Throughout Nick Rimando’s MLS career, even the casual viewers were left perplexed at how a 5-foot-9 goalkeeper could save penalties at an almost a preternatural rate. The 59 penalties he saved over his career (not counting shootouts) are an MLS record. Over his two decades in the league, Rimando also set records for appearances, goalkeeper wins, clean sheets and saves. He has two MLS Cup titles, two Supporters’ Shield crowns and was an eight time MLS All-Star selection. The danger of Rimando on the line, waiting for a penalty to gobble up became MLS folklore.
Advertisement
Even though the odds were never in his favor, you always assumed he had a shot at going the right way. My assumptions were that I’d never get to tell this story. Most goalkeepers are wired differently. Rimando himself admitted “we’re all headcases” in search of an edge in the moments after a referee points to the spot, everything going against them.
Going back to 2013, I’ve pestered Real Salt Lake’s PR staff regarding how receptive Rimando would be to doing a story on his approach to penalties. Every time he’d save another, former editors would suggest I ask him for an exclusive. But I always knew: there was no logical reason for Rimando to truly entertain the idea.
Why would he? He was remarkably good at turning what should be a near-certainty for penalty takers into a heavy cloud of confusion and doubt. When I would ask his RSL teammates in passing if they knew why Rimando was so effective at stopping penalties, they would turn the question back at me. They honestly wanted to know, too. That’s how closely Rimando, considered to be one of the best goalkeepers in MLS history, guarded the ace that was always up his sleeve.
I emailed Rimando out of the blue a few weeks ago. The MLS Cup playoffs were underway. I wondered if his mindset had changed. Rimando retired at the conclusion of the 2019 season after 20 remarkable years in the league. He took some time to think about it, then replied.
“Let’s do it,” he wrote.
Rimando pulled back the curtain. And truthfully, the etymology of the secret, trick, or whatever you want to call it, was just as fun as hearing him break down how it all came to be. Which is how I ended up on a call with Bobby Clark, former Notre Dame soccer coach, whose secret got passed around through various clubs and leagues over the years. When Clark was at Stanford in the late 1990s, he coached Ryan Nelsen, a defender from New Zealand, who would go on to be drafted by D.C. United in 2001. Rimando joined Nelsen in D.C. after the Miami Fusion dissolved. It wasn’t until their third season as teammates that Nelsen divulged the information that changed Rimando’s life.
The 2004 Eastern Conference final between D.C. United and the New England Revolution is considered one of the best matches in the history of the league. It even has its own nickname: “The Rumble at RFK.”
Prior to it going to penalties, Nelsen approached Rimando. He told the goalkeeper that he didn’t know what his process was, but he had a tip that had been passed down through the ranks over the years. It was for Rimando to take or leave in real time. Rimando took it, and D.C. United advanced when Rimando stonewalled a shaggy-haired Clint Dempsey. That was the night it all began.
Advertisement
So what was the origin of this fruitful tip that Nelsen shared with Rimando?
The answer came via Lossiemouth, Scotland, described on the town’s website as a “golf-oriented resort” on the country’s northeast coast. It was near suppertime there for Clark. Now enjoying his retirement back home, Clark was a former disciple of Sir Alex Ferguson and a popular NCAA Division I coach for over 30 years. Now 75, phoned after his son, Jamie, the head men’s soccer coach at the University of Washington, added me to a WhatsApp thread appropriately labeled: “Family secrets.”
“Most families have cooking/recipe secrets,” Jamie wrote to his father, “but in the Clark household it’s about (penalty kicks).”
Without this well-guarded information snaking its way around the globe and ending up on Rimando’s right shoulder almost two decades ago, RSL doesn’t have a star to proudly sport above its crest. Yes, Rimando was always good at anticipating correctly, bursting off his line and stopping penalties. Even when he was young — before going to UCLA and later turning pro — he felt a knack for it. Those who remember RSL’s 2009 run to lifting MLS Cup know that Rimando was on an otherworldly level.
