Why is it, then, that players still get it wrong so often? A common crux of the varied threads of research suggests a familiar bugbear: pressure engenders anxiety and anxiety, in turn, affects performance.

In a study conducted last year, researchers from the University of Exeter in England instructed one group of subjects, labeled “low-threat,” to simply try their best in a penalty-kicking task. Members of another group were told that their individual scores would be circulated to the rest of the participants and that the winner would earn £50, about $72. The study found that shooters in the second group fixated longer on the goalkeeper, and this significantly lowered their shooting accuracy.

“People under pressure feel like they lose control and they’re unable to control their attention,” Mark Wilson, one of the authors of the study, said of the findings. Imagine the pressure in a World Cup shootout: “You’re standing on the halfway line, you walk all the way up, you pick up the ball, you spot it, step back, the hopes of your country on top of you,” he said, laughing. “That’s an awful lot of time for your attentional control to be disrupted.”

While researchers like Binsch and Wilson conduct most of their work in a controlled lab setting, Jordet and his colleagues use a different approach. Over the last six years they have examined videos of every shootout from each World Cup, European Championship and Copa América — the sport’s three biggest international competitions — since 1978.

His team has scrutinized more than 400 penalty kicks and accounted for more than 120 variables in each shot, ranging from a player’s body language to time intervals in his prekick routine.

One of Jordet’s conclusions deals not with the run-up to a kick, but what occurs afterward. A player who celebrates demonstratively after scoring, he said, increases the chance that his teammates will score later in the shootout and also increases the likelihood that the opposing player who shoots immediately after him will miss.

“I make this point every time I work with a team,” said Jordet, who was an adviser to the Dutch national team from 2005 to 2008. “Some players score and look like they’re at a funeral because they’re still nervous.”