Why Nobody Kicks Down the Middle

It's Tuesday, June thirtieth. If you watched the World Cup yesterday, you saw two games decided by penalty kicks. Paraguay knocked out Germany. Morocco eliminated the Netherlands. And I was watching these shootouts closely, because I'd heard somewhere that the best place to kick a penalty is straight down the middle, and I wanted to see if anyone actually did it. Across both matches, twenty two penalty kicks were taken. One went down the middle. One out of twenty two. Every other kicker picked a corner, every goalkeeper dove to a side, and the pattern repeated itself over and over. So I looked into why, and what I found goes a lot further than soccer. In 2007, a researcher named Michael Bar-Eli at Ben-Gurion University in Israel published a study that analyzed 286 penalty kicks from top leagues and championships worldwide, tracking where kickers aimed and where goalkeepers dove. Kickers aimed left about 32 percent of the time, right 44 percent, and center roughly 17 percent. Left and right kicks converted at around 70 to 77 percent, which is solid but not overwhelming. Central kicks, the ones almost nobody attempts, converted at rates above 80 percent, and a more recent study of 212 elite penalties found that kicks aimed at the central zones scored between 89 and 100 percent of the time.

The goalkeeper numbers are even more lopsided. Keepers dove left 46 percent of the time, dove right 40 percent, and stayed in the center on just 13 percent of kicks. When they stayed center, they blocked 33 percent of the shots, roughly twice the save rate they managed when diving, which sat around 12 to 14 percent. A deeper look at Bundesliga data found that only 15 percent of kickers aimed for the middle, and across Bar-Eli's full dataset of top competitions, goalkeepers stayed center on just 2 percent of kicks.

So the optimal strategy for both the kicker and the keeper involves the center of the goal, and both of them avoid it almost completely. Yesterday's shootouts followed the exact same script. The question is why. These are professionals who study film, work with analysts, and have access to all the same data I just cited. The gap between what the numbers say and what the players do isn't about ignorance. It's about psychology.

Picture yourself stepping up to take a penalty kick in a World Cup elimination match with a billion people watching and your teammates' entire tournament riding on this one moment. If you kick it down the middle and the goalkeeper dives, the ball rolls into an empty net and you look like a genius. But if you kick it down the middle and the goalkeeper stays, you've essentially handed the ball to him on global television in the biggest moment of your career, and that clip gets replayed for the rest of your life as one of the worst penalties ever taken.

Now picture aiming for the corner instead. You go left, the keeper dives left, he saves it. That stings, but the story around it is completely different: you went for the corner, the keeper guessed right and made a great save, tough break. You did what you were supposed to do and it just didn't work out. The failure is survivable because the strategy looked reasonable even though it produced a worse outcome.

Psychologists call this action bias, and Bar-Eli confirmed it by surveying 32 professional goalkeepers who openly admitted they understand the statistics and know that staying center would improve their save rate. But they said the emotional experience of standing still while a ball flies past them into the net is unbearable in a way that diving and missing isn't, because diving at least looks like an effort. The norm in penalty kicks is to act, to dive, to pick a side, and when you follow the norm and fail, the failure feels tolerable. When you violate the norm and fail, the failure feels catastrophic, even though violating the norm produces better results more often. The penalty kick is the cleanest illustration of action bias because the stakes are visible and the data is unambiguous, but the same pattern shapes decisions in medicine, investing, and careers in ways most people never recognize.

Doctors order unnecessary tests all the time, not because they think the patient needs them, but because ordering a test and finding nothing feels responsible while doing nothing and having the patient get worse feels negligent. Watchful waiting is often the evidence-based recommendation, but a doctor who watches and waits runs the risk of a patient asking "why didn't you do something?" and a malpractice attorney asking the same question. So the tests get ordered, and sometimes an unnecessary scan discovers an incidental finding, something that looks concerning but would never have caused harm, which triggers follow-up tests, biopsies, and procedures that each carry their own risks. The whole cascade started because acting felt safer than waiting, even when the evidence supported waiting.

Investing follows the same logic. Research consistently shows that people who trade less frequently and check their portfolios less often tend to outperform the ones who react to every market movement. Every time you see your portfolio drop and sell something or rebalance something, you're the goalkeeper diving. Buffett's entire approach, which we've covered before, is essentially a refusal to dive. He buys companies, holds them, and does nothing while the market panics around him, which sounds simple until you consider that doing nothing while a billion dollars evaporates from your portfolio on a Monday morning takes more discipline than any trade ever made.

Career decisions work the same way. Staying at a safe job that's going nowhere feels less risky than taking the leap to a startup or a new industry, even when the expected payoff of the move is higher, because the safe choice is the dive. If things don't work out, you can say you played it smart. The unconventional move is the kick down the middle: if it fails, everyone says you should have stayed where you were. Nokia had the resources and the talent to build a touchscreen phone and chose the safe strategy of sticking with keyboards because the risk of failing at something new felt worse than the risk of doing nothing with something old, and within six years they went from 51 percent of the global phone market to irrelevance. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Central penalty kicks convert at the highest rate of any zone, somewhere between 81 and 100 percent depending on the study, and goalkeepers who stay in the center save roughly twice as many penalties as those who dive. Almost nobody does either. The reason is action bias: when the norm is to act, failing after action feels tolerable while failing after inaction feels catastrophic, regardless of which strategy actually works better. The same bias drives doctors to order unnecessary tests, investors to trade too often, and professionals to stay in safe jobs instead of making the move that scares them. Most people don't make decisions by asking what gives them the best chance of success. They make decisions by asking what they'll regret least if it doesn't work, and those two questions lead to very different answers.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.