The Penalty Taker: The Marble and the Sculptor

By Max Miecchi

Marco is fifteen, plays striker, and already knows that football is the only language in which he can say everything.
Then, on a November afternoon in Ancona, he misses the most important penalty of his life.
In the stands is Arianna, the green-eyed girl he has never dared approach.
The wrong moment, in the most definitive way possible.
Twenty years later, under the floodlights of a World Cup final, Marco finds himself face to face with a man eleven metres away.
A man who stares back at him with an air of arrogance, a look of pure challenge.
But who is scratching the tip of his nose, exactly the way Marco used to do it, as a boy.
The Penalty Taker is a novel about time that cannot be undone, about a love that changes shape without changing substance, and about that precise instant when foot meets ball and a whole life decides what it was meant to be.
With a surprise ending.

This story was adapted into the short film "The Last Penalty" (2013).

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H56B5KRF
• ISBN13: 9798181404663
• Release Date: June 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"