July 15: Penalties and Goats

I know, I know. "Another newsletter?" you ask yourself, staring bleakly at this post. It's true, the soccer world has plenty of blogs. I promise you, though, that this newsletter is not meant to replace any of those blogs, nor to add another 2000 words to your reading list every week. The Post-Match Report, inspired by Futi's MLS Daily, Mark Thompson's Get Goalside, and Jan Van Haaren's yearly Soccer Analytics Review, is instead meant as a recap of each week's biggest soccer analytics1 stories. Think of this as a central place to learn about new metrics, datasets, interesting projects, conversations you may have missed on Bluesky, and everything else analytics-related.

Back when I was at Syracuse, I was elected President of the Soccer Analytics Club in my final semester — not to brag. Every week, I would put together a slide show, and each meeting would began with a recap of games, a rundown of interesting things I'd seen online, and usually one or two deep dives into a particular topic. We discussed everything from AI-first analytics companies to 8-year-old American Soccer Analysis articles. The goal of this newsletter is to focus on more recent topics — specifically ones from the last week — but the vibe will be similar. We're here to chat about the goings-on in the community and introduce new people to the exciting work that is happening across platforms.

One last thing before I get into the actual newsletter: I will be publishing PMR on Leaflet, which is a pretty awesome blogging platform built on the ATProtocol, the same thing that Bluesky runs on. The amazing people at Leaflet are providing me with free Leaflet Pro to write this newsletter as part of Atmosphere Field Reporters program. Essentially, they're helping me cover this online community purely for the love of the game. So, first off, huge thanks to them for helping make this happen. Secondly, that means that you can subscribe to this newsletter in one of two ways. You can get it delivered to your inbox directly by inputting your email, or you can subscribe with your Bluesky handle and pin the Leaflet Reader feed so that you can keep track of these posts through the Bluesky app.

Without further ado, the report:

The rundown

(in no particular order)

The data has slowly been trickling in on World Cup viewership numbers, and while the main story has been record-breaking US audiences, another narrative has emerged: FOX is getting viewer-mogged by Telemundo. As of July 2nd, the Spanish-language channel is seeing faster growth compared to FOX and almost identical viewership numbers, probably because they're putting together a better product and have real pundits covering the games. Go figure.

@michaelcaley.bsky.social dropped the deepest of dives on the Messi vs. Ronaldo debate and confirmed what the data nerds knew all along: Messi is the undisputed GOAT. It's a great piece and definitely worth reading in it's entirety, if only for the beautiful charts and "top right Messi" moments. One part I especially appreciated was the section on how common analytics asterisks don't really apply in this situation:

In my writing for this website, I have primarily focused on these hard problems of analytics, seeking a deeper understanding of team and tactical contexts, of substitution effects and the age curve. But with this topic, most of those difficult issues can be set aside. We can get a clear sense of what Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo brought to their clubs through their on-ball statistical profiles, and we do not need to present the findings with excessive modesty because so many of the confounding issues do not apply to this particular problem. It’s fun. We can just start with goals.

The good people at Futi dropped game-specific player skill ratings and also got a shoutout on Iranian TV, which is pretty cool.

Simon Kuper, of Soccernomics fame, had some interesting takes in a Financial Times article this week that can mostly be distilled down to "Western europeans understand geometry, and the rest of the world doesn't. That's why Europe dominates soccer." Thanks for that, Simon.

Unrelated to soccer, Nick Wan of the Cincinnati Reds posted a thread on Bluesky reflecting on his draft day experience. The thread contained a lot of really interesting thoughts on what it's like to be in the decision room (and what it means to influence those decisions). A short — but worthwhile — read that will teach you a lot more about leadership than Dr. LLM's LinkedIn posts.

Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane have scored 12 of England's 13 goals at the World Cup heading into a big semifinal against Argentina, which is a number that I guess makes sense, but feels insane when said out loud. That's the most impactful duo in World Cup history per Opta (ranked by percentage of team's goals scored). Funnily enough, Mbappé and Dembélé's 13/16 goals for France come in 4th all time, which maybe isn't a great sign for England's star boys.