In the conference finals, Rimando saved three of the seven penalties attempted to advance to MLS Cup. In the final against the LA Galaxy, he saved two of seven, while Landon Donovan looked shaky from the outset and skied his attempt over the crossbar. That was when mythology surrounding Rimando’s abilities on penalties really began to soar.
Nelsen talks to Rimando during a match in 2002. (Photo by Greg Fiume/Getty Images)
This is the rundown, this is what Nelsen, who’d go on to be a defender in the Premier League for nearly a decade, first told Rimando when the stakes couldn’t be higher on that fall night in 2004.
“When they put the ball down, their hands show you where they’re going,” Rimando said all these years later. “It’s a mental thing that they don’t know what they’re doing, but they have in the back of their head. They know where they’re going, they’ll just put in a direction they’re going. Maybe they’ll try and use their eyes to trick you into going a different direction, but mentally they don’t know they’re tipping their hands.”
Advertisement
After he explains, I grabbed the Nike ball on the floor of my office near my desk, and asked him to walk me through it.
“Imagine you have a ball in your hands and it’s even on both sides,” he explains. “Like a steering wheel at 10 and 2. Now imagine your wrists go to your right, so now if you’re the taker, I would think he’s going to the goalkeeper’s left, the kicker’s right. Now, if he moves his hands to the left a little bit, now he’s showing me that he’s going to his left, and my right. He puts it down in that kind of direction. He doesn’t know he does it. He puts it down on the spot, but his wrists show me where he’s going when he puts it down.”
It’s hard to find video clips of the confusion that ensues after a penalty is awarded. What you get is a 10-second bit of the referee blowing his whistle, signaling the kicker’s time to approach the ball. But everything Rimando and other goalkeepers have to do to mentally prepare for that moment comes the first time the referee blows their whistle and points to the spot. Defenders will go nuts and plead, while opposing players, the ones granted the shot, will try to clear out space for the referee to get to the explanation of the call. All the while, Rimando is trying to focus on who gets the ball.
There were times where he missed a player grabbing the ball and setting it down, so he’d purposefully walk up to the spot and poke the ball away to ensure he could get a clean view a second or even third time, depending on the amount of chaos in the box.
All these years later, Nelsen, now an agent, is laughing over our call about this subject. For one, because he joked that Clark’s trade secret was “probably over 100 years old” and, two, that Rimando was giving Nelsen credit for helping change the complexion of penalty-taking in American soccer.
“When a player is naturally going to go to the right, they naturally put their hands and place the ball a bit further to the right than normal,” Nelsen says, explaining Clark’s theory. “It’s an instinctive thing. They place it the way they’re going to aim it, in a way. When it’s more straight, when they put their hands more straight, it’s going to go to the left and the goalkeeper’s right. If you’re pretending to be a mathematician, it’s all about probabilities, right?”
Not including penalty shootouts, takers went 59-of-92 against Rimando in his 20 seasons in MLS. That’s a 64 percent success rate. From 2010-2018, the leaguewide success rate was 79%, according to Opta data via MLSsoccer.com.
Advertisement
“When they do score a goal on me as a PK, I don’t take it as harshly as if they scored a regular goal on me,” Rimando says. “That’s what the game wants. That’s what MLS wants. They want to see goals. That’s what the game is about.”
Bobby Clark explains how he first formulated the idea during his playing days at Aberdeen in the Scottish league in the 1960s. Back then, the ball had pronounced laces all over, so it was easy for him as the goalkeeper to notice where the penalty taker’s hands were and, from six yards away, he could pick out the laces that helped him guess which way the taker was going. His late former manager, Eddie Turnbull, and star striker Joe Harper liked to engage in penalty competitions after training. Clark chose to be in goal for those duels, and that’s where he perfected — or at least tried to perfect — this theory.
“I always had a wee feeling,” Clark says. “But I’d always be watching him. Even when he thought I wouldn’t be watching (any penalty taker).”
