Sent On to Miss?

The 119th-Minute Substitution

It is a move we see more, not less. In an analytics era fixated on the highest-percentage option, managers increasingly send on a fresh, specialist taker in the dying minutes, purely for the shootout. On 29 June 2026 the Netherlands did exactly that, then watched substitute Justin Kluivert strike the post as they went out of the World Cup. England fans need no reminding of Euro 2020, when Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho came on in the 119th minute and both failed.

There is something quietly cruel about it. The player barely touches the game; a few minutes of cold legs, maybe one sprint, and then the whole tournament rests on his single kick. So does the gamble actually work? I built a dataset of 840 shootout kicks from 88 men's international shootouts (World Cup, Euros and Copa América, 1990–2026) to find out.

How Often Does a Shootout Penalty Go In?

Before judging substitutes, we need the yardstick. Across all 840 kicks in the dataset, the overall conversion rate is 72.0% (95% confidence interval 68.9%–75.0%). Roughly three in four shootout penalties are scored, so missing is the exception. That is exactly why a missed sub stands out.

For scale: Lionel Messi, for many the greatest of all time, has converted about 78% of his career penalties (114 of 147, shootouts aside), barely above this shootout baseline. The spot-kick humbles almost everyone.

It's the Extra-Time Sub Who Pays

It is not substitutes in general who falter. Across all subs the gap (67.3% vs 72.8% for starters) is only borderline. The effect concentrates in the players sent on late: extra-time substitutes convert just 57.1%, and the dying-minutes specialists brought on at 110'+ manage only 50.0%.

Because the hypothesis is directional (subs are predicted to do worse, not merely differently), the one-sided test is the relevant one; the stricter two-sided figure is shown too.

Every Extra-Time Sub Who Took One

The closest cases to the hypothesis: players introduced in extra time (105'+), often with the shootout in mind. As a group they scored 20 of 35 (57.1%).

Baseline by Competition & Era

Conversion is remarkably stable across competitions and decades, so the substitute effect is not an artefact of one tournament or period.

Why This Isn't a Clean Experiment

A substitute is not a random starter, so part of the gap may reflect player quality rather than cold legs alone. But it often cuts the other way: the late sub is frequently a designated specialist, sent on precisely because he is one of the squad's best takers with a strong record in normal play. That even these specialists miss more here points at the conditions (a long wait, then one cold and decisive kick) rather than the player. Either way the data is observational, so the pattern is real but not proof that the substitution itself is the cause.