English goalkeepers are not responsible for England\u2019s poor performance in penalty shootouts in the past

Michel Brinkschulte,Daniel Memmert,Philip Furley,Maximilian Klemp

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-04118-6

Michel Brinkschulte, Daniel Memmert + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-04118-6

Copy DOI

Journal: Scientific Reports	Publication Date: Dec 1, 2021
Citations: 1	License type: open-access

Affiliation: German Sport University Cologne

Abstract

Scrutinizing public opinion is one of the central goals of science as the divergence between public opinion and scientific evidence can have negative consequences. The present study aims to further investigate the alleged English ‘penalty curse’ and determine if it can be linked to the prevalent stereotype of the ‘English goalkeeper problem’. We analyzed a large sample of 2379 penalty kicks that 629 different goalkeepers faced in World Cups and European Championships, as well as in the Champions and Europa League by comparing the goalkeeper success rates of different nations by fitting a generalized linear model (binomial regression) to the data. However, the results do not reveal meaningful differences between the success rates (on average 22.23%). Consequently, we conclude that English goalkeepers are not responsible for England’s poor performance in penalties in the past as they perform as well as goalkeepers from other nations and, in turn, provide a counterargument to the widespread stereotype that ‘England has a goalkeeper problem’.

Highlights

Public opinion and scientific evidence do not always overlap and can sometimes substantially diverge
There were no significant differences between the success rates or percentages saved of goalkeepers from different nations
The aim of the present research was to investigate if the nationality of goalkeepers has an influence on the success rates of saving penalty kicks

Summary

Introduction

Public opinion and scientific evidence do not always overlap and can sometimes substantially diverge. There is high consensus in science that human activities cause global warming, whereas there is little consensus on this in the public opinion [1] This divergence between public opinion and scientific evidence can have negative consequences. If large proportions of people have certain stereotypes concerning different national or ethnic groups, this can lead to discrimination or stereotype threat (i.e., people behave/perform in accordance with the stereotype [2]). For this reason, it is important to conduct rigorous scientific tests to find out if public opinion stands the test of the scientific method

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion