ABSTRACT
International football tournaments such as the World Cup and the European Championship attract enormous worldwide attention (Hoffman et al., 2002). Arguably, they are becoming the world’s largest festivals with houses, cars and bodies around the world being festooned with national symbols and television audiences twice the size of the next largest sporting event, the opening ceremony of the Olympics (Reuters, 2006). Television audiences for the games in the knockout stages of competitions are enormous: 284 million people watched the 2006 World Cup final between Italy and France live and an estimated 5.9 billion people watched at least one World Cup match (Reuters, 2006). When games are deadlocked and go to penalty shoot-outs all of this attention is focused on the individual taking his penalty kick. Quite literally, the fate of his nation rests with him; he knows that his every movement is being observed by millions of passionate supporters. For example, 23.9 million people in Italy and 22.1 million people in France are reported to have watched the penalty shoot-out in the 2006 World Cup final (Reuters, 2006). Some players have reported the immense psychological stress (e.g. Pearce, 2000; Owen, 2005) this places on the individual player making them almost incapable of standing-up.
