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London: Football penalty shoot-outs give an unfair psychological advantage to the team that shoots first according to new research from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) published today.
Now Professor Ignacio Palacios-Huerta, from the LSE’s department of management, has suggested football chiefs switch to a tennis style tie-break system, during which players can have two consecutive serves, in a bid to make shoot-outs fairer.
Palacios-Huerta and co-author Jose Apesteguia, an associate professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, studied 2,820 kicks from shoot-outs in major national and international competitions between 1970-2008.
They found that the team that takes the first kick wins 60 percent of the time and the team that takes the second 40 percent of the time.
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