Who was the best at shooting penalties?
“Head penalty” (Giunti) read by Tullio Fazzolari
It is not a good time for football fans. Between limits on entry to stadiums, teams decimated by the pandemic and companies with budgets on the verge of bankruptcy, there is enough to feel disoriented. Let's also put in a hectic calendar where we play every three days and in the end it is hard to remember if today's game is for the championship or for the Italian cup and the confusion seems unstoppable. But the passion for football persists even in such a difficult moment and to recover the certainty that football is not just the chaos that now appears, it is worth reading the latest book by Marco Malvaldi and Paolo Cintia.
"Head rigor" (Giunti, 192 pages, 18 euros) or "football stories, paradoxes, algorithms" gives back to football what should be its true dimension: half art and half science. And the tandem of the authors corresponds to these characteristics. Paolo Cintia is a young IT talent who has decided to devote himself to the analysis of sports data. Marco Malvaldi is more difficult to label as he is nothing short of an eclectic: a chemist by profession but with a passion for opera, he is famous as a crime writer for the BarLume series of crimes, who deserves the merit of being one in Italian fiction of this genre. rare examples of detective that does not cause anguish. More or less in the same way "Head penalty" removes the melancholy of today's football by carefully mixing algorithms and talent of the players.
Who, for example, was the best at shooting penalty kicks? Among those still in business, Cristiano Ronaldo immediately comes to mind who was only 20 percent wrong. Better than him, however, is Diego Armando Maradona who hit the center 93 times out of 107. And even more Marco Van Basten who scored 51 penalties out of 54 with almost 95 percent of successes. Famous names who have certainly made football history but none of them can be considered the best scorer ever. The title instead belongs to a player who is anything but famous: Matthew Le Tissier, Southampton midfielder, who missed only one penalty out of forty-nine in his career.
Anecdotes and curiosities emerge continuously among algorithms, graphs and tables in “Rigore di testa”. Among the players who have scored three goals in a single game there are obviously the great forwards from Ronaldo to Lionel Messi. But the English Tony Read and the Paraguayan José Luis Chilavert also appear which is quite unusual given that both of them were full-time goalkeepers but this did not prevent them from also being excellent shooters. An appropriate algorithm would certainly have chosen them to kick the penalties in a final ended in a draw while, in the 2020 European title challenge between Italy and England, it would have excluded the very young Bukayo Saka: the one who missed the last shot but in his defense. it must be said that he had never taken a penalty even in the league.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/chi-e-stato-il-piu-bravo-a-tirare-calci-di-rigore/ on Sat, 12 Feb 2022 07:25:49 +0000.