This hit-and-miss penalty technique can make the World Cup’s best players look cool — or silly

It’s theatrical. It can be maddening. It makes the world’s top soccer players look very cool — or very silly.

The stutter-step penalty has been a feature of this World Cup, with the leading adopters of the technique being superstars Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, Cristiano Ronaldo, Harry Kane and Neymar.

Let’s say it’s had varying levels of success.

It has sent France through to the quarterfinals and contributed to Brazil’s exit. Messi didn’t even hit the target when he tried one in group play.

As for Neymar, a converted stutter-step penalty proved to be his parting gift to international soccer.

And that feels poignant.

Popularized by Pelé, continued by Neymar

The stutter-step penalty — where a player feints, sometimes repeatedly and almost to the point of stopping, keeping his eyes on the goalkeeper during their run-up to the ball — is widely believed to have been spawned in Brazil in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Nicknamed the “paradinha,” Portuguese for “little stop,” it was made famous by Pelé and continued by a young Neymar when he was being hailed as an heir to the three-time World Cup winner.

In 2010, at the age of 18, Neymar took the stutter to extremes when he scored a penalty for club team Santos by dancing up to the ball, coming to a standstill after placing his standing foot next to the ball, and then stroking it home, having made the goalkeeper commit a dive already.

It forced soccer’s lawmaking officials to change the regulations ahead of the World Cup in South Africa that year, instructing referees to show a yellow card to penalty-takers who feint as they are about to strike the ball and to disallow those goals.

The law has been refined again since then, with players allowed to feint during their run-up but not after completing it before shooting.

Experts say the stutter-step technique is ‘sophisticated’ but risky

The main idea of the stutter-step penalty is to befuddle goalkeepers so much in this battle of wills over 12 yards (11 meters) that they commit early and offer an easy path for a shot into the net.

This “goalkeeper-dependent technique” — as it’s called by experts — is not for the faint-hearted.

“It is very sophisticated and hard to perform when the pressure is truly on,” explains Geir Jordet, professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences and author of the book “Pressure: Lessons from the Psychology of the Penalty Shootout.” “If you’re competent at executing this technique, this will effectively delete the risk factor of the goalkeeper going in the right direction and your odds suddenly going down.”

However, Jordet added: “You need to have a very high clarity in your head to be able to do that.”

It seems everyone is doing the stutter step

When it comes to penalties, there will always be traditionalists in the head-down-and-hit-it-hard camp. There was also fleetingly a hop-skip routine, used notably by Portugal midfielder Bruno Fernandes and former Italy international Jorginho, that enjoyed some success around six or seven years ago.

Nowadays, most penalty-takers have the stutter-step technique in their armory, even if they don’t use it all the time.

Messi used it — and failed — for his spot kick that drifted wide against Austria in the group stage. He changed course by doing a normal run-up for a penalty against Egypt in the last 16 on Wednesday and this time saw his kick saved.

In England’s group-stage win over Croatia, Kane had a penalty saved after a stutter-step run-up, only for the referee to order the spot kick to be retaken because the goalkeeper stepped off his line too early. Kane scored his second attempt after a straight run-up to the ball.

Successful kicks using that technique have been delivered by Mbappé to secure France’s 1-0 win over Paraguay in the round of 16, Ronaldo in Portugal’s 2-1 win over Croatia in same round, while Neymar — now aged 34 — rolled back the years to score from one in the last seconds against Norway. He retired from international play after the match.

Possibly the best at it is Mexico striker Raúl Jiménez, who used repeated stutter steps on his way to converting a penalty in the 3-2 loss to England on Sunday. He is statistically the best ever penalty-taker in the Premier League, having scored on all 14 of his kicks.

Goalkeepers are getting wiser to stutter-step attempts

When they go wrong, stutter-step penalty-takers can seem so insouciant that they look unprofessional.

Goalkeepers are getting wiser to them, too, changing their own techniques, not committing as early and becoming “creative, deliberate and volatile” in their attempts to put more pressure the shooter, Jordet says.

And so, the high-profile stutter-step failures are adding up, especially when the pressure is at its highest. Just look at Brazil midfielder Bruno Guimarães, whose effort was saved — when the score was 0-0 — before Norway went on to win 2-1 in the round of 16, and Justin Kluivert in the Netherlands’ shootout loss to Morocco.

Kluivert had come on late in extra time, giving the Dutch a supposed penalty specialist in the shootout, but struck the post with his kick.

See more of AP’s World Cup coverage here