With the African Cup of Nations Final between Senegal and Morocco tied at 0-0, the tournament’s leading scorer Brahim Diaz stepped to the penalty spot after 19 minutes of stoppage time tension. Diaz was initially thrown to the ground on a corner kick by Senegal defender El Hadji Malick Diouf in the 95th minute of regulation, with the referee going to VAR and calling the penalty in the 98th minute. Senegal would then walk off the field in protest before Sadio Mane instructed his teammates to return in the 10th minute. Diaz would put the ball down on the penalty spot in the 112th minute, but we didn’t get off that easy with Mane and Senegal keeper Edouard Mendy trading off between complaining to the ref and scuffing up the penalty spot. Diaz would finally take the penalty in the 114th minute, attempting a Panenka so poor that audiences wondered whether it was staged, with Diaz and Mendy agreeing upon the save beforehand in exchange for Senegal finishing the match.
Of course, Senegal would win the final 1-0 with an extra time goal. Diaz apologized for the Panenka attempt, saying that his “soul hurts.” The moment broke containment as the larger footballing world chimed in, with Sergio Ramos sending his support. Real Madrid teammate Kylian Mbappe even “paid tribute” to Diaz the following weekend with his own successful Panenka (note Mbappe’s stutter steps before his take to throw off the keeper’s rhythm). Yet PSG manager Luis Enrique had to concede that the decision to take the Panenka was “bizarre,” then defended Diaz by adding that the midfielder was “neither an assassin or a bad person.”
But why the appeal of the Panenka in the first place? The skill feels like a glitch in the sport, an ultimate understanding and flipping of the intensity of the moment. Consider the penalty sequence as a whole: first, the foul in question, with protests from both sides. Moments pass before the referee makes a decision, which then leads to more arguments. There could be more time wasting and displays of the dark arts. The tension continues to rise as the penalty taker places the ball 12 yards away from the net and stares down the opposition. The ref blows the whistle for live play. The whole sequence could take 30 seconds or last 18 minutes. It can end anticlimactically since a player “should” score from penalties (it has an xG of 0.79).
The Panenka transforms a moment into something and nothing at the same time. There is a charged silence as the ball slowly floats in the air. The skill relieves tension not through speed or power, but with cleverness and mental trickery - with quietness. It’s as if nothing happened, but everything happened. There is no unique annotation to denote a successful Panenka, but something changed and shifted underneath. Its resolution to silence instead of noise feels anti-sport, defined as much as what it is not by what it is.
The Panenka suggests a portal to another solution not based in technique, nor athleticism, nor tactics. It fuses the context of a match, the nervous energy of the crowd, and the tension of the passing seconds. The penalty taker understands that the keeper is also on their own heroic journey, believing that saving a last minute penalty in a final is part of their own destiny. Using this desire for greatness against the opponent, the penalty taker beats the keeper with a floating ball they could have saved in elementary school. It is antithetical - the keeper did something when the answer was to do nothing. The simplicity is taunting. The Panenka resolves these contradictory emotions with a single moment.
We have footage of the first ever Panenka by Antonin Panenka to win the 1976 Euro Championship in penalties (the commentator immediately recognizing the skill’s genius). But our collective consciousness’s first memory of the skill came from Zinedine Zidane in the 2006 World Cup Final between France and Italy, when the French midfielder fooled keeper Gigi Buffon in the seventh minute on the grandest stage of the sport. It wasn’t a clean Panenka - the ball hit the underside of the crossbar before it went over the line, putting the sequence briefly into the hands of the referee. But it also encapsulated Zidane’s elegance of doing exactly enough and nothing more, of walking right up to the limits and leaving no room to spare.
What started with a Panenka, of course, would end in one of the most infamous moments in World Cup Finals history with Zidane getting sent off after headbutting Italian defender Marco Materazzi. It was as if Zidane’s early Panenka opened up space for anything else to happen. Madness doesn’t always necessarily follow the Panenka - but it creates the possibility.
Whereas Zidane stoked the flames, Andrea Pirlo calmed them with his Panenka in the shootout of the 2012 Euro Championship quarterfinal match between Italy and England. Pirlo described feeling that England keeper Joe Hart was “very confident” and wanted to deal his opponent a “psychological blow.” Hart would later write that Pirlo “understood how pumped up I was” and that the midfielder “knew exactly what I was going to do.” The Panenka is more than a skill, but a mastery of the emotions and psychology of a tense situation.
Because then, what happens to an opponent when their mask is uncovered in front of the world?
This risk and reward are the attraction. The pragmatic penalty taker rests on the right shoulder, with glory on the left. To paraphrase Chekhov, each failed Panenka is unique in its own way. But for Zidane and Pirlo, hitting a Panenka in the international tournament knockout stages was their destiny, a necessary step into soccer immortality. It was not enough to display their world class technique, but they had to display that they had conquered the sport on a psychological level in its most pressure-packed moment. After that, what else is left to prove?
–
What of Diaz now? Already the top scorer of the competition, he would have been the Player of the Tournament and a national hero had he hit the Panenka. Instead, he is a symbol of flying too close to the sun. In the thin line between national hero and infamy, there is the Panenka.
It’s difficult to imagine a more consequential failed Panenka as it would have to take place in the final of the World Cup or Champions League. The fallout would continue. Pape Thiaw, whose post-match press conference was cancelled due to journalists’ anger, was suspended by the Confederation of African Football for ordering his players to walk off the field in the buildup to the Panenka. Morocco’s FA announced that they would pursue legal action against Senegal, with manager Walid Regragui calling the choice to walk off the field “shameful.” In what should have been the decisive moment to end a match, the Panenka only created a bitter new beginning.