Pascal Groß, Germany and the Penalty Shoot-out Preparation Gap at the World Cup

On the pitch, the score stood at 1-1 after 120 minutes. The shoot-out began. By the sixth kick, Joshua Kimmich — still regarded as one of the team's pillars — was walking around the group asking for volunteers. The staff had locked in five names beforehand. That list ran out. Jonathan Tah stepped up, took the first penalty of his professional career, and put it over the bar. In one corner of the bench, Pascal Groß sat still. He had said he was prepared for exactly this scenario. He was never sent on.

For someone who spends his working life watching youth teams and forgotten names, that detail deserves more attention than the result itself. It says something about how a group prepares for the moment when everything else becomes meaningless.

To read it properly, the story has to be placed on two parallel tracks: the fate of a 35-year-old midfielder at club level, and the rebuild of a national team coming off a disappointing World Cup.

On the first track, Groß is enjoying the best start of his Brighton career. After five Premier League matches he has three goals and four assists. Brighton sit third in the table. For a 35-year-old midfielder, that is among the highest output in the league, and few leading clubs would turn down that kind of contingency option.

On the second track, Germany entered the World Cup with Julian Nagelsmann in charge. Groß played just 17 minutes at the tournament, barely enough to appear in the match records. Jürgen Klopp then took over as head coach, and Groß was left out of the first squad. He has 19 caps and one international goal.

At the elite level, a shoot-out is a process designed in advance. Leading national teams build ranked lists of eight to ten takers, rehearse sudden death, and assign who steps up for the sixth, seventh and eighth kicks. Germany locked in five names. Once the shoot-out passed the fifth round, the plan was gone.

Germany were once held up as the model here. Major-tournament history records shoot-outs the white-shirted side entered with the expression of men who already knew which kick was theirs. That confidence came from preparation. The distance between that image and the sight of Kimmich canvassing for takers at the sixth kick is the part worth analysing.

A good shoot-out list is not simply the best five penalty takers. It is the people who can carry the walk from the halfway line. Coaches usually rank by two criteria: technique and temperament, and sometimes place a reliable taker third to build momentum. Assigning roles in advance removes the hesitation that, in sudden death, can cost a whole tournament.

This is an organisational failure, not a rules failure. IFAB laws allow any eligible player still on the pitch to take a sudden-death kick. No rule was broken, and no sanction will follow. What was missing was a sheet of paper with names on it.

Pascal Groß fits the profile coaches usually keep precisely for dead-ball situations. He is a possession controller, a set-piece specialist, and at club level a regular penalty taker. At 35 he is no longer the man who covers the most ground, but he is among the least error-prone when the ball is placed on the spot.

He came to the national team late, past thirty, and has one goal in 19 caps. A midfielder who plays on rhythm and positioning is rarely measured in goals, but the record places him in the depth group rather than the first-choice group. That makes the sixth-kick story harder to swallow.

Kimmich, the man labelled a key player, had to go looking for takers himself. Tah, a centre-back, stepped up for the first penalty of his career. Between those two details sits a gap: nobody in the Germany setup owned the contingency plan. A team can field eleven good players and still lose the sixth kick, because preparation is not counted as part of the match.

During my years covering youth sides, I have seen many games decided the same way. Not by a flash of brilliance, but by a training session that was skipped. There are players who get forgotten — and digging them up is what I was born to do.

When Groß says he was ready, it is not a complaint. He also says being left out is not a problem, and that for him personally the matter is closed. The message is conciliatory, and it defuses most of the argument that might have flared.

Another detail is rarely mentioned: after the shoot-out there was no conversation between Nagelsmann and Groß. He only learned that his coach at the time was devastated too. A communication vacuum inside a large group is often the earliest sign of a cycle closing, and it repeats at many national teams just after a major tournament.

This is where a contrarian reading is needed.

Germany went out after a 1-1 draw that ran to 120 minutes. That is a narrow defeat, not a collapse, and the crisis framing ignores that the side competed on level terms for most of normal time.

Groß's Brighton form is being viewed with excitement: three goals and four assists in five games. Five games is far too small a sample to confirm a trend. At 35 he is on the final slope of the player-value curve, and a hot streak of this kind often coincides with a contract or renewal juncture. No advanced data has been published to confirm that output will hold over the next ten matches.

There is also a contradiction inside the coverage itself. The same article calls his omission no surprise given his age, and calls his form outstanding. Both statements cannot stay true indefinitely. If the form really is outstanding, age should be a variable, not a verdict. And if age is the verdict, then three goals and four assists should be read alongside the quality of Brighton's system, a side overperforming its expectations.

For Brighton, Groß's form carries a double meaning. It keeps the club high in the table while raising the short-term value of a 35-year-old. For a club built on buying low, developing and selling high, an ageing player in form is more often a short-term retention than a long-term investment. An early third place only brings outside bids forward.

Klopp takes over Germany at a psychologically convenient moment. A new cycle usually opens by prioritising younger profiles, which narrows the route back for a 35-year-old midfielder regardless of club form. But that very form feeds the question the media will keep asking: why not?

That question will survive as long as Groß keeps scoring and creating in the Premier League. It will quieten if Brighton fade or he drops off. And it will disappear entirely if Klopp ever publishes a ten-name shoot-out list.

Klopp will not lack talent to choose from in the next cycle. What Germany need is a ten-name list written in advance, a shoot-out session at eleven at night on an empty pitch, and someone calm enough to step up when the sixth kick calls. Before they were legends, they were just a name on the bench list. The quietest revolutions always start from a substitutes' bench.