AI beats goalkeepers at predicting which way penalty taker will shoot

Deep learning models trained on more than 1000 penalty kicks in football matches can predict which way the ball will go better than real-life goalkeepers. "Penalty kicks are some of the most decisive moments in soccer, often determining the outcome of major tournaments," says David Freire-Obregón at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. "Despite this, real-time support for goalkeepers is still largely intuition-based. We wanted to explore whether machine learning could predict shot direction from a kicker's body motion." So Freire-Obregón and his colleagues scraped 1010 penalty kicks from real, televised matches in Spain.