Modern Strategies and Future Outlook

This message comes from Edward Jones, where they believe rich means opening yourself to new possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are Helping you move forward with confidence. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones, member SIPC This is Planet Money from NPR Last week, one of the best soccer players of all time did something kind of shocking. Leonel Messi missed a penalty kick. The top World Cup score of all time is actually a slightly below average penalty kicker. He's in the running for missing the most penalties of any player in World Cup history someomehow Messy is worse at scoring when he's just twelve yards from the goal, with no one but the goalie between him in the back of the net And that might be because there's another skill at play when it comes to penalty kicks. It's not just about how good you are at kicking the ball Its about something we here at Planet Money love Game theory. Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Jeff Guo The use of game theory in soccer penalties might be one of the most interesting applications of economic theory like ever Today on the show, we hear from the folks at the Socreromics podcast about the art and strategy of the penalty kick In a World Cup year where there might be more games going to penalties than ever before, we're going to learn how game theory has changed the sport. This message comes from Schwab. With the new Schwab teen Investor account, teens can gain hands on investing experience. It's co owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at Schwab. com This message comes from Better Help. People talk about mental health more openly now, but asking for help can still feel hard. BetterHelp's twenty twenty six state of stigma report surveyed two thousand Americans and found that eighty five percent believe getting support is wise, yet seventy four percent say society discourages people from doing so. Don't let stigma stand in the way of support Start therapy with better helpel Visit betterterhelp. com slash NPR. As America marks two hundred and fifty years, remember, we the people make a free press possible. Together, we hold the powerful to account with reporting for the public funded by the public at plus. npr. org So the whole point of game theory is to come up with and analyze winning strategies. And where it gets fun is that in any game, your opponent, of course, is trying to anticipate your strategy and vice versa. So your strategy depends on what you think they think, you think they think, you think they think they're going to do Right? Like game theory is probably the best subject to study if you're an overthinker. Nowhere are these mind games more cinematically laid out than on the soccer field when it's time for a penalty kick Stehen Schmeinsky is one of the hosts of the podcast Socceronomics. He's a retired professor at the University of Michigan and an expert in the economics of sports. And he says if you watch elite penalty kickers, they are not always taking the shots that they are the best at. Everyone who takes a penalty has a good side and a bad side, almost everybody And you might think that you'd always shoot to your best side, but if you do that, you're predictable And so what you have to do is sometimes, even though your chances of scoring are lower, you actually want to shoot to your worst side And what you have to do is do this in a way that's unpredictable. And that's what's called in game theory a mixed strategy Picking a sequence of random numbers is quite a difficult thing to do to choose at random left or right in a sequence. L, right, right, right, left, right left. So on That's actually very hard to do. Most people are very good at it. And that's what you have to do with penalty taking. Sometimes you have to go one way, sometimes you have to go the other way But you have to do so in a way that's completely unpredictable. and footballers turn out, professional footballers turn out to be very good at picking those random sequences. Now in this game, of course, it's not just the penalty kicker who's trying to be unpredictable. Another host of this Soconomics podcast, Ashis Smel Hultrep, points out that the goalie is also thinking about how to be unpredictable So it's two simultaneous people sort of thinking about this in this way and also sort of knowing I know that he knows, you know what my tendencies are then that's going to complicate it further. That's exactly right. What's happening here is that both sides are in a in the mirror image situation. The penalty takers trying to choose whether to go left or right. and the goalkeeper, if the penalty is well taken, that doesn't have time to react to the direction has to choose before the ball is hit which way to dive And they're then choosing what is their best strategy, dive left or dive right. And they have the same problem because goalkeepers are often better going one way or going the other And so what it turns out is the goalkeepers are also good at constructing these sequences as well. By the way, in economics, these random mixed strategies, they actually used to be fairly controversial. There were economists who didn't think that people used mixed strategies in real life, partly because most people are just really, really bad at being truly Rndom People tested this in laboratories with very simple experiments, offering students a few dollars to try and choose between alternatives and see if they could construct these random sequences of choices, and they couldn't. They weren't very good at it. So people started to say, o, this mixed strategy theory is not up