Yes, but being good at taking or saving penalties isn't a reflection of anything other than being able to take or save penalties. As such, it doesn't reflect anything about the game or the relative abilities of the players and reduces the game itself to meaninglessness. This makes it an enormously unsatisfactory and arbitrary way of settling a game.
“Other clubs never came into my thoughts once I knew Arsenal wanted to sign me.”
True, but it is an English disease, this notion that it is a lottery/coin toss/no reflection of blah blah blah….
Where two teams have failed to win the game in 120 minutes they resolve it through a test of bottle and one specific skill.
We almost always fail this test. It may render the game meaningless but it does prove one thing- that we, the English, don’t have the bottle for it. Until we accept that and try and address it we will keep losing shoot outs. WE prefer to just write it off as meaningless, a lottery, flip of a coin.
Its *******s.
Perhaps we could even take the thing further in insisting each team designate just one player (obviously its striker or chief penalty-taker) to execute all its kicks until the winner is decided.
Then instead of the tragedy of some poor unknown squad member who's never taken a pen in his life costing his side the match or even a trophy, you have the real drama of a mano a mano contest (not literally obviously, unless one wishes to focus on the goalkeepers, I suppose) between the two teams' Galáctico stranieri; Kun v Alexis, for example, or even Ronaldo versus Messi.
A finer spectacle, imo, and much fairer.
"Plenty of strikers can score goals," he said, gesturing to the famous old stands casting shadows around us.
"But a lot have found it difficult wearing the number 9 shirt for The Arsenal."