How to win a penalty shootout (with game theory)

▸Key takeaways

01Elite penalty takers intentionally shoot to their weaker side at random intervals — being unpredictable beats being accurate, which is why Messi misses more than you'd expect.

02Penalty kicks became the breakthrough real-world proof of 'mixed strategy' game theory, which economists had dismissed because lab subjects were terrible at being random.

03One economist's homemade database of thousands of penalties out-scouted every professional club for years — and shaped the 2008 Champions League final.

04Chelsea lost that final not because the data was wrong but because they used it predictably: every kicker aimed at the same identified weakness.

05The long-standing ~60% advantage of shooting first in a shootout may have disappeared now that every top team commissions penalty reports.

▸What this episode covers

Lionel Messi — the top World Cup scorer of all time — is a below-average penalty kicker, and Planet Money argues that's because penalties aren't really a kicking contest. They're a game-theory problem. Host Jeff Guo brings in the Soccernomics podcast team to explain the 'mixed strategy': elite kickers deliberately shoot to their weaker side some of the time, in a genuinely random pattern, because a predictable shooter is a stopped shooter. Goalkeepers are running the identical calculation in mirror image, deciding which way to dive before the ball is even struck.

The centerpiece is the story of economist Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, who spent years building the world's best database of penalty habits — with his wife and mother mailing him videos from Spain — while clubs tracked nothing. Chelsea hired him before the 2008 Champions League final against Manchester United, and his crib sheet worked eerily well: goalkeeper Petr Cech followed it to stop Cristiano Ronaldo. But Chelsea's kickers all aimed at the same spot he'd identified, United's keeper spotted the pattern mid-shootout and literally pointed it out to the final kicker, and the rattled Nicolás Anelka hit exactly the shot the report said never to take. The data was right; using it predictably lost the final anyway.

The episode closes with how thoroughly this research has remade the sport: goalies tape crib sheets to their water bottles, teams pipe fake crowd noise into practice shootouts, and the classic 60% advantage of shooting first may have evaporated now that everyone comes armed with a report.

Why listen: The rare economics episode with a genuine thriller in the middle — and the rock-paper-scissors detour will change how you play it.

▸Chapters

“Even though your chances of scoring are lower, you actually want to shoot to your worst side.” Stefan Szymanski · at 1:35 —

“Before Anelka runs up, van der Sar points to his left. He's saying: I know what you guys are doing.” Simon Kuper · at 10:40 —

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