「经济学人」Sweet spot

Practise with an augmented-reality headset

Are you reading, Gareth Southgate? As the England football manager prepares for this year’s European championship, a Swiss neuroscientist is offering some help with the England team’s Achilles heel: penalty shoot-outs. (As a player, Mr Southgate is perhaps best remembered for missing a decisive spot-kick in a shoot-out against Germany in 1996.)

Penalty kicks are used at the knockout stage of major tournaments to determine the outcome of drawn games. They have decided the winner in more than 20% of World Cup matches, including the final in 2022, when France lost to Argentina. More than 30% of shoot-out kicks are missed, but pros and pundits disagree on the value of practising them.

In March Didier Deschamps, the manager of the French team, railed against suggestions from the national football federation that his players could prepare better. “I find it inappropriate, and I would even say disrespectful,” he said. “It is impossible to recreate a real penalty shoot-out on a psychological level.”

That may be true, but trials of a new augmented-reality system developed at the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland, suggest that penalty technique and success can very much be improved—even in the case of elite players. In a paper published in The Innovation, a journal, earlier this year, the researchers showed that just ten sessions of 20 kicks each were enough to increase by 35% the chance that international-level youth players score a penalty.

“I cannot say we would get the same effect with Cristiano Ronaldo, because I haven’t tested him. But I can say over all the players we tested it works, and it really works,” says Jean-Pierre Bresciani, a neuroscientist who leads the research.

The technology focuses on the type of penalty favoured by three out of four professional penalty-takers, in which the kicker waits for the goalkeeper to move before propelling the ball into the empty part of the goal. (Those players who simply blast it as hard as they can should seek help elsewhere.) The idea is to speed up the kicker’s reaction time in cases when the goalkeeper fails to move in the expected direction, increasing their chances of switching tactic mid-stride.

Working with players from the under-18 teams of fc Luzern and fc Basel, two Swiss clubs, the scientists got penalty-takers to wear a headset that projected the avatar of a goalkeeper into the centre of a real goal. Each player was then asked to kick a real ball into one or other side of the goal, but to switch if the simulated goalie moved in that direction. The headsets were also connected to an algorithm capable of adapting the speed of the goalkeeper’s movements.

Dr Bresciani says that such tests offer several advantages over other penalty-taking drills. First, the avatars are programmed to move in consistent ways each time, which makes the results more reliable and useful for analysis than those using a real goalkeeper. And second, no human goalkeeper needs to get their shirt muddy.

Use of the headset significantly improved how quickly players reacted to an unexpected goalkeeper movement, shaving an average of 120 milliseconds off their response time. That is 28% faster than before the training, which the scientists say would correspond to a third more penalties scored.

With this year’s European championship taking place just across the border in Germany, Dr Bresciani says he is eager to help any team that asks. All they need to pack is a headset and laptop. But with the knockout rounds beginning on June 29th, time is running out.(June 14th 2024)

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