The goalkeeper who stood still

A study of several hundred penalty kicks in professional football found something that ought to change how goalkeepers behave and mostly has not.

Kicks are distributed roughly evenly: about a third go left, a third right, a third near the centre. Goalkeepers, however, dive left or right in about ninety-four per cent of penalties. Staying in the centre has a higher save rate than either dive, and keepers almost never do it.

The researchers argue the explanation is not ignorance. It is how failure feels. A keeper who dives and concedes has visibly tried; the crowd saw the effort. A keeper who stands still and watches the ball go past has, in the eyes of everyone in the stadium, done nothing. Both outcomes are a goal. Only one of them looks like a mistake.

Economists call this action bias: when the cost of being seen to do nothing exceeds the cost of doing the wrong thing, people act even where acting is worse. It appears far outside sport. A doctor prescribing something rather than waiting. A committee launching an initiative rather than leaving a working system alone. A student rewriting an answer that was already correct.

The uncomfortable part is that the bias is often rational for the individual. A keeper judged on effort is responding correctly to how he is judged, even while costing his team goals. Changing the behaviour requires changing the judgement first, which is slower and much harder than publishing the statistics.