Penalty Kicks And Partnerships

Key Takeaways:

• The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 showed the importance of stopping penalty kicks throughout the event including the final match.
• I show how looking at the “right” inputs can be used to better “guess” how stop penalty kicks and apply that framework to sports partnerships.

The FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Final ended with Argentina defeating France by 4-2 in a penalty kick shootout. We show how looking at the “right” inputs can be used to better “guess” how stop penalty kicks and apply that framework to sports partnerships.

For those unfamiliar with penalty kick shootouts, soccer games are played with a 90-minute regulation period followed by a 30-minute period of extra time if the score is tied at the end of regulation. If the score remains tied, then the teams go to a penalty kick shootout where they alternate shots on goal in a best-of-five format or sudden death if the score remains tied after five shots.

Penalty shots are converted 78% of the time according to analysis done by The Athletic. For many soccer fans, it seems amazing that goalkeepers can stop penalty shots at all. The shooter stands only 12 yards from goal shooting a stationary ball wherever he / she would like.

There are insights, however, that make saving penalty shots easier than it may initially seem. For example, soccer players tend to prefer kicking to the side of their dominant foot (i.e., right footed players kicks favor their right side). To kick to the left side, a player must take a steeper angle to the ball and change their plant (non-shooting) foot to face a different direction.

Goalies that are better at stopping penalty kicks tend to use relevant data, such as what was mentioned in the previous paragraph, to increase their save percentage. Fans and soccer commentators, however, can use irrelevant data to attempt to predict or explain penalty kick performance. For example, a fan or commentator may focus on how a player looks (or does not look) at a goalie or the goal as determinative of where he / she will shoot.

One argument that goalies generally leverage data for penalty shots can be seen by looking at World Cup Qatar 2022. The conversion rate in Qatar through December 10th games was 58%,or 20% lower than the average conversion rate. While it is good to be cautious given the relatively small sample size, this finding is consistent with the idea that the best soccer teams are leveraging data to enhance performance.

How do penalty shots have applicability to sports partnerships? One of the most common questions that Excel Analytics receives is how we determine partnership ROI given the amount of potential data that exists. More specifically, how do we determine if a partner is able to achieve revenue and brand lifts based on its company specific goals.

The answer is that we have spent years determining the right technology, algorithms, models, insights, and partners to find the right data we need to answer these questions. That means finding the partnership equivalent of the dominant side hypothesis for penalty kicks and applying it to our analysis.

For example, many sports partnerships contain activations that maximize the top of the brand marketing funnel (i.e., enhance brand awareness and brand perception). Yet, many companies want to know the relationship between those top-of-funnel partnership activations and revenue generation.

We have found that the most relevant data for correlating brand metrics with revenue metrics is organic conversation across multiple digital and social channels. More specifically, analyzing organic conversation provides the most explanatory power (the correlation of brand and revenue) with the fewest number of variables (reach, engagement, sentiment, and audience).

Focusing this analysis on the “right data” (i.e., organic conversation) and these variables provides a strong, but certainly not perfect, correlation between brand and revenue metrics. It is the same as understanding that knowing a shooter’s dominant foot or seeing his / her plant foot will not lead to a goalkeeper saving a penalty shot 100% of the time. It is that a company (or a goalkeeper) is more likely to be more right on more occasions by looking at the “right data” and completing the best analysis.