One question for each 2026 World Cup team. Why exactly are people from Czechia so good at penalties?
Would you love me in a Bentley? Would you love me on a $95 bus from downtown Boston to Gillette Stadium? Footnote is asking 48 questions, and they’re all about the 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup. This post is part of our Group A preview. You can also read previews of Mexico, South Africa, and South Korea.
Why exactly are Czech people so good at penalties?
Czechia are a good soccer team, and they have been for a long time.
This blog could have a serious examination about the merits of the Czech Republic’s current squad, or the central European nation’s knack for churning out battle-ready midfielder, or even Patrick Schick’s excellent goalscoring record in the Bundesliga.
Perhaps we could cover the Mamelodi Sundowns-like influence that Sparta Prague has on the Czech national team.
But what I would like to focus on is the fact that Czech people are really good at penalty shootouts.
Consider, first, the statistics. Czechia1I’m going to use Czechia and Czech Republic interchangeably, because the Czech Republic is the official English name of the country and Czechia is the shortened name that its officials encourage people to use informally and in sports, similar to how France is officially the French Republic. has never lost a penalty shootout, either as an independent nation or as Czechoslovakia. That includes two straight shootout wins against Northern Ireland and then Denmark to emerge from the UEFA qualifying playoffs this spring.
Consider, next, the mythology: There is exactly one kind of penalty that has a name, and that name is Czech.
If you take a hop-step into your kick some may say your penalty was Jorginho-esque, or Bruno Fernandes-like. If you take a big stutter around halfway through your run-up, they may say it was the kind of penalty that Cristiano Ronaldo took in the early 2010s. Or they might say none of that.
But everyone knows what to say if you take a penalty that is softly lobbed down the middle of the goal.
That’s a panenka, named after Antonín Panenka’s instantly iconic winning kick in the 1976 European Championships shootout against West Germany, a penalty kick which incidentally started the ongoing unbeaten run.
Why exactly are Czech teams so good at penalties? Is it the long-term influence of the Danubian culture of early 20th century intellectualism in central European soccer creating more technically reliable players? Is it the lingering influence of communism encouraging all Czech youth to refine their striking skills regardless of size or position, similar to how the Balkans produce great passing big men in basketball? Is it the fact that Czech ultras are really scary so the more genteel major tournament crowds don’t faze Czech players?
Or is it just a product of chance and small sample size? Czechoslovakia only competed in two shootouts, and the Czech Republic has only been in three. If you won five coinflips in a row, I would still want to see you flip like eight more coins before I decided that tails really doesn’t ever fail.
More relevant than the overall record, then, is probably the two consecutive shootout wins in those playoffs, in which they outlasted the Republic of Ireland and Denmark.
Those two performances demonstrate separate, but related, forms of resiliency. The Czechs first found a late equalizer to force extra time against Ireland, then managed to recover from seeing Denmark level the decisive match late to dominate the shootout.
At risk of tough guy coach speak, the playoff shootouts are part of a broader trend for this Czech team: they are extremely hard-to-beat over the past two years. They came last in their Euro 2024 group, but that involved twice losing on stoppage time goals, and then they only lost two games in World Cup qualifying.2Their group included the Faroe Islands, Gibraltar, and Montenegro, but still.
If they can carry that through to this World Cup group, they have every chance of advancing past three teams that haven’t exactly been explosive goalscoring threats recently.
And once they are in the knockouts, it will be time to see if the shootout record really is just sample size, or if the spirit of Antonín Panenka lives on.
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