Anticipating the movement of football (soccer) goalkeepers

The outcome of a penalty kick can pivot