uli Hoeneß’s miss with West Germany’s fourth kick meant Panenka could win the whole thing, and in doing so he also fulfilled all his own aesthetic criteria. “The shot should not be too fast: you have to chip the ball so it glides. You have to send the ball directly to the centre, because even if it is one metre to the right or left, the penalty loses its beauty. When the ball is crossing the line, it should be already dropping.”
The kick wasn’t just decisive: it was iconic. It was only eight years since the Prague Spring had been crushed, and the national yearning for triumph was profound. “Nobody expected that so many people would come to give us such a warm welcome [on our return home],” Panenka said. “When some head of state came, the roads were lined with young people holding parade wands, but it was all sort of forced. This time, they came spontaneously to greet us and show their appreciation. I had never experienced anything like that before.”
The outpouring of joyful pride also spoke obliquely to the risks Panenka had taken. In a country where “normalisation” meant cracking down on dissident elements such as musicians and poets, taking a penalty as though it were a golf chip was emphatically not normal: it was individualistic, subversive, decadent. Panenka got away with it because he scored, but when asked what fate he’d have suffered if he’d missed, he replied, “Thirty years working down the mines.”
Pelé said that anyone “who takes a penalty like that must be either a genius or a madman”, but Panenkas have been a regular sight in even the biggest matches since then. Zinedine Zidane scored one for France in the 2006 World Cup Final against Italy; the Moroccan Brahim Díaz missed one in the AFCON final against Senegal this January past.
Any penalty is at heart a psychological battle between taker and keeper, with the former wanting to put the ball in a place where the latter can’t get to it. By this metric, all misses are equal, but a Panenka which doesn’t work makes the taker look foolish in a way more conventional kicks don’t. Díaz has described his AFCON miss as “hurting my soul”.
Dwight Yorke said: “If you do the good old-fashioned ‘run up and thump it’ and miss, people seem to sympathise. They say, ‘At least he smashed it.’” On these lines, and with a nod to Isaac Newton’s third law of motion — that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction — the anti-Panenka must surely be Kevin Pressman’s penalty for Sheffield Wednesday against Wolves in the 1995 FA Cup. Pressman, a 15-stone keeper, put his considerable force into what was essentially a goal kick which the stanchion just about managed to stop, and in a parallel netless universe the shot has, 31 years later, achieved Voyager 1 levels of interstellar travel.
If a penalty is awarded to either Germany or Côte d’Ivoire in June, the commentators will surely mention the anniversary: and this is, perhaps, the pity for Panenka himself, that a fabulous all-round player full of vision and invention has been reduced to a dimension as singular as his immortal moment. “On one hand I am proud,” he has said. “I saw myself as an entertainer, and I wanted to give the fans something new to see, to create something that would get them talking. But on the other hand I am a bit unhappy that the penalty erased everything else I wanted to give the viewers: a lot of passes, goals, chances I created.”
His final verdict is, like the kick itself, beautifully nuanced. “I am down the middle about it.”
