The Market Is Catching Up to You
From soccer to Chipotle, everything we do is shaped by economics
The FIFA World Cup, and specifically the penalty-kick-heavy match I watched a few weeks ago between Colombia and England, reminded me of the first chapter of a book I read last year called How to Think Like a Freak, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the hosts of the Freakonomics podcast. The first chapter was about where to aim a penalty kick to maximize the chance of a goal. Because of players’ proximity to the goal when taking a penalty kick, goalies have little option aside from guessing where the player will kick it, and then diving in that direction. Logically, then, both players and goalies should analyze each others’ tendencies to better perform in a penalty kicking scenario.
Subsequent analysis found that when goalies leap, they typically go to the kicker’s strong side (left side for a right-footed kicker and right side for a left-footed kicker) — 57% of the time, in fact. The other 41% of the time, they dive to the kicker’s weak side. It would seem obvious, then, where players should kick the ball: their own weak side. But that strategy ignores that 57% + 41% is only 98%. What happens the other 2% of the time, when goalies dive neither left nor right? The answer is obvious: 2% of the time when trying to block a penalty kick, goalies stay right…
