Statistics suggest Aguero’s panenka was not a mistake, but his execution was poor.
Manchester City striker Sergio Aguero tried an audacious penalty kick against Chelsea at the weekend, but Edouard Mendy managed to save it comfortably.
Had Aguero scored the spot-kick, Manchester City could have wrapped up the Premier League title last week.
The Argentine was heavily criticized after the game for his choice of a penalty kick.
Sergio Aguero tried a panenka style penalty, but the Chelsea goalkeeper read his intentions and positioned himself accordingly to make a comfortable save.
After the game, Aguero’s former teammate Micah Richards revealed that the Argentine always tried the panenka penalty in training, but he never succeeded.
Aguero’s penalty was aimed at the middle of the goal, and Opta statistics suggest that aiming a penalty kick centrally is 97.8% successful. However, players tend to place their shots on the left and right side of the net more often than not, and both zones have a lower success rate as compared to the middle.
Meanwhile, LSE professor Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, an expert in discovering patterns among penalty kick takers and goalkeepers, claims that the scoring rate of a panenka is statistically almost similar to that of any other types of penalties.
“It is not a terrible idea,” says Palacios-Huerta. “In my dataset, the scoring rate of a true Panenka is statistically similar to that of any other type of penalty kicks, although it is slightly lower.”
He says, “the scoring rate could be 4-5 percentage points lower than the average penalty kick”.
According to him, around 80% of penalties are successful, and the scoring rate of a panenka would be 4-5% lower than an average kick.
Statistics would suggest that Aguero’s decision from the penalty spot was not a mistake. Still, his execution was poor and Edouard Mendy’s reading of the shot has to be credited as well.
