Field-based validation of penalty shooting recommendations: An experiment with elite youth football players

Abstract

Research has suggested many ways in which professional football players can increase their penalty shooting success rate. We set up a field experiment testing these recommendations. We perform the experiment with one of the most successful youth academies in the world. All players are highly skilled, including prospective and current Brazilian youth national players. The players either decide themselves where to shoot or the coach tells them where to shoot. The coach does not reveal if the decision is based on a random allocation or his own choice. The algorithm randomly selects where players must shoot. The results from the experiment show that the best outcome is when players choose where they want to shoot. Coaches and random algorithm have a lower success rate, although following research-based recommendations. The findings are important as they show that researchers should test their recommendations in the field as they do not necessarily translate into real-life settings.