Dortmund, Germany: Penalty shootouts used to strike fear into the hearts of England’s soccer players and their fans. Maybe not anymore. England coach Gareth Southgate, who has his own special chapter in the country’s spot-kick heartache, has worked hard behind the scenes to change the psyche around the shootout in his eight years in charge of the national team.

Now it's something they embrace, not dread. "I think we’ve got a good process,” Southgate said after England’s 5-3 shootout win over Switzerland in the European Championship quarterfinals. That process involves a bit of common sense (picking specialist penalty-takers), some science (breathing techniques and not being rushed), plenty of data (on goalkeeper Jordan Pickford’s water bottle were instructions for each of Switzerland’s penalty-takers ) and, of course, some luck.

It's clearly working. England has won three of its four shootouts in Southgate’s tenure. Before that, the team had lost five in a row - stretching back to 1996 when Southgate himself had a penalty saved in a loss to Germany in the Euro semifinals.

He ended up in a pizza advert, where he got mocked for his miss. England’s penalty transformation can be split into two stages. The first came between January 2017, a few months after Southgate was hired, until the World Cup the following year in Russia.

In that 17 months, a team of analysts led by a sport psychologist worked on getting England better at penalty shootouts. Geir Jordet, a pr.