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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