The 10 most painful penalty misses in football history RANKED: Brahim Diaz 2nd… | OneFootball

Penalty shootouts create football’s most unforgiving moments. Reputations can be made or shattered in seconds. A single miss can echo for years, replayed endlessly by fans and players alike.

From World Cup finals to unforgettable Champions League nights, football history is littered with spot-kick heartbreak. Internationals from France, England (of course), Italy and Egypt will tell you how desperately they wish they could go back and do things differently.

Here’s our ranking of the 10 most painful penalty misses in football history.

10 & 9. Kingsley Coman & Aurelien Tchouameni – 2022 World Cup final

Very little separates Coman and Tchouameni, France’s unfortunate two from the 2022 World Cup final shootout.

Neither were part of Les Bleus’ squad in 2018. The biggest trophy of all still evades them.

You don’t imagine Coman, playing out in Saudi Arabia these days, will have another chance, but Tchouameni should get a couple more bites at that cherry.

They can at least console themselves with glittering club careers. And, ultimately, France’s part in the Qatar World Cup narrative has quickly been washed away.

It was all about Lionel Messi, Argentina and their sense of destiny.

8. Mohamed Salah – 2022 World Cup play-off

Salah did a Ronaldo in the 2021 AFCON final. Egypt’s best, most reliable penalty-taker was pencilled in for the fifth penalty. Which never arrived. Rookie error.

Fate conspired for Egypt to once again face Senegal in a play-off for the 2022 World Cup the following month.

Liverpool’s Egyptian King wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice and watch on helplessly. Senegal missed their first two penalties, but Salah was one of three Egyptians who failed to convert.

It was surely no coincidence that Salah was blinded by a swarm of green laser pointers.

7. Jadon Sancho – Euro 2020 final

The racist abuse levelled at three young black footballers after the shootout loss cast a long, ugly shadow over the Euro 2020 final. One of English football’s darkest hours.

We’ve chosen Sancho ahead of Marcus Rashford and Bukayo Saka for the crossroads moment it represented in his career.

Rashford and Saka will surely go to this summer’s World Cup, but Sancho never recovered.

He made a £73million move to Manchester United later that summer, but has never lived up to the exceptional potential he showed at Borussia Dortmund.

Since missing against Italy, Sancho made a further one appearance for the Three Lions. Against Andorra. Even Patrick Bamford can boast that.

Tyrick Mitchell, Kyle Walker-Peters and Emile Smith Rowe are among the players who have more caps for England over the past five years.

6. David Trezeguet – 2006 World Cup final

Be honest. You weren’t entirely sure who missed France’s penalty in the 2006 shootout, were you?

Fortunately for Trezeguet, that moment has largely been forgotten in the wake of Zinedine Zidane’s headbutt on Marco Materazzi a short while earlier. That was the defining moment of the 2006 World Cup final.

Zizou had already scored a penanka early doors (that’s how to do it, Brahim) and the captain would’ve backed himself come the shootout with what would’ve been his final kick in the professional game. But it wasn’t to be.

Trezeguet also already boasted one World Cup from 1998. A second would’ve been nice, sure, but that takes the sting off hitting the crossbar in Berlin.

5. John Terry – 2008 Champions League final

“I wasn’t actually supposed to take one of the first five penalties, but Didier Drogba had been sent off,” Terry told FourFourTwo, reflecting on his infamous slip in the Moscow rain.

“I still think about my miss to this day. Honestly – not as often as I used to, but I still wake up and it’s there. I can see it.

“When you look back on your career, the trophies mean a lot but the ones you missed out on can haunt you and I won’t forget that one. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.”

We’d have considered putting this at the top spot had the Chelsea captain not finally got his hands on the trophy four years later.

“I was broken by it. I’m just so thankful we won it in 2012. That helps me massively.”

4. Stuart Pearce – 1990 World Cup semi-final

The pure emotion on Psycho’s face when he successfully converted his penalty in the Euro ’96 shootout against Spain tells you more than we ever could about the weight he was carrying ever since missing that night in Turin.

“For me, failure wouldn’t have been to miss again,” Pearce recalled.

“Failure would have been not to try.”

Balls of steel.

3. Gareth Southgate – Euro 96 semi-final

Shootouts were still a relatively new thing in the ’90s. The English national psyche hadn’t yet developed a complex over penalties when they hosted Euro 96.

Yes, there was Italia ’90 (see above), but the Three Lions bounced back to dispatch Spain with a 100% success rate in the quarter-finals, and demonstrated a hard-edged steeliness to score their first five penalties in the semis. The problem? So did the Germans.

You can pinpoint the start of the English penalty psychodrama to Southgate’s sudden-death miss at Wembley.

They went on to lose their next four major tournament shootouts, exiting two World Cups and two European Championships on penalties before they finally exorcised their demons against Colombia in 2018.

Southgate in the dugout, of course. Football has a knack for the poetic, doesn’t it?

2. Brahim Diaz – 2025 AFCON final

Call it recency bias, but this one instantly goes into the pantheon of all-timers.

A major final. On home soil. Your nation has waited half a century to get their hands on this trophy.

You’ve had a superb tournament and can cap it off by dispatching the winning penalty in the dying minutes of injury time.

And then you do this. Not only a failed panenka – never a good thing – but one struck so pathetically it prompted widespread chatter on social media that he missed on purpose.

The biggest of ooofs. Senegal’s extra-time victory felt inevitable from there.

1. Roberto Baggio – 1994 World Cup final

This was always the daddy of penalty miss gut punches. The stage doesn’t get any bigger. We can’t express the pain in any more stark terms than Baggio himself.

“If I had had a knife at that moment, I would have stabbed myself,” Baggio later reminisced on that moment in an interview with The Athletic.