Ask a group of eleven-year-olds to finish and watch what happens. Almost all of them will hit the ball as hard as they can with their laces. That instinct never fully goes away — you see it in Sunday league, you see it in academy football, and occasionally you see it in professionals who should know better, blazing a six-yard chance into the third row.
Meanwhile the strikers who score sixty goals a season are, most of the time, doing something that looks almost lazy. They side-foot it. They pass the ball into the corner from twelve yards like they're playing a square ball to a teammate.
Why the side-foot wins
Three reasons, and they compound.
Contact area. The inside of the foot presents a large, flat, relatively forgiving surface. The laces present a small, curved one. If your contact point is off by a centimetre with a side-foot, the ball goes roughly where you wanted. If it's off by a centimetre with your laces, it goes into the stand.
Repeatability. The side-foot motion is short and mostly comes from the hip. There's less to go wrong. A laces strike involves a longer backswing, a bigger rotation, and much more that has to be timed correctly, which is fine when you're standing still and terrible when you're arriving at a cutback with a defender's shoulder in your ribs.
You don't need the power. This is the one people miss. A goalkeeper twelve yards away cannot reach the bottom corner in time regardless of how hard the ball is travelling, as long as it's placed properly. Power only matters when the keeper is close enough to be in the way, or when the shot is from distance. Inside the box it's almost irrelevant.
The numbers back it up
Conversion rates from inside the six-yard box and central areas of the penalty area are dramatically higher for placed finishes than for struck ones. That's true across every dataset I've seen, and it's not a small gap.
What's more interesting is that the gap widens under pressure. When a striker has time and space, a laces finish converts reasonably well. When he's rushed, with a defender closing, the placed finish holds up and the struck one falls apart. Which is exactly backwards from how most players behave — they reach for power precisely when they're panicking.
What the great finishers actually do
If you watch a genuinely elite finisher in slow motion, a few things stand out and none of them are about the strike.
They look at the goalkeeper, not the ball, in the moment before contact. The ball's position is known — it's coming to a spot they've already calculated. The information they need is where the keeper's weight is, and they gather it late.
They shift the ball out of their feet before striking. One touch to set, not to control. That touch creates the angle and the distance for a clean contact, and it's the most under-coached moment in finishing.
And they choose a target that isn't a corner. This surprises people. The far bottom corner is the hardest place for a keeper to reach, yes, but it's also the smallest target and the most likely place to miss. A lot of elite finishes go into the area maybe a metre inside the post, low, which is still unreachable but has a much bigger margin for error.
When you should hit it
I don't want to overstate this. There are situations where the laces are correct.
Anything outside the box, obviously — you need pace to beat a set keeper from distance. Any shot where the keeper is very close and closing, because then you need the ball past him before he sets, and placement into a corner takes longer to arrive. And volleys, generally, where the mechanics of the side-foot don't work well with a ball arriving at height.
There's also the case of the near-post finish across a keeper who's narrowed the angle. That often requires a firm strike simply because the gap is small and the ball has to get there before the keeper's leg does.
But those are the exceptions. The default, inside the box, with a moment to look up, should be the pass into the net.
Coaching it is a psychology problem
Here's the difficult bit. Telling players to place their finishes doesn't work, because in the moment their adrenaline says hit it. I've said "just side-foot it" to young players about four thousand times and it's changed roughly nobody's behaviour.
What has worked, at least for me, is changing what the practice rewards. Shooting drills where the goal is divided into zones and only the low corners count for anything. Finishing exercises with a goalkeeper and a rule that anything over the bar is minus two points. Small-sided games where you can only score from inside the box.
The other thing that helps is removing the audience. A lot of the desire to smash it is social — a hard-struck goal feels better and gets a bigger reaction. In a quiet, repetitive finishing session with nobody watching, players will naturally settle into the more efficient technique, and it starts to become the default.
Then it needs about a thousand repetitions before it survives a match. That's the actual answer, unglamorously. The strikers who make it look easy have taken tens of thousands of these, mostly alone, mostly boring. The technique is the simple part.