Replication: No action ‘Bias’ among elite soccer goalkeepers during penalty kicks

One of the core questions in economic psychology has been whether decision making is optimal. It is especially important to study this question in naturalistic environments, with significant real-world consequences. One such example is on-field decisions during penalty kicks in soccer. Bar-Eli and colleagues (Bar-Eli, M., Azar, O. H., Ritov, I., Keidar-Levin, Y., & Schein, G. (2007). Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers: The case of penalty kicks. Journal of Economic Psychology, 28(5), 606–621.) claimed that elite soccer goalkeepers during penalty kicks have an action bias: they jump to the left or right much more often, even though the optimal action would be to stay in the center. They further comment that biased decision making among such professionals is quite unexpected, given the huge incentives they have for making optimal decisions. Given the large implications of such a possibility, we re-looked at this claim by examining the distribution of 292 on-target penalty kicks from a different dataset: Men’s World Cup matches (1982–2022), which is one of the high-stake elite soccer tournaments in the world. Although goalkeepers were jumping more often towards the left or right and staying less often in the center, they had statistically similar chances of stopping the goal for both decisions. Additionally, there were more kicks to the left and right compared to the center. Thus, we conclude that jumping is not a sub-optimal action for goalkeepers and high frequency of jumping is not indicative of action ‘bias’, which suggests competent decisions by these professional goalkeepers during penalty kicks.