It's 2006.
This is referee Horacio Elizondo giving a red card
to Zinedine Zidane because he headbutted Marco Materazzi.
Due to budget concerns, let's say this is the video of it happening.
(Muttering)
This really was a big deal.
It has been sculpted.
But this isn't the only famous part of that match.
It also featured Zidane shooting one of the greatest penalty
kicks of all time.
What happens when you strip away all the emotion and psychology
and chance of a penalty kick and look at the data?
Where is the best spot to place a penalty kick?
In football, the beautiful game, the penalty kick places a player here
against a keeper.
A penalty kick shootout helps decide a game in the event of a tie.
It's the same thing, but with kickers from each team
in succession, to see which team scores the most after five chances.
A PK shootout from Spain 1982
looks pretty similar to one in Russia in 2018
or Qatar in 2022.
So you could record every PK shootout shot and find out which spot worked best.
“The most frustrating part was, you know, finding the video.
I remember, I think it was a West Germany match.
Once I found it, I actually struggled just to see where the ball went.”
“Which is kind of crazy,
if you think about it, because that's how people watching the games,
like they had no idea what was happening.”
“Exactly.”
Pablo López Landeros is a data scientist and sports-obsessive hobbyist
who recorded every World Cup shootout kick
from 1982 to 2018.
“I had to watch the same shootout from five different videos
if I could find it.”
Those shootouts provided a lot of data.
He recorded the team, the foot the kicker shot with,
where the keeper went, whether the ball was on target or not,
if it did go in, and if it was an elimination goal.
“Fans get kind of angry when a match comes to a penalty shootout
just because they feel like it's a coin flip.
But if you look at the data, then it's a very unfair coin flip,
just because 70% of the goals go in.”
Keepers affected that.
They dove to the left, from the player's perspective,
more than they dove right.
They often dive before seeing a shot's trajectory,
so it can really be worth knowing the probabilities.
They stayed in the middle
only about 13% of the time, where the save percentage was also the lowest.
These stats work in concert with where the kicks ended up.
If you divide the goal into nine common zones,
it's possible to see where players kick the most.
For all shots, including misses,
the lower corners were the most common targets.
But that doesn't mean they were best.
These are the success rates by zone, and there are clear trends.
The top middle has a high miss rate, likely a combination of it
getting stopped by the keeper or missing the goal completely,
like in this classic shot from a 1994 penalty kick shootout.
Meanwhile, the most popular area, that lower left corner,
actually has a lower success rate than the opposite corner.
The top spot is that top right corner,
where 88% of shots in World Cup shootouts
resulted in a goal.
When you combine the keeper dives with the shooting data,
that right side looks like it's undervalued by kickers.
So is that the final answer?
Always shoot it there if you can?
“There's two approaches in statistics, two main, like, schools of
thought , I guess.
The frequentist approach, which is like the clear cut example
of what we're doing, just getting ratios, looking at the data.
And then there's this other approach called the Bayesian approach.”
A Bayesian might look at increasingly complex predictors
rather than a count. It could go on forever:
from the footedness of the kicker... to the the country the kicker is playing for...
(voices overlap with many reasons).
Let's go back to the 1976 European
football championship: Czechoslovakia versus West Germany.
This is Antonin Panenka, and he's holding this trophy
because of a penalty kick strategy that he basically invented.
He approaches, looks normal.
You think he'll hit it hard in that top right corner.
The keeper dives.
But look, Panenka has
just gently tapped it in.
Today, that's known as a Panenka kick.
It's a bluff in poker, a bunt in baseball,
a fake punt in that game with the oblong brown ball.
You can have data that suggests that the top right corner
or even those center zones are kind of undervalued.
But ultimately, the penalty kick is a head game.
Which brings us back to Zidane.
In 2006, that greatest penalty kick of all time
— it wasn't a cannon to the top right.
He approached, the keeper dove to that statistically likely lower left corner,
while Zidane casually sailed it through the center.
A panenka kick.
Where it hit the goalpost and crossed the line into history.