Do Soccer Players Choke? 
Assessing the research on penalty kicks and pressure. 
By Phil Birnbaum 
Slate
Posted Friday, July 9, 2010
http://www.slate.com/id/2259927

The "Yerkes-Dodson Law" predicts that participants in a
penalty shootout should buckle under pressure. According
to the theory, human performance follows an "inverted U
shape." Under the effect of mild stress, or "arousal,"
proficiency improves as the subject expends more
concentration and energy. But past a certain point, too
much pressure leads to panic and attention problems, and
choking ensues.

. . .

The penalty kick, then, seems like the perfect
laboratory to study how we respond to pressure. A
handful of researchers, after sifting through penalty
shootout data, have determined that soccer players do
show a tendency to choke under stress. In one study,
described in last month's New York Times, researcher
Gier Jordet looked at a dataset of important
international matches and found that when a team needed
an immediate goal to win a shootout (and the game), it
succeeded 90 percent of the time. But when a team needed
a goal simply to tie the shootout, and a miss would mean
an immediate loss, it succeeded only 60 percent of the
time. (The overall average on penalties was 79 percent,
as Jordet and colleagues reported in this paper.) David
A. Savage and Benno Torgler found similar results in
their own study. (The Savage-Torgler paper doesn't seem
to give a nontechnical interpretation of the numbers,
but if I understand their method properly, their
findings seem comparable to Jordet's.)

[moderator: to read the entire article please click on
the link below]

http://www.slate.com/id/2259927

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