to much And then what happened was a few economists came up, including Ignatio Plassios Scheter, who we're going to talk about a lot actually studied penalty shooting and found out that choices of penalty takers in practice almost exactly match the theory. This was the sort of a breakthrough in game theory to be able to demonstrate that this concept of the mix strategy which Many academics have been quite skeptical about as a practical strategy. Um kind of showed that this really did work and that people could do it if it was important enough. And of course, in professional football, penalty taking is pretty important Just as an aside, for those of us who aren't elite soccer players, this research into mixed strategies is still really important. They show up in everyday life, like this could help you win your next game of rock paper scissors You see, according to game theory, the best possible strategy in rock, paper scissors is a mixed strategy. You want to be perfectly random so your opponent can't predict whether you're going to go rock or paper or scissors But in real life Pball are never perfectly random, right? Say you go rock like three times in a row, there's this big psychological temptation to go scissors or paper next time. And your opponent knows that. This is where the mind games come in. There's actually an entire world of competitive rock paper scissors players. Back in two thousand seven, they even aired the championships on ESPN The entire basis of this competition is that at the elite level, you're trying to exploit your opponent's tiny little deviations from that perfect random strategy Now in professional soccer, once people started to realize that there was this optimal mixed strategy for penalty kicks, you started to see teams collecting data on their opponents to see who was good at being unpredictable and Who was it Simon Cooper is another one of the hosts of the socceronomics podcast. He's a journalist and a soccer commentator, and he explains how one economist led a kind of data revolution in penalty shootouts. Well for a long time, almost nobody is tracking how people take penalties. And of course there isn't much TV footage in the eighties and nineties or many leagues. So it's hard to know, you know, what the guy penalties have been. reallyally until into the two thousands, almost no teams are using records of how people have taken penalties But the one guy who has this is an economist, a friend of ours Ignio Palazio Suerta and he from the nineties is mapping collecting this database of thousands of penalties. H wife and his mother are sending him videos of penalties from Spain and elsewhere And he is creating the best database in the world. of how footballers are taking penalties. And so you got this weird situation that this guy who's a graduate student at Chicago, he knows more about the habits of penalty takers than any club, even though he doesn't need the knowledge and they desperately do. So when does this come to the fore two thousand eight Champions League Final, Chelsea Manchester United dramatic. The Champions League. This tournament features the top club teams in Europe. and ahead of the two thousand eight championship match, the manager of one of the teams in the final, Chelsea, had heard about Ignacio's database and asked him for his help So Nasio ends up writing a penalty report on Manchester United for Chelsea And then of course the game goes to a penalty shootout. I'm in the stas in Moscow. It's about one in the morning when the shootout starts It has to be prime timee in Western Europe. and What does Ignacio's cribbs sheet say? It has some amazing advice. So for example, Ronaldo, the young Christiano Ronaldo When he pauses in his run up Keper should never move because Ronaldo watches what the keeper does And when he pauses in his run up, he usually shoots right If you up the penalty shooter Knowing Ignacio's advice is absolutely thrilling. Christiano Ronaldo The world is watching So Peter Chack and Chelsea Goalkeeper follows this advice. B big step and he waits and he looks and Jack stands bg And Cck dives right stops Ronaldo's penalty and Cck has saved from Ronaldo Yeah, it seems like the Chelsea Galie is following the economist's advice to a T. the most important advice that Ignacio has for the team might involve what Chelsea's penalty kickers should do, how they can outsmart the opposing goalkeeper, Manchester United's Edwin Vandisar. Ignastio says from theara, the United Keper doesn't really follow The mix strategy of randomizing He dives too often to his right And so clearly the Chelsea players got the notes. Yeah, there are clips of this all over the internet. We'll link to one of them in our show notes where you can see player after player shoot to the Manchester United Kepers left. takaking some pressure penalties before answered and scored. How he drills this running. Chelsey's second penalty kick. also goes in And the third. The fourth sneaks in two just barely it got in just. Just Then comes Chelsea's fifth penalty kicker, John Terry. He slips because it's raining, so he misses his goal and now it is tied for all This whole time, the teams have been going back and forth and now they go to a sixth round. Th a seventh. Manchester Uniteds kicker goes first, he scores, and that's when the Chelsea player Nicholas Anelca steps up to the penalty spot to face off against the Manchester United goalie, Edwin Vanisar And Anelkca has to get this one in And just when An ellka is about to kick for thear has figured it out He's worked out. they're all kicking to his left. and I was in the stadium. Nobody noticed, I think this gesture in the