Do Professional Football Players Follow the Optimal Strategies in Penalty Shootout?

Takaya Koizumi, Ryohei Orihara, Yuichi Sei, Yasuyuki Tahara, Akihiko Ohsuga

2018

Abstract

Do people and companies choose optimal strategies under various situations? If not so, why not? Pursuing the reason for this helps to understand individuals and companies. In addition, game theory has been heavily involved in the understanding of sports, economics and other social sciences. In this study, we focused on football’s penalty shootout where data is relatively easy to collect, mixed strategy can be applied and making a pay-off matrix considering our own probability is possible. Using the pay-off matrix, we obtained optimal strategy of the kicker in the penalty shootout and revealed the gap between the optimal strategy and actual action taken by players. We compared the probability distribution for each data attribute in the dataset in order to obtain the cause of the gap. We use 100 professional penalty shootouts (total 1032 kicks) which were collected from internet video site during the period from 2001-2016. Experimental results showed that there was a gap between the optimal strategy and the actual action taken by players and that it also suggested the position and team attributes and temporary scores of the shootout and kicking order involved in the gap. Considering them we made the hypothesis and estimated the cause of the gap. We hope this method can apply to other fields than sports.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Koizumi T., Orihara R., Sei Y., Tahara Y. and Ohsuga A. (2018). Do Professional Football Players Follow the Optimal Strategies in Penalty Shootout?.In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-758-275-2, pages 454-461. DOI: 10.5220/0006591704540461

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart18,
author={Takaya Koizumi and Ryohei Orihara and Yuichi Sei and Yasuyuki Tahara and Akihiko Ohsuga},
title={Do Professional Football Players Follow the Optimal Strategies in Penalty Shootout?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,},
year={2018},
pages={454-461},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006591704540461},
isbn={978-989-758-275-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,
TI - Do Professional Football Players Follow the Optimal Strategies in Penalty Shootout?
SN - 978-989-758-275-2
AU - Koizumi T.
AU - Orihara R.
AU - Sei Y.
AU - Tahara Y.
AU - Ohsuga A.
PY - 2018
SP - 454
EP - 461
DO - 10.5220/0006591704540461