Investigative Trends in Understanding Penalty-Kick Performance in Association Football: An Ecological Dynamics Perspective

Abstract

There have been different approaches to studying penalty-kick performance in association football and in this paper we synthesize key findings within an ecological dynamics theoretical framework. According to this theoretical perspective, information is the cornerstone for understanding the dynamics of action regulation in penalty-kick performance. Research suggests that investigators need to identify the information sources that are most relevant to penalty-kick performance. An important task is to understand how constraints can channel (i.e. change, emphasize or mask) information sources used to regulate upcoming actions and how the influence of these constraints is expressed in players' behavioural dynamics. Due to the broad range of constraints influencing penalty-kick performance, it is recommended that future research adopts an interdisciplinary focus on performance assessment to overcome the current lack of representativeness in penalty-kick experimental designs. Such an approach would serve to capture the information-based control of action of both players as components of this dyadic system in competitive sport.

Goalkeeping in the soccer penalty kick

“…These are very complex interactive dynamics indeed, but-importantly-affordancebased control gets them into view. In doing so, affordance-based control also directs empirical efforts towards the actual dueling in the penalty box, that is, the evolving interactions between goalkeeper and penalty taker (see Lopes, Araújo, & Davids, 2014b;Lopes et al, 2014a).…”

The use of spatial manipulation to examine goalkeepers’ anticipation

“…These findings suggest that the goalkeepers may use a global perceptual strategy by anchoring on the lower distal extremity and the ball whilst extracting essential information from other body segments using peripheral vision. This approach aligns to the research area of ecological dynamics (Lopes et al, 2014), which explains even if a goalkeeper is looking at a predictive source, the perception of information from the performance environment via peripheral vision does not signify the use of that information for action outcome .…”

“…In fact, research has consistently shown that the most important visual cues to correctly anticipate the direction of the ball for goalkeepers are from events immediately prior to the striker's kicking action to the striker's foot-to-ball contact (Button, Dicks, Haines, Barker, & Davids, 2011;Dicks, Uehara, & Lima, 2011;Savelsbergh, Van Der Kamp, Williams, & Ward, 2005). However, studies using eye-tracking devices have reported that fixations on the torso, hips and kicking leg of the striker result in successful anticipation of a penalty kick (Lopes, Araújo, & Davids, 2014;Savelsbergh, Williams, Van Der Kamp, & Ward, 2002) although Franks and Harvey (1997) and Savelsbergh and colleagues (2005) have shown that anticipatory skills of goalkeepers were more successful when fixating on the stance leg (i.e., non-kicking leg) prior to foot-to-ball contact.…”

Comparison of the Kinematic Patterns of Kick Between Brazilian and Japanese Young Soccer Players

“…Kicking performance is the most studied technical action in soccer ( 1 ), and a growing body of research has been dedicated to studying penalty kick performance ( 2 ). Information regarding the “number of kicks” and “number of kicks on target”, usually provided by notational analysis, are important indicators of success in high level competition ( 3 ), and it illustrates the need to understand and train such motor skills.…”