When the Stakes Rise: What Pressure Actually Does to Athletes and Teams
By Fury Performance Labs Research Desk, in collaboration with Fernando Herrera Coronel
A penalty shootout is one of the strangest tests in sport. The distance is the same every time. The ball is the same. The goal doesn't move. And yet the same player who scores calmly in training can miss entirely when the shootout decides a World Cup. What changes isn't the technique. It's the pressure, and recent research is getting increasingly precise about what that pressure actually does to the body, the mind, and the group around it.
Pressure Is Not One Thing
The first correction the research makes is to how we talk about pressure at all. A widely used framework describes athletes entering high stakes moments in one of two physiological and psychological states: a challenge state, where the situation is appraised as demanding but manageable, or a threat state, where the same situation is appraised as exceeding personal resources. The same event, the same shootout, the same shot, can trigger either state depending entirely on how the athlete interprets it. That distinction matters because it reframes pressure from something that happens to an athlete into something that gets interpreted by one, which opens the door to training that interpretation directly.
The Data Behind Choking
Choking is often talked about as bad luck or a mental lapse, but the numbers tell a more specific story. A 2024 analysis of over 1,700 international penalty kicks found that high situational pressure raised the probability of completely missing the target by roughly 6 percent, regardless of the shooter's underlying skill level. The same analysis found that skill still mattered, high skill reduced the chance of a save by the goalkeeper by about 4 percent, but skill functioned more as a buffer against pressure than as a replacement for it. In other words, technical ability and mental composure under pressure are separate variables that both need training, not one variable standing in for the other.
What Separates Those Who Thrive From Those Who Fold
A 2024 meta-study synthesizing qualitative research on athletes performing well under pressure identified a recurring set of factors distinguishing clutch performances from choking ones: a sense of perceived control over the situation, pre-performance routines that create a feeling of familiarity inside chaos, and psychological skills like structured breathing and self-talk that regulate anxiety in real time rather than suppress it. None of these factors are talent. They are practiced skills, which is precisely why research increasingly recommends deliberately training under pressurized conditions that mimic competition, not just training the physical skill in a low-stakes environment and hoping composure shows up on the day.
Pressure Doesn't Stay With One Person
Perhaps the most underappreciated finding in this research area is that pressure moves through a team, not just through an individual. Foundational work on penalty shootouts found that celebrations after a successful kick were associated with a teammate's subsequent success, while muted or negative reactions after a miss tended to precede further misses, evidence of emotional contagion operating in real time inside a single shootout. More recent qualitative work on team collapse describes a similar mechanism at the group level: a single critical event, a key error or an opponent's momentum shift, can trigger a cascade of negative emotional and behavioral contagion across an entire team, compounding what started as one person's mistake into a shared unraveling.
This has a direct coaching implication. If pressure spreads through a group the way research suggests it does, then managing pressure isn't just an individual sports psychology exercise; it's a team-wide discipline. The environment a team builds around failure, whether a miss is treated as catastrophic or as an expected part of a high-stakes process, appears to shape how contagious that failure becomes.
The Practical Takeaway
None of this makes pressure something to be eliminated. The research doesn't support the idea that the goal is a pressure-free environment; it supports training athletes and teams to interpret pressure as a challenge rather than a threat, to rehearse under conditions that resemble the real thing, and to build team habits, in celebration, in response to error, in body language, that keep one person's difficult moment from becoming everyone's. The margin between the champion and the runner-up in a tied contest is rarely a gap in ability. Increasingly, the research suggests, it's a gap in how well the mind and the group around it were prepared for the exact moment that mattered.