The Penalty Shootout Was Invented in 1970 by a German Football Fan

Karl Wald was a referee and football administrator in Bavaria when he wrote a formal proposal in 1970 to the Bavarian Football Association describing a method for resolving drawn knockout matches: a series of alternating penalty kicks, taken from the spot, until one team missed and the other did not. The letter was polite, specific, and largely ignored.

At the time, FIFA settled tied knockout matches with replays — expensive, scheduling-intensive, and occasionally impossible in tournament formats. When replays ran out of time, the fallback was a coin toss. The 1968 European Championship semi-final between Italy and the Soviet Union was decided by a coin flip. Italy called it correctly and went to the final.

The Bavarian FA eventually put Wald's idea forward to FIFA. The organization trialled it at the 1972 UEFA Cup and formalized the procedure as standard for its own competitions in 1978 — the same year the World Cup in Argentina still used coin tosses for its knockout ties. The first FIFA World Cup penalty shootout happened on July 8, 1982, in Seville: West Germany beat France 5-4 to reach the final.

Wald died in 2015 without having received a major award for the invention, though the Bavarian FA honored him. His letter from 1970 is now in the German Football Museum in Dortmund.