Researchers at Meiji University in Tokyo published a research paper over the weekend that deals with predicting player movements using an Attacker-Defender model. The researchers used tracking data to identify continuous dribbling sequences and considered the ball carrier as well as the closest defender (as long as that defender did not change for the duration of the dribble). They then used each player's actual trajectory to predict the opponent's trajectory — rather than predicting both simultaneously, as other previous studies have done — and were able to create a more accurate model that better describes player movement in isolated moments. They classified the various movement types in relation to movement toward/away from goal and toward/away from opponent, but I think it would be interesting to see phase of play incorporated into this model to better break down how players react in various situations. The overall applicability of the A-D model as presented in this paper is limited, but I do think it's an interesting basis on which work could be constructed. Primarily, could we use this model to identify player-specific defending tendencies in isolated 1v1 situations? Could we adapt the model to identify team defensive strategies in transition or in low-block situations? Lots of interesting things to consider.

A closer look: the penalty shootout

Penalty shootout research is nothing new. It is perhaps one of the most considered aspects of the game, both for it's relative simplicity, and because it is such a consequential coin flip. The soccer world seemingly never gets tired of PK innovation, though, with new tactics and strategies springing up frequently. Just last year, a paper analyzing penalty kick tendencies through a game theory lens won best paper at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, highlighting just how ubiquitous this topic continues to be.

As with every major knockout tournament, the 2026 World Cup has seen its fair share of PK discourse. A main topic of discussion has been the stutter step run-up, which is, depending to who you ask, either a simple, deceptive technique or everything wrong with modern football. It's true that the prevalence of this run-up has ballooned in recent years, with nearly a quarter of all penalties at the 2026 World Cup being taken using this method, according to an analysis published in The Athletic.

The main distinction made in the article, however, doesn't center on whether a penalty uses a stutter run-up, but instead on whether the penalty taker is watching the goalkeeper. This strategy of adjusting PK direction based on GK reaction in the exact moment it's being taken is called "goalkeeper-dependent" penalty taking. According to The Athletic, the conversion rate for goalkeeper-dependent penalties is 65% at the 2026 World Cup, which is the exact same as the goalkeeper-independent penalty conversion rate. This 65% figure is significantly lower than conversion rates at previous World Cup tournaments, indicating that either GKs are getting better or PK takers are getting worse (or neither, see below).

One thing we know for certain, however, is that center backs are having a hard time at this World Cup. Daryl Dao over at Talking Tactics took a look at penalty conversion rates by position and found that CBs are converting at a rate of just 40% through the round of 32 and round of 16, while only attacking midfielders and wingers are reaching the target 80% mark.

Multiple of these penalties have gone well over the bar, suggesting that defenders are attempting to go for power over placement. In other words, they've seen too many Harry Maguire edits.

Despite these trends, it's worth remembering that short tournaments can create outlier results (low conversion rates), and that we should always take these findings with a grain of salt. A good example of this is an article published by Opta Analyst that analyzes win rates depending on team order in PK shootouts at the 2026 World Cup. After the round of 16, all four teams that went second in their respective shootout had come out on top, indicating some sort of new advantage that favors the second-taking team. Across a much larger sample, though, including previous World Cups and other international and club tournaments, this trend does not hold. The split is about 50-50, which suggests a lack of advantage in PK order. While it's something to keep an eye on, there's nowhere near enough data to suggest a deviation from the norm.

The penalties this tournament have provided plenty of fodder for discussion and analysis, and I haven't even touched on the question of Lionel Messi's PK-taking abilities2. If you ask me, it's somewhat comforting to know that there will never be a dearth of penalty discourse to be had, and you can't say that these shootouts have been anything other than thrilling3.

"Analytics" here is loosely used. There will be non-analytics things. There will be non-soccer things.

Mainly because I'm with the majority — he's a great player and an average penalty taker. Not much else to it.

Except for the Switzerland - Colombia shootout. I don't want to talk about it.