Inside or laces? Which shot when

The short version

Inside: placementThe most common finish in the box.
Laces: powerFaster, but harder to aim.
Curl: off-centreYou trade speed for spin.

Inside: placement

England Football puts it simply: accuracy over power. It’s the finish you see most inside the box.¹

Inside of the foot: it starts wide, curls in, hits the post and goes in. From one of our test sessions, half speed.

Laces: power

In a lab study, the laces shot left the foot about 20% faster than the inside shot.²
In 8,466 kicks, the inside was more accurate than the laces.³
A laces shot can feel great even when it wasn’t accurate.¹ Check the video.

The laces strike: ankle locked, toes down, through the centre. An illustration, not a measurement. Shorts: Mindfront, MakeHuman Community, CC BY 4.0.

Curl

Hit the ball off-centre and it spins and curves, but it goes slower.⁴ England Football teaches curl with the part of the foot between the laces and the inside, striking under and to the side of the ball.¹

The knuckleball

Almost no spinThe ball can wobble one way or the other, depending on its panels.⁵
It needs distanceThe wobble takes 10–20 metres to show.⁶ From the penalty spot there’s barely room.

It’s rare by design, even for pros. None of the shots from our test sessions is a knuckleball.

Which shot when

Situation	Try
Close, keeper set	Inside, into a corner
Edge of the box, a gap	Laces, low and hard
Keeper or defender in the way	Curl around them

Drill · our proposal

Same corner, two surfaces

Call a low cornerFrom the penalty spot.
5 with the inside, 5 with the lacesCount each series on its own.
Step back 5 metresAnd do it again.

What we can and can’t see

We seeWhere the ball went and how your body moved around the strike.
We don’t measure yetSpin or speed. A bend in one camera isn’t measured curl.

See your own strike

Send five shots. You get every one slowed down, with one thing to keep and one to work on.

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England Football: finishing techniques.
Nunome et al. 2002: 28.0 against 23.4 m/s.
Hunter et al. 2018.
Kellis & Katis 2007.
Hong & Asai 2014.
Darbois Texier et al. 2016.