stadium. It wasn't in newspaper reports afterwards. I didn't see it I didn't write about it. But watching The penalty shootoutouse on YouTube, you see very clearly from the Sar standing on his goal line like this, massive figure And before Anrela runs up, Vonessar points left. to his left And he's saying to Anelka, I know what you guys are doing. You're all going left. And Anilka probably meant to go left like all the other Chelsea kickers. But now he knows that F thear knows that he knows that F thear des off from right So what does he do? F theis said, I think you're going kick it left I Ek is probably very shaken. He didn't look happy coming forward, Anelka And he kicks exactly the kick Ignasto said never take against Von Narre. He said A against Von thear, either go over the ground or high in the top corner. Do not hit at mid height So Anelk it's theable mid height Sfon the Sar is right. F the sar saves it quite easily United win the Champions League. So this brilliant data penalty report. for Chelsea ends up back firing Okay, okay. I don't know if backfiring is the right word. Like yeah, Ignacio's report didn't end up working for Chelsea. but I would say that game theory still prevailed, right? Because even though United's Keper was too predictable, in the end, so was Chelsea. They did the most obvious thing. They shot to the keeper's left every single time Chelsea themselves quite employ that unpredictable mixed strategy. And that and maybe the wet field is what ultimately costs them the victory After the break, we're going to learn a couple more tips about how game theory has changed the game of soccer This message comes from Schwab. With the new Schwab teen invvestor account, teens can gain hands on investing experience. It's co owned by you and your teen, so you can monitor the account while your teen learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at Swab. com This message comes from Dell teechnologies. Inruptions happen at work But with the Dell Pro laptop powered by Intel Core Ultra with VPro, built with optimized battery and built in intelligence, your tech won't slow you down. Dell. com slash deell dash pro for you. This message comes from American Homeeshield It's not a matter of if an appliance or system like your H vac will break, but when. Without a home warranty, these repairs or replacements can cost thousands. but with an AHS home warranty, they will fix covered breakdowns, helping protect your wallet twenty percent off all plans at ahs dot com slash npR and see promo details. See ahs dot com slash contracts for coverage details, including service fees, limitations, and exclusions NPR's tiny desk can't come to you. I mean it's a desk, but the tiny desk contest tour can New York City join NPR's Tiny Desk contest winner, Cure for Paranoia at Warsaw this july ninth. It's all the NPR Tiny Desk Energy minus the office furniture Get your tickets now at tinydesktour. org Since two thousand eight, a lot of teams have used Ignacio's data strategy to prepare for penalty shootouts. Ignacio has worked with the English National team. He's worked for athletic Bill Bau in the Spanish League. Goies now often even have their cribs sheets taped onto their water bottles. And the opposing pickers know that the goalies have these cribs sheets taped onto their water bottles How do things change now that everyone is trying to play their optimal strategy, which is based on what they think their opponent's optimal strategy is There is a bit of a debate going on in the football world about whether really the better approach is the psychological approach or the sort of pure statistical approach. So I think the interesting thing is it? So what Inazer did is she brought data and quantification to penalty taking And you know, that's just about the analysis of numbers The The world doesn't quite fit perfectly with the theory in the sense that the theory is based on there are two choices left or right. Well, there aren't really two choices. There's obviously up top, left, top bottom right. And so there's there there are different options. And so I think the issue is How far does pure number crunching get you? And then how much is additional you know psychology? And then what's interesting about Iignnatio is he's clearly good at both. He does all the numbers, but then he sort of sits back and says, well, you know, what can we surmise from what we know? He sort of develops a feel for it. Over the past two decades, between the research into game theory and the research into soccer psychology, most teams have started to treat penalty kicks in a totally different way I mean, there are some findings from broader penalty research about things that are good to do. So for example, take your time before your shot. take a few seconds. England players, Jamie Carran, two thousand six famous for example, often rush in shoots which is a bad way of doing it. And then you want to practice under kind of shoot out conditions. So I think they pipe in noise of the crowd, even in training sessions and you actually recreate the shootout in a training session. you make everybody practice There's even a strategy for the order in which you want to take your penalty kicks You should always shoot first because the team shooting second is often in the psychological position of having to score just to stay in the game So there's higher stress on the team shooting second, which probably explains why certainly in the past, in the era before penalty reports The chances of winning if your shot first were sixty percent I've said goingo first has lost some of its value now that pretty much every top team has Penalty reports now