When football turned to penalties to end 'cruel' system

Boothferry Park, Hull, 5 August 1970. The air was warm, the terraces were packed and an 11-year-old Martyn Kelly stood on tiptoe, wishing he had a stool like the other children so he could see over the sea of heads. History was about to unfold: the first officially sanctioned penalty shootout in professional football.

Manchester United, crowned European champions only two seasons earlier, had been held 1-1 after extra time by second-tier Hull City in the opening round of the Watney Cup, a pre-season competition for the highest-scoring teams from each division. With no replay scheduled, the new tie-breaker—approved barely six weeks earlier by the International Football Association Board—would decide the outcome. Five kicks each, 12 yards out, keeper against taker. No coin toss, no drawing of lots, no summoning of luck.

Kelly’s pulse raced. “Blimey, it’s George Best,” he thought as the United icon placed the ball. Best promptly dispatched the first spot-kick in shootout history, low to the keeper’s left. Hull’s player-manager Terry Neill answered, and after nine more attempts the tally stood at 3-3. Then Denis Law, one of the game’s great scorers, saw his drive clawed away by Tigers keeper Ian McKechnie. McKechnie had already become the first goalkeeper to save a penalty in a shootout; minutes later he would become the first to take one. His powerful effort crashed against the bar, sealing a 4-3 win for United and etching his name in folklore for contrasting reasons.

The shootout’s arrival was born of frustration. At the 1968 European Championship, Italy advanced to the final by correctly calling heads. Four months later, Israel’s Olympic quarter-final against Bulgaria was settled when captain Yisha’ayahu Schwager pulled a slip reading “no” from a sombrero. Israeli FA official Yosef Dagan deemed the method “immoral and even cruel.” Together with colleague Michael Almog, he drafted a proposal for five alternating penalties, submitting it to Fifa in 1969. Ifab adopted the idea on 27 June 1970, and the Watney Cup provided the first live trial.

Replays, coin flips and corner-counts had long been used, but none carried the visceral theatre of the shootout. Since McKechnie’s bar-rattling miss, 24% of shootout penalties have been missed, and the device has settled three World Cup finals and countless continental titles. Yet on that humid evening in Hull, no one knew whether the successor to the coin would prove any kinder. More than half a century on, the question still lingers every time the referee points to the spot.