May 14, 2010
A GAME THEY DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND:
Penalties - Science is on the spot (AFP, 13 May 2010)
A mathematical study of penalties at Liverpool's John Moores University puts the death nail into the "blast-it-and-hope" approach.The perfect penalty, it found, is a ball that is struck high, targeted precisely to the right or left of the goalie, and fast, travelling at 25-29 metres per second (90-104 kilometers or 56-65 miles per hour).
Anything faster than this boosts the chance of a miss because of inaccuracy, while anything slower helps the goalie to intercept it.
Moving swiftly to take the penalty (less than three seconds after the whistle is blown) gives the striker the element of surprise, while delaying the strike by more than 13 seconds makes the keeper unsettled, according to the researchers, who looked at decades of international matches involving England.
Waiting for the goalkeeper to move also boosted chances. However, waiting longer than 0.41 milliseconds caused a scoring chance to be halved. A runup of four to six steps was the most successful approach, while a long runup of 10 metres (yards) was the least.
Seen only through the prism of statistics, the balance in penalties is tilted massively in favour of the taker: between two-thirds and three-quarters of strikes result in a goal, according to various analyses in top-flight European club soccer.
Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics and ‘Soccernomics’ (JACK BELL, 11/02/09, NY Times)
In their new book “Soccernomics,” to be published in the United States on Tuesday, the author Simon Kuper and the economist Stefan Szymanski do for soccer what “Moneyball” did for baseball. It puts the game under an analytical microscrope using statistics, economics, psychology and intuition to try and transform a dogmatic sport.“The heart of the matter,” Kuper said in a telephone interview from his home in Paris, “is that the thinking in soccer is outdated, backward and tradition-based. It needs a fresh look based on data. There’s a new global map, with countries like the U.S. and Japan already rising. And they will continue to rise at the expense of Europe as knowledge gets disbursed. And it’s happening very quickly.” [...]
“Of course the specifics are different than baseball, where there is more data, but what Bill James does for me is to look at sports from the outside,” Kuper said. “The importance of data in soccer has been underestimated. You need to get rid of the mystique and look at it in a cold way. There’s a reason the Oakland A’s don’t let their managers make picks in the amateur draft. The coach/manager is a middle manager, not concerned with the long term.”
Perhaps the authors’ most contentious assertion is that the balance of power in global soccer is about to change because of three factors — population, wealth and experience. And that, Kuper said, means that countries like the United States, China and even India have the potential to be among the sport’s elite.
Soccernomics is probably as good a book as could be written given the paucity of informed soccer analysis, which really only illustrates why America will quickly come to dominate the game. The understanding of the use of space and performance measurements abroad is primitive.