Does shooting
first win?

Backlog #46. The claim traces to a genuinely famous paper: Apesteguia & Palacios-Huerta (2010, American Economic Review) analyzed 262 soccer penalty shootouts and found the team kicking first won 60.5% of the time — a "psychological pressure" effect on the second-moving team, cited ever since as a reason some tournaments trialed an alternating ABBA kicking order. This run pulls its own independent record — 260 international shootouts, 1976–2026, from martj42/international_results, the standard open compilation of international football results, restricted to shootouts where the source could confirm which team actually shot first — and fits the identical test: does the first-shooting team win more than a coin flip?

It does not, in this sample. The team that shot first won 136 of 260 shootouts, 52.3%, a gap of +2.3 percentage points from 50%, 95% CI [-3.8, +8.4], p=0.46 — contains a coin flip. A 20,000-resample bootstrap on the identical data agrees almost to the decimal (gap +2.3 pts, CI [-3.8, +8.5]).

Checked for a confound: is "shoots first" secretly "the stronger team"? In this source, the team listed as home shoots first 60% of the time — not 50/50, so it's worth splitting on. When the home team shoots first (n=157), it wins 53.5% of shootouts, CI [-4.4, +11.4] pts from 50 — contains zero. When the away team shoots first (n=103), 50.5%, CI [-9.3, +10.3] — also contains zero, and lands almost exactly on 50%. Being designated the home side in these knockout fixtures (often a neutral-venue or second-leg tiebreaker, not a true home crowd) doesn't explain away a first-mover effect, because there is no first-mover effect to explain away in either subgroup.

Checked across time. 1976-06-20–2015-07-25 (n=130): 53.8%, CI [-4.8, +12.5]. 2016-06-04–2026-07-07 (n=130): 50.8%, CI [-7.9, +9.5]. Restricted to 2015 onward only, where this source's shootout coverage is densest and most reliably carries a shooting-order tag (n=139): 48.9%, CI [-9.5, +7.3] — if anything the point estimate tips slightly the other way. Every spec this run fit contains a coin flip.

Read plainly. This isn't an isolated failure to replicate. Apesteguia & Palacios-Huerta's own 60.5% came from the smallest sample in the literature. Kocher, Lenz & Sutter (2012, Management Science) reanalyzed a superset of 540 shootouts and got a non-significant ~53%. Rudi, Olivares & Shetty (2020, PLOS ONE) found ~55% across 1,623. Pipke (2025, Journal of Economic Psychology), the largest sample yet at 7,116 soccer shootouts, found 50.2% and an equivalence test ruling out any first-mover effect bigger than 1.8 points. The pattern across the whole literature, this run's own pull included, is exactly what you'd expect if the original 60.5% was a real but noisy estimate from a small sample that regressed toward zero as the sample grew — not proof that psychological pressure in a shootout is fake, but proof that this particular famous number was never as solid as its citation count.