The ever-excellent Simon Kuper on penalties. Perhaps unsurprisingly for anyone who has read about cognitive biases, but penalty takers are rarely random in their behaviour, and neither are goalkeepers in which way they dive. But that said, it may not be that necessary…
But these individual patterns are secondary. The key moment in any shoot-out is the coin toss. The captain who calls correctly gets to decide whether his team takes the first kick. Always kick first, says Mr Palacios-Huerta. The team taking the first penalty wins 60 per cent of shoot-outs.
Interesting - not sure how FIFA could fix this - maybe make each team alternate going first on each round of penalties?
(via Gary Andrews)
