Here’s one to spark some debate in your group chat: ‘If your life depended on them scoring it, which current player would you want to take a penalty?’
Cristiano Ronaldo? He’s scored 121 penalties across his career, leading to detractors to label him ‘Penaldo’.
What about Lionel Messi? Many consider him the greatest player of all time and 89 penalties scored in his career is certainly impressive.
How about Mario Balotelli? One of the most temperamental characters in modern-day football has been an almost certainty from the spot during his career. 37 career penalties out of 42 gives him an impressive 88% conversion rate.
But there is a player in the A-League who has a better conversion rate than all three of these.
In fact, with 51 penalties scored from 57 attempts he has a better ratio (89%) than Neymar (80%), Sergio Aguero (78%), Luis Suarez (81%), Wayne Rooney (80%), James Milner (86%), Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang (74%), Gylfi Sigurdsson (77%), Luka Milivojevic (88%), Harry Kane (84%), Ciro Immobile (83%), Romelu Lukaku (76%), Fabio Quagliarella (86%), Santi Cazorla (87%) and a whole host of players you can think of.
Sydney FC’s Adam Le Fondre is one of very few players in the world who has scored more than 20 penalties and has a ratio above 88%.
Ronaldo is at 84% (121/143) and Messi is at 77% (89/115) for the record.
What’s Le Fondre’s secret?
“If you block out any negative thoughts, other people and outside effects, and you know that only you can affect what happens next. That's the best frame of mind to be in.” LeFondre tells The World Game.
“Wherever I decide to put the ball the key is confidence and blocking out everything around you.”
He certainly hits them with confidence, in fact, if you study his technique you see a pattern of him smashing the ball with his laces. Very few are side-footed, and the approach is very straight on making it difficult for the goalkeeper to read which way he’s going to shoot.
The accuracy is evidently there, but the thing that stands out is the power.
This penalty below against Wellington last season at Campbelltown stadium is a great example. Even if Filip Kurto managed to guess correctly that Le Fondre would go down the middle, he didn’t have the time to react and save it.
This season he has smashed them past Adelaide’s Paul Izzo, Perth’s Liam Reddy and Brisbane’s Jamie Young. All three penalties blasted to the keeper’s left.
Amazingly Le Fondre failed to score a penalty for the first time since 2014 when 22-year-old Melbourne City goalkeeper Tom Glover managed to stick out a leg and block another rifled shot.
It was the first time in 15 attempts that the Englishman had been thwarted.
“The only time I have ever missed is when I’ve changed my mind.
The now 33-year-old clearly had the confidence from an early age.
He was 19 when he took his first one in senior football while playing for Stockport against Brentford in 2005.
“Sam Sodje fouled me for the penalty, and Mark Robinson who was the regular penalty taker for Stockport was standing on the spot and wanted the ball. But I said, ‘no you’re not having it..’ and he walked away and I took it.
“I put it to my right and keeper’s left. He went the wrong way and it went in but that was the day we got relegated.
“The penalty got us back in the game and I was confident having scored 36 goals in all comps that season coming through the youth team and reserves, and then I just continued taking them.
He continued scoring them also, 15 straight without a miss before finally being denied.
“When I was younger, I very rarely changed my ways with penalties and the way I was going to go, so it gave me a lot of confidence. These days I like to vary it a lot more.”
Over his 16-year career technology and data advancements in football means opposing goalkeepers are much more informed of a player’s preferences.
Often before games, they are given a full briefing of how a player has taken their penalties in past matches.
So is Le Fondre worried that he will be found out?
“Not really – I do a bit of research on the keepers as well and John Crawley also used to give me a video on the opposition keepers and where they like to go and what their trigger is.
Le Fondre might have an 89% record, but he really admires two penalty takers from the past.
“Matthew Le Tissier because he only ever missed one penalty and I also like the penalties of Graham Alexander, the former Preston and Scotland player, which are similar to mine.”
Le Tissier scored an incredible 47 out of 48 (98%), and it’s clear in his explanation that he shares Le Fondre’s belief of self-belief.
“(I was) always so incredibly confident, it didn’t matter who was in the goal,” Le Tissier says in a video with Adidas.
“On your run-up just pick one of them (a side), keep it simple, don’t over-complicate it, don’t think too much.”
If Le Fondre shares Le Tissier’s mental approach then he certainly shares Alexander’s technical approach.
Alexander scored 77 out of 83 penalties, a 93 per cent conversion rate, with a similar straight run-up approach and a powerful shot off the laces that Le Fondre uses.
But it all comes back to the mind for Alexander.
"You don't want to get into mind games. For me the keeper was irrelevant. They try to put you off, they talk to you. If you take the penalty you want to take you'll score - even if they go the right way,” Alexander told the Manchester Evening News in 2012.
"I'm a believer in positive thinking - know your penalty and stick to it. You must believe you can score. Say to yourself 'I am scoring this goal'. You might not always but at least you're giving yourself the best chance.”
So if your life did depend on a person scoring a penalty to keep you alive than Le Fondre is a very good choice, statistically 5% better than Ronaldo and 12% better than Messi.
Somewhat surprisingly, of current players who have scored more than 20, West Ham’s Mark Noble might be an even better choice with a 90% conversion rate (38/42), or even AS Roma’s Diego Perotti at 92% (23/25), or what about Fenerbache’s Max Kruse at 92% (24/26) also.
Chelsea’s Jorginho has an incredible 95% with 20 scored from 21 attempts.
From an Australian perspective, recently retired Mile Jedinak ended his career with a perfect 100% record, although that was from 16 attempts. Yaya Toure also had a 100% record from 15 attempts.
Of course, there are a few players who managed perfect records, but almost none of them took more than 20.
Kevin Muscat managed to get 95% with the same ratio as Jorginho over the course of his career.
But if you’re looking for the best-known penalty taker in history, it’s a toss-up between Le Tissier’s 47/48 (98%) and Mexican legend Cuauhtémoc Blanco who scored 71 of 73 (97%).
Looking at the limited vision of Blanco’s penalties on YouTube you can see that he also favours a very straight run-up.
Le Fondre might be slightly behind Blanco and Le Tissier, but no doubt once the A-League returns he’ll be confident of building on his tally.
Players can come to be remembered by penalties, for the good and for the bad - think Antonín Panenka, to a lesser extent Roberto Baggio or even John Aloisi.
The concept of sudden death tends to be memorable or maybe more accurately; traumatic.
Sydney FC fans will be able to remember that in Adam Le Fondre they had an assassin from the spot.
