Do tall players miss more penalties? I checked 30,000 kicks to find out
Watching the Socceroos go out to Egypt on penalties at the 2026 World Cup made me wonder about player height vs penalty success rate. Both Australian defenders who missed – Harry Souttar and Lucas Herrington – are tall. Souttar is 198 cm. Herrington is 193 cm.
On the back of the Champions League shootout where Gabriel (190cm) also missed, I wondered if there is anything statistically meaningful relating to player height and penalty success rate.
The question
Is there a relationship between a player’s height and whether they score from the spot? And does it differ for in-game penalties versus shootouts, where the pressure is obviously different?
The data
For penalties, I used the dataset from Vollmer, Schoch and Brandes (2024) – roughly 51,000 cleaned penalty attempts from European men’s football between 2012–13 and 2022–23, plus World Cups in 2014, 2018 and 2022. Each row is a single kick: scored or not.
For height, I used Transfermarkt data, matching players by name.
Of the 51,007 penalties, the height data matched for 29,803 (about 58%). The unmatched penalties are mostly from smaller leagues where Transfermarkt coverage is thinner.
The matched sample covers 9,744 unique takers, heights ranging from 160 cm to 203 cm, with a mean of about 182 cm.
What the numbers say
Shootouts are harder
| Context | Penalties | Success rate |
|---|---|---|
| In-game | 20,827 | 81.4% |
| Shootout | 8,976 | 75.5% |
That ~6 percentage point gap matches what Vollmer et al. found. Shootouts are different.
Height? Not signficant
Here’s success rate by 10 cm height band, all players, all positions:
| Height | Attempts | Success rate |
|---|---|---|
| 160–169 cm | 624 | 78.4% |
| 170–179 cm | 9,902 | 79.5% |
| 180–189 cm | 16,105 | 79.7% |
| 190–199 cm | 3,118 | 79.8% |
| 200–209 cm | 54 | 83.3% |
From 170 cm upward, it’s essentially a flat line around 79–80%. The 200+ cm group looks better, but with only 54 attempts it’s not a large enough data set.
Using the 180 cm threshold:
- In-game: under 180 cm scored 81.4% of the time; 180 cm and over scored 81.4%
- Shootout: under 180 cm scored 74.9%; 180 cm and over scored 75.9%
Splitting into height quartiles tells the same story. The tallest quarter doesn’t consistently underperform the shortest.
Statistically, the correlation between height and scoring is effectively zero (Pearson r = 0.003, p = 0.57). A logistic regression gives an odds ratio of 1.001 per centimetre of height – meaning each extra centimetre changes your odds of scoring by about 0.1%. That’s not significant. The shootout interaction term is also insignificant (p = 0.95), so height doesn’t affect in-game and shootout penalties differently either.
Short (?) version: being tall doesn’t make you more likely to miss, or more likely to score.
Look at defenders only, the results are similar – no significant impact on success based on player height.
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