ECONOMISTS LOVE STUDYING THEM:

Over the past four years, major European teams have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on analysts who examine hours and hours of video footage to identify potentially decisive trends.

Such is the intensity of preparation that when a match goes to penalties, even the five first-choice penalty takers are typically selected based on scientific information and psychometric evaluations which identifies the players that will prove most resilient to the pressure of such a situation.

Even the precise order is often decided through using this data, with studies showing that the first and fifth kicks are the most important, so they need to be taken by those most robust to handling stress.

"We did this kind of testing well in advance of the World Cup to ensure that if a shoot-out came around, there would be a calmness in the way in we approached it," said England manager Gareth Southgate who masterminded his country's first World Cup shoot-out victory over Colombia in the last-16.

"You want as much of your analysis and thinking done well beforehand to avoid making any decisions on the spur of the moment."

Psychometric evaluations are the mere tip of the iceberg when it comes to the scientific battleground before a penalty shoot-out.

Following a trend set by clubs in the English Premier League and La Liga in recent years, most of the teams in the World Cup now either employ independent consultants to gather penalty data or subscribe to services provided by teams of analysts at large companies such as Opta. 

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