A montage of Rimando’s penalty heroics was cobbled together a few years before he hung up his gloves. The first attempt he stops in the video is as a 19-year-old against Colombian star Carlos Valderrama. The list goes on: Donovan, Dempsey, Robbie Keane, Steven Gerrard. They’re all there.
All of this led to a scenario he’ll never forget — what remains the coolest “what if” of his career.
It was midway through the second period of extra time in the 2015 CONCACAF Cup final between the U.S. and Mexico. The U.S. had tied the match 2-2 on goal from Bobby Wood in the 108th minute. Rimando’s U.S. teammate, Chris Wondolowski, plopped down next to him on the bench and informed him that he was to warm up. Then U.S coach Jurgen Klinsmann wanted to utilize Rimando in the shootout, if the match reached that point.
The Rose Bowl was filled with 93,000 spectators on that October evening. Rimando, who grew up in nearby Montclair and went to UCLA, was leveled by the potential of the moment. But Mexico outside back Paul Aguilar spectacularly volleyed home a winner in the 118th minute, securing the regional title for Mexico before the match could go to penalties.
Advertisement
Still, Rimando thinks about that five years later.
“Who knows?” he jokes. “Maybe we would’ve lost in penalties, and my legacy might’ve gone down the drain.”
A year prior, Rimando received the dream call to be part of the 23-man roster at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Some days after training, Rimando and Dempsey would stay late together and practice penalties. Had the U.S. drawn a penalty in Brazil and Dempsey was on the field, it would’ve been his moment. So it was up to the team’s resident penalty expert to bestow upon him as much inside information as possible. There were times where Dempsey would take as many as 30 straight attempts and Rimando would explain to him what exactly he was seeing and how an opposing goalkeeper could aim for his own edge in a match scenario.
“I was the old guy doing the young guy’s jobs,” Rimando says.
His knowledge and insight was always considered to be of the utmost importance on the subject of penalties. During the 2016 Copa America Centenario, Klinsmann asked Rimando if he could fly to Seattle to serve as a guest assistant coach during the tournament’s knockout rounds. Rimando first ran the idea by fellow U.S. goalkeepers Tim Howard and Brad Guzan, friends of his, who remained the top two goalkeepers. He didn’t want to impose. With RSL’s approval, Rimando then boarded a flight to Seattle on a Thursday afternoon after training, got there in time and flew back to prepare for the weekend’s game. That night in Seattle was the first time he laid out, in detail, his primary tactic on penalties to other goalkeepers.
Over the years, others have come calling. Recently, Seattle’s Stefan Frei and Rimando’s former backup at RSL, Portland’s Jeff Attinella, reached out for pointers. Rimando’s two-decade-long reticence to publicly discuss his secret still looms. But the reality is that there’s a laundry list of tendencies goalkeepers all over have come to rely upon. Even Clark himself asked “which secret” Nelsen had relayed to Rimando. He wasn’t willing to divulge anything more than what was necessary.
“And that’s what I’m afraid of,” Rimando says. “Goalkeepers now, if this story comes out, does it work against them because some strikers read this article? It continues to be a head game. It’s our moment. This is equivalent to us scoring a goal.”
Advertisement
Since retirement, Rimando has started coaching young goalkeepers in the Salt Lake City area. It’s helped him spark a renewed love for the game after a much-needed year away from the sport. And no, the youngsters haven’t asked him for the penalty secret. Not yet.
When Rimando’s at home, he still tries to pay attention as closely as possible when a penalty is called. He wants to see how the taker grabs the ball and sets it down, if the broadcast allows for it. Rimando will make bets with his kids or girlfriend on which way a penalty will go. His batting average is still remarkably on-point, he proclaims.
“I don’t think that will ever go away,” he says.
Nope. The secret is out. And it’s not a bad thing.
“While it’s not a slam dunk, it’s at least being on the roulette table,” Nelsen said. “It gives you an advantage on the house. Because everybody should be scoring these penalties.”
(Top photo: Warren Wimmer/Icon Sport Media via Getty Images)
