{"id":22393,"date":"2008-05-08T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2008-05-08T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/05\/08\/the-economics-of-soccer-penalty-kicks\/"},"modified":"2008-05-08T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2008-05-08T10:00:01","slug":"the-economics-of-soccer-penalty-kicks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20080508-01\/?p=22393","title":{"rendered":"The economics of soccer penalty kicks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m fascinated by economics, specifically the application of economic theories to things you wouldn&#8217;t normally consider as economics. Back during the World Cup, Slate&#8217;s undercover economist column took a look at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/id\/2144182\"> the economics of penalty kicks<\/a>.\n Steven D.&nbsp;Levitt, co-author of another paper on the subject, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.freakonomics.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/27\/in-soccer-it-is-not-whether-you-win-or-lose-but-how-you-play-the-game\/\"> writes in more detail on the unusually low percentage of penalty kicks taken straight ahead<\/a>. I wasn&#8217;t aware of the &#8220;straight ahead&#8221; strategy, but the more I read about it (and watched a video of a successful execution) the more fascinated I was by this rarely-used strategy.<\/p>\n<p> Levitt highlighted the &#8220;anti-straight-ahead bias&#8221; of the press, pointing out that the second Swiss shooter hit the crossbar and was not lambasted. But isn&#8217;t that worse than shooting straight ahead and being stopped? I mean, if you hit the crossbar, it means that the opposing goalie <i>didn&#8217;t even have to be there<\/i>. He could&#8217;ve been playing Nintendo or picking his nose. You&#8217;d think the cardinal rule of taking a penalty kick is <i>at least make it a shot on goal<\/i>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m fascinated by economics, specifically the application of economic theories to things you wouldn&#8217;t normally consider as economics. Back during the World Cup, Slate&#8217;s undercover economist column took a look at the economics of penalty kicks. Steven D.&nbsp;Levitt, co-author of another paper on the subject, writes in more detail on the unusually low percentage of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-22393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>I&#8217;m fascinated by economics, specifically the application of economic theories to things you wouldn&#8217;t normally consider as economics. Back during the World Cup, Slate&#8217;s undercover economist column took a look at the economics of penalty kicks. Steven D.&nbsp;Levitt, co-author of another paper on the subject, writes in more detail on the unusually low percentage of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22393"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22393\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}