World Cup Teams Without Data and Analytical Capabilities Face Severe Penalties

Replacing the goalie who'd played the entire game just prior to a penalty kick shootout?

Neymar and Silva may be out for Brazil, but as the Dutch demonstrated in their quarter final match against Costa Rica, the science of big data analysis has supplanted the art of instinct when it comes to big money sports like the World Cup.

Coaches have always analyzed tendencies in many sports. In American baseball an entire industry based on 'sabre-metrics' has sprung up. American football has always been data-obsessed and basketball coaches have their shot charts. But as parity becomes more of an issue in many sports, especially soccer/futbol, statistically sophisticated analyses of shooters' and defender's tendencies overlaid with data about conditions, scores, geography and virtually any other information that can be normalized and fed into an algorithm.

Of course, knowing tendencies and then having players with the physical and psychological ability to do something about that wisdom is, as it is said, why they play the game. JL

Simon Kuper reports in the Financial Times:

Complex analyses of patterns are necessary, because very few regular penalty-takers or keepers have obvious habits
It is now penalty time at the World Cup. In the knockout rounds, any match tied after extra time goes to a penalty shootout. A growing number of studies by academic economists and psychologists has enhanced our understanding of penalties and penalty-takers. Often, in fact, these outside experts know more than the teams do.

“Neymar is not an incredible guy for kicking penalties,” says Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, economist at the London School of Economics and author of Beautiful Game Theory: How Soccer Can Help Economics.

“Clearly he’s kicking because his name is Neymar, not because he’s a good kicker.”

Palacios-Huerta began tracking penalties in 1995, as a real-life example of game theory. By now he has a database of about 11,000 kicks. He looks for a kicker’s recurring patterns, and though now out with a broken vertebrae in his back, Neymar’s are obvious. The Brazilian usually kicks to the right of the keeper, or the middle of goal, says Palacios-Huerta. “I’ve never seen him kick left.” In fact, he adds, Neymar’s trademark stop in his run-up makes it hard for him to shoot left.(Declaration of interest: Palacios-Huerta and I briefly tried to sell his penalty analyses to clubs.)Until 2006, most teams entered penalty shootouts in World Cups knowing almost nothing about their opponents’ habits. Then Germany, and later other countries, began using data. But Palacios-Huerta believes most teams simply count a player’s lifetime penalties. “And counting doesn’t help much,” he warns. Argentina’s Lionel Messi, for instance, has hit most penalties in his career left of the goalkeeper. Most keepers in the Spanish league now dive to that corner against him, says Palacios-Huerta. However, Messi’s lifetime aggregate is misleading. In recent seasons he has more often hit penalties to the right or centre of goal. In any case, he has mastered the art of shooting only after the keeper has chosen his corner. Of Messi’s 49 penalties in Palacios-Huerta’s database, keepers went the wrong way 32 times.
Complex analyses of patterns are necessary, because very few regular penalty-takers or keepers have obvious habits. One rare predictable fellow is Belgium’s keeper Thibaut Courtois. Palacios-Huerta says: “He has a very strong tendency to go right. Which is not going to last.” Courtois is only 22, and will learn the error of his ways. So far, kickers shooting to his left in league football have always scored.
Some insights into penalties are specific to the shootout. Most importantly, says Palacios-Huerta, the team that wins the toss before a shootout should always choose to shoot first. Historically, the team going first wins 61 per cent of shootouts, says Ben Lyttleton, author of Twelve Yards, a new book on penalties. That is probably because the team shooting second constantly faces the negative pressure of having to score just to stay in the game. Palacios-Huerta points to the crucial fifth penalties in the Brazil-Chile game: first Neymar for Brazil, then Gonzalo Jara for Chile. “Neymar had less pressure than Jara. Jara is do or die. Neymar is do, or well, we’ll see.” Neymar scored, Jara missed off the post. In the tournament’s two shootouts so far, Brazil and Costa Rica shot first and won.
Lyttleton sees another psychological factor in shootouts: cheering. “Statistics show that if a player converts his penalty when scores are level, and he celebrates with one or two hands raised over shoulder-height, his team is 82 per cent more likely than if he does not celebrate to go on and win. [Brazil’s] David Luiz and Marcelo both celebrated enthusiastically after their penalties.” That probably heartened their teammates. By contrast, Kostas Mitroglou netted Greece’s first penalty but then walked back to the centre-circle head down, unsmiling.
Palacios-Huerta offers one last tip to teams facing shootouts: inexperienced penalty-takers are overwhelming likely to shoot to their “natural” side. That means right of the keeper for right-footed kickers, and left for left-footed ones. It’s the simplest kick, and in high-pressure situations, most people opt for simplicity.
Perhaps the teams know all this already, but quite possibly not.