Game Theory, Penalty Kicks, and Icy Veined Lando

As Landon Donovan prepared to take his series-clinching penalty against Chivas USA on Sunday night—right before he launched into his obsessive-compulsive, Nomar Garciaparra-esque,  pre-kick ritual of odd tics and gestures—ESPN2 put up a graphic showing the location of Lando’s last ten penalty kicks. They all went to his right, the keeper’s left. Every one.

John Harkes almost jumped out of the booth: “I love this graphic!” he said, and we here at Backpost have to agree. Why hasn’t it been done before? And more important, did Zach Thornton and Chivas USA have this information? Safe to say it would come in handy.

As it happened, both Donovan and Thornton behaved as though they knew about Landon’s last ten spot kicks. Thornton dived to his left, and Donovan, well, check it out in these highlights [Updated with better video]:

What Donovan did, as he talks about above, was look up on his approach, see Thornton cheating to his left, and just roll it  slightly off-center the other way. Goal. LA to the Western Conference final. It seemed like Thornton knew that Donovan had gone that way on each of his last ten PKs and that Donovan knew he knew.

There’s a great new soccer book out by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. It’s called Soccernomics, and it’s kind of a Moneyball for world soccer, debunking all sorts of conventional wisdoms connected to the game. In a chapter titled “The Economist’s Fear of the Penalty Kick,” Kuper and Szymanski discuss how “economists revere the penalty as a real-life example of game theory.” Game theory tackles the question of “what happens … when what I should do depends on what you do, and what you should do depends on what I do.” Game theory supposedly came up during the Cuban missile crisis, and was used by the U.S. government during the Cold War (“If we do X, then they’ll do Z, and then we’ll have to do A, and they’ll do B…” and so on). The chapter recounts the 2006 World Cup quarterfinal penalty shootout between Germany and Argentina—the one in which German keeper Jens Lehmann kept in his sock a cheat sheet on his opponents’ shooting tendencies—and the astounding penalty shootout at the 2008 Champions League Final between Chelsea and Manchester United, when Chelsea allegedly had advance info on Man U’s penalty shooters’ tendencies, but Manchester keeper Edwin Van Der Sar ultimately bluffed his way into Nicolas Anelka’s head on the critical penalty.

It’s all fascinating stuff—and even more so if read alongside YouTube videos of the two shootouts in question. The dynamic is neatly summed up in the short story,  “The Longest Penalty Ever” by the Argentine writer Osvaldo Soriano, which Szymanski and Kuper quote. Two teams in the story have one week to prepare for one penalty that will decide a big match, which had been suspended with 20 seconds left.

“At dinner a few nights before the penalty, “Gato Diaz,” the keeper who has to stop it, muses about the kicker:

‘Constante kicks to the right.’

‘Always,’ said the president of the club.

‘But he knows that I know.’

‘Then we’re fucked.’

‘Yeah, but I know that he knows,’ said el Gato.

‘Then dive to the left and be ready,’ said someone at the table.

‘No. He knows that I know that he knows,’ said Gato Diaz, and he got up to go to bed.”

And if he’s smart, with ice in his veins, he may look up to see where you’re going to dive before he shoots. So don’t move!