At the Stadio Olimpico last night, Roma experienced one of football’s strangest nightmares. In their Europa League match against Lille (a 1-0 defeat), the team failed the same penalty three times. Twice the referee ordered a retake—first for encroachment, then for the goalkeeper moving early—but neither Dovbyk nor Soulé could beat Turkish keeper Ozer.

The penalty is football’s cruelest paradox: eleven short meters that often feel like an abyss. It has created legends but far more heartbreaks—Baggio in Pasadena ’94, Trezeguet in Manchester 2003—moments etched into collective memory.

Yet some stories verge on the surreal. At the Athens Olympics in 2004, Tunisia’s Mohammed Jedidi took six consecutive penalties against Serbia, scoring once but forced to retake for repeated infringements, before finally converting at the sixth attempt.

Italy, too, has seen its share of oddities. In a Lazio-Napoli clash in 1984, Giordano and D’Amico missed and repeated penalties in a bizarre sequence, while Inter’s Evaristo Beccalossi went down in history in 1982 with two missed spot-kicks in just eight minutes.

Roma’s ordeal against Lille now enters this hall of football folklore. Because from the spot, a penalty is never just about technique—it is theatre, psychology, and often, cruel irony.