Are penalties a lottery? All the data you need from the art and psychology of launching them

Good Morning!

Today I am writing to talk about performance under pressure.

Practical case: shooting a penalty with millions watching.

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Before it was said that penalties were a lottery.

Now it is fashionable to say the opposite, also to the point of exaggeration.

Throwing from eleven meters is a mixture of luck, skill, strategy and psychology.

Below I compile a dozen statistics, studies and keys to the penalty shot.

1. Penalties are scored 76% of the time, but there are specialists.

Regular shooters score 77% and rookies 75%, according to InStat.

But I have looked at the players who have taken the most penalties in the 21st century to look for the best:

• Messi has scored 78% (130 shots)

• Ibrahimovic 84% (100)

• Cristiano Ronaldo 84% (166)

• Lampard 85% (70)

• Eden Hazard 88% (57)

2. It is not clear that it is much better to shoot first.

A much-cited study by Ignacio Palacios-Huerta observed that in penalty rounds the team that shot first won 60% of the time.

That was a great advantage and the result is mentioned often.

However, a later job with triple the data (540 runs) reduced the benefit of moving first to 53%.

That is, the advantage may exist, but it is quite small.

• After the penalties between Spain and Italy, the footballer Gerard Piqué commented that this advantage of shooting first is unfair - it is - and suggested an alternative format: to shoot in order ABBAABBAAB ... Thus the teams alternate the advantage (as is done in tennis with the serve of a

  tie break

  ).

3. Shooting hastily is a sign of failure.

The psychologist Geir Jordet spent five years studying penalty shootouts and recently summed up his work on Twitter: “It's a psychological game.” It's a pressure situation and the nerves pay off. It can sometimes be seen in the rush with which the If the shooter places the ball or reacts too quickly to the referee's whistle, those hasty penalties are scored only 57% of the time, while players who wait a second or more after the referee's whistle score 81% of the time.

4. The pitcher must be in control.

It was explained by Dave Reddin, the former head of strategy for the England team, in an article in

The Athletic:

“The important thing was to tell the players that they were in control. They decide when to launch. It is up to them, not the referee or the goalkeeper ”. In 2016, one of Reddin's missions was to break England's curse on penalty shootouts (which effectively ended in the 2018 World Cup). The British had been the worst in rounds for years, and one of the patterns they found when analyzing their shots was that they fired very quickly after the referee's whistle, as if it were a starting pistol.

It is the same data that Jordet gave in a 2009 paper: the English waited just 0.3 seconds before firing.

They were the most impatient, very close to the Spanish.

In contrast, the Germans took twice as long and the French three times.

(This pattern is also mentioned by journalist Ben Lyttleton in his book

Twelve Yards,

dedicated to penalties).

6. Even the illusion of control seems to help.

Penalties may be a lottery, but when Jordet interviewed a dozen footballers, he found a pattern: players who thought it was all a matter of luck were more likely to experience destructive anxiety: "The perception of control is key," he explains. .

7. It is easier to shoot to win than not to lose.

Players only score 62% of penalties when they need to score so as not to immediately lose the shootout (for example, when you are losing and you are the second to take the fifth penalty). At such times, more nervous signals are seen, such as short preparations and glances at the ground. Instead, the penalties decisive to win were successfully transformed 92% of the time.

8. As the batch progresses, the pressure and number of failures increases.

The first shot has been converted almost 90% of the time, while the third, fourth and fifth are below 80%.

The fourth has historically been the worst, although the difference does not seem significant.

After the sixth pitch, the hit does not reach 70%, because the tension rises and the worst are thrown.

9. There are players with repertoire.

As Reddin explains in

The Athletic,

a specialist like Harry Kane "has four or five different penalties that he takes regularly."

The idea is to maintain a habit, automate the shot, and feel comfortable when asked to do the same under extreme pressure.

Then there are the players who don't shoot penalties normally.

For some, the round of a World Cup or a European Championship may be the first time they shoot a penalty as professionals.

What Reddin suggests with these players is "find a pitch," pick a mechanic, and practice to gain confidence.

What you don't want is for them to see each other in the middle of the race thinking about what they are going to do.

10. There are two ways to shoot penalties: goalkeeper-independent or goalkeeper-dependent.

There are specialists like Kane, who target specific areas no matter what the goalkeeper does.

If they are able to adjust the ball to the side, or if they raise it, penalties are very difficult to stop.

This Mona Chalabi graph with Opta data shows that very few missed penalties are stopped (the risk is to shoot them out).

Mona Chalabi graphic with shots on penalty shootouts in World Cups and Euro Cups from 1976 to 2016

The alternative is to decide the shot by looking at the goalkeeper.

The pitcher makes a slow run, keeps his blood cool and only decants the shot when he senses where the goalkeeper is going to move.

It's a great technique, but difficult to perfect.

According to

The Athletic

, this is how 4 of the 6 missed penalties were taken during the Eurocup group stage, including the one missed by Gerard Moreno against Poland.

