The Penalty Kick

About The Penalty Kick

A rousing history of the penalty kick and its introduction in English football by a famed British writer & editor.

“Football is a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for ninety minutes and at the end, the Germans win.” —Gary Lineker

In the 1880s, football was a rough and often dangerous game. As a result, William McCrum, the heir to a linen fortune and a keen amateur goalkeeper in Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, proposed a new and drastic sanction: a penalty kick that would admonish anyone—and their team—for not following the rules.

At first the International Football Board resisted “the Irishman’s Motion” as a restriction that would curb the players’ freedom of expression, but the Penalty Kick was adopted in 1891 to almost immediate acclaim among fans and players. For about a hundred years, this extraordinary phenomenon has not only regulated the conduct of football, but has also inspired game theorists and infiltrated classics of contemporary literature.

An enthralling portrait of a lost age, The Penalty Kick: The Story of a Game-Changer looks at the history and meaning of an extraordinary phenomenon while examining the Penalty Kick’s psychological—even philosophical—grip on our imaginations, with its distillation of risk and chance into an all-or-nothing moment.