How to Beat Onana at Penalties

FC24, previously known as FIFA, was my main source of bonding with my boys in RC4. During my career as a pro FIFA player, I have witnessed how André Onana has been an absolute disaster of a keeper and have positioning worst than a cat playing chess. Thus I will dedicate this blog post on how to play against Onana in the hopes of getting him benched and hopefully Manchester United can be not another dusty banter club.

Over the 23/24 and 24/25 EPL seasons, Onana has faced 11 penalties and had an amazing performance, saving just 1 ball, equating to 9% save rate ¹. The only person to fail to score against this League One tier keeper was Southampton FC’s Cameron Archer so this serves as my recommendation to Southampton on how to make Onana’s record reach 0% save rate.

Where players shoot

For us to know how to bench Onana, we must first look at what kind of information our dearest keeper has. Assuming Onana has done his homework and has one of those quirky bottles with fancy probability numbers ², we can assume that he knows the probability of where Cameron Archer, a right footer, might shoot.

Right-footers mostly go low and wide.

• Bottom right: 19%
• Bottom left: 18%
• Top corners: ~1% each

In Southampton vs United, Archer went bottom left. That matches the right-footer trend. The bottom left quadrant had the highest probability of 44%, Onana guessed correctly, saved the pen, and his potential retirement.

Where could Archer have shot?

Using conversion stats from a bunch of penalties, we can make a reasonable, though not definitive, call on where to shoot.

• Top corners: ~100%
• Bottom centre: 93.8%
• Bottom corners: ~85%
• Mid-height left-centre / right-centre: ~71–74%

From this, we can see that the bottom left where Archer shot had a conversion rate of just 79.4%, probably because keepers like Onana did their readings and dived correctly. Top corners, although tricky, have near perfect success rate (high risk high reward) and shooting directly into the centre (low risk high reward) seems like free goals to me!

Validation (ish but not really)

To make sure my recommendations are data driven, I have personally reviewed 102 on target penalties from the 23/24 EPL season to try and P-hack my way through on why shooting into the centre is worth it.

Download my dataset here!

Doing a quick and simple analysis, we can draw the following conclusions:

• Overall conversion: 96/102 = 94.1%
• Right foot: 60 (91.7%) ~ Archer is a right footer!
• Left foot: 42 (97.6%)
• Versus Man United (Onana): faced 7, conceded 7, dives 4 left, 3 right

Note: 3×3 grid below is numbered left-to-right, top-to-bottom (1–3, 4–6, 7–9).

Penalty conversion by zone (3×3, goal layout)

The findings from my data pretty much lines up with the conversion chart.

What I’d tell Archer

• Top corners are pretty much a guaranteed score if you can place them. However, they are really risky to shoot as you might hit the post or just simply shoot off target. Your FC25 stats is pretty bad so just avoid top corners.
• Bottom corners strats are too well known and keepers are exploiting that predictability.
• Shoot into the centre as Onana doesn’t seem to stay stationary. Looks like a free goal to me. Plus it sends Onana to the shops!

Why you should trust me

• I won a fifa ‘tournament’ once and got a golden ball.

TLDR; Just go centre, Onana always dives anyways ³

Thanks for reading!