Eden Hazard is one of the soccer players who shoots penalties like this, and has, as we saw before, the best percentage of success in the elite (barely one in ten fails). In this video, he is seen shooting 15 penalties, always watching the goalkeeper's movement, and in all but one he shoots to the opposite side. If you pause the image before Hazard touches the ball, you will see that the goalkeeper's feet almost always give him away. If he moves too early, the forward pushes the ball down the middle to secure the goal. Problems only come if the goalkeeper stays put, but pitchers who use this technique often have a last resort shot, which they take when that happens.

Do you know which other player takes penalties the same?

The Italian Jorginho (88% correct, after 33 penalties), who scored the last against Spain to put his team in the final of the European Championship.

If you see it repeated, you see him take a little jump, which is something he does sometimes, as if to push the goalkeeper to move, and then he waits for Unai Simón, who endures but ends up going to his right, to see how Jorginho puts it down the left almost smoothly.

The Italian Jorginho beating Unai Simón in the decisive penalty for Italy - Spain.Facundo Arrizabalaga / AFP

11. Perhaps the important thing is to choose who starts.

If shooting second in the shootout is not bad, as we saw earlier, does that mean that Italy did not start the penalty shootout with an advantage against Spain?

Not so fast.

It turns out that a recent study has looked at another detail: the advantage of deciding who starts.

On Monday there was a curious scene before the Italy-Spain launches.

The referee tossed a coin twice, following current regulations, first to decide the goal and then to decide which captain chose the order of the toss.

At first there was a confusion and the Italian Chiellini began to joke with Jordi Alba, who made a face of "he is not doing me any fun".

The fact is that Chiellini won and decided that Italy would pitch first.

Well, according to the study, that simple fact of deciding the order - and regardless of whether you decide to shoot first or second - is associated with a greater probability of winning the penalty shoot-out. In the 207 rounds since 2003 (adding World Cup, Euro Cup, Champions League and Europa League), the team that decided the order has won 60% of the rounds. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but it can also be something mental or a strategic advantage.

12. Superstars can be a weak point.

The most striking result of Jordet's work is what happens with media players: after receiving an individual award - like the one awarded by FIFA - the players score 65% of their penalties, instead of the 89% they scored before the award.

Part of it may be due to regression to the mean, but also that "their status adds pressure to an event that was already high pressure."

13. Ghosts haunt you.

Another Jordet job: if your team has lost the last few penalty shootouts, you are more likely to miss your penalty.

The result is valid even if you did not participate in those rounds, which suggests that it may be an effect of psychological pressure.

14. Alternatives to penalties?

I was wondering if it would make sense to give the victory

to the points

, using the expected goals (xG).

I would do it in overtime.

If the match ends in a draw, an extra 30 minutes are played, but in that time the teams have a double objective: to score and have chances.

If there are goals, the one who scores the most wins, but if there is a draw, instead of taking penalties, the team that makes the most dangerous shots in extra time wins the game.

For that there would be a mini-scorer with the sum of expected goals, which, remember, are a metric of the probability of ending in a goal from each shot made.

With this format, Spain would have saved penalties against Switzerland in the quarterfinals, because in those 30 minutes they made many dangerous shots, according to Driblab data.

Goal chances in Switzerland - Spain (xG, expected goals).

Source: Driblab

Against Italy?

There it is not clear why each team barely added 0.1 xG.

The last 15 minutes would have been very different.

Goal chances in extra time for Italy - Spain (measured in xG, expected goals).

Source: Driblab

I haven't thought about it much and it's probably a bad idea.

Of course, it would be necessary to refine details: for example, it would be convenient to put a minimum to avoid that the teams start shooting from 40 meters to add xG from 0.01 to 0.01.

Another crazier option is to take back what they did in the US soccer league in the 1990s: they took penalties like in hockey.

The attacker came running from halfway with the ball under control and had a few seconds to beat the goalkeeper.

2. 🐤 Other

random

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Our pets are a severe disturbance to the ecological balances between hunter and prey: we have a healthy, protected and fed predator at home, but we let him hunt in the garden for entertainment. By some estimates, domestic cats could kill about 2 billion birds each year. I guess it's a familiar thing, but I found it out by listening to Tyler Cowen's great podcast with ornithologist Richard Prum.

… An AI to reprimand the deputies who look at the mobile.

The Flemish Parliament broadcasts its plenary sessions on YouTube and since Monday a machine has been watching them: if they pick up their mobile, it will send them an open message on Twitter: “Dear distracted person, please focus,” along with a short video of the moment.

The algorithm analyzes the image and detects, more or less, who each deputy is and if they are looking at the phone.

It was developed by a visual artist to draw attention to the risks (and benefits?) Of mass surveillance.

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THE COUNTRY

Capture of an image from the Twitter account The Flemish Scrollers showing the percentage of certainty that the artificial intelligence system has when detecting a face and a mobile in the hands of each deputy

… Vaccines are effective against the delta variant.

Based on provisional data from the UK, field effectiveness against symptomatic disease appears to be somewhat reduced;

with Pfizer it drops from 93% to 88%, although it is still very high.

They do notice some loss of effectiveness with just the first dose, which would drop from 51% to 33%.

But the best news, as the Financial Times reported yesterday, is that the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are proving more than 90% effective in preventing hospitalizations for those infected with delta.

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