What drives a goalkeepers' decisions?

TL;DR

This paper introduces a model to evaluate goalkeeper decision-making and effectiveness in soccer, revealing that real goalkeepers exhibit more diverse movements than the model's optimal strategies, and provides a tool for performance analysis.

Contribution

The study develops a novel predictive model for goalkeeper movements and a tool for analyzing and improving goalkeeper behavior in real matches.

Findings

Real goalkeepers' movements are more diverse than the model's optimal predictions.

The model can identify situations for potential goalkeeper performance improvement.

A practical tool for analyzing and enhancing goalkeeper decision-making.

Abstract

In soccer games, the goalkeeper's performance is an important factor to the success of the whole team. Despite the goalkeeper's importance, little attention has been paid to their performance in events and tracking data. Here, we developed a model to predict which movements would be most effective for shot-stopping and compare it to the real-life behavior of goalkeepers. This model evaluates the performance of goalkeepers based on their position and dive radius. We found that contrary to the movements that were considered most effective by our model, real-life goalkeepers' movements were more diverse. We further used our model to develop a tool to analyse goalkeepers' behavior in real-life soccer games. In addition, a simulator function allows team analysts or couches to identify situations that allow further improvement of the reaction of the goalkeeper.