A team of British scientists that just finished a study on football psychology and the importance of stress, are offering some valuable advice to all penalty takers in the upcoming World Cup 2010: Focus on the ball and pretend the goalkeeper does not even exist. The study that was published at the Journal of Sports Science came after extensive research of various University football teams, where the players had to wear special equipment tracking their eye movement.
“We are all naturally preoccupied to focus on things we consider threatening to our environment,” says one of the participating psychologists. “In the case of a penalty shoot out the only thing threatening our success of scoring a goal is the goalkeeper. So we tend to focus on the goalkeeper and follow his movements, but instead we should only look where to shoot the ball and completely ignore the goalie.”
The study showed that many times goalkeepers manage to block a penalty shot just by moving their arms and legs or jumping up and down to draw attention. As a result the confused brain of the penalty taker throws the ball directly in the hands of the goalie. The more stressed a player is the more he focuses on the goalkeeper, and the more he focuses on the goalie the more chances he has of missing the penalty shot.
So the advice researchers give to World Cup 2010 penalty takers is: “The person kicking the ball has the absolute control, he needs to understand this, get confident and focus his eyes on the ball while letting the brain get the information needed for a successful penalty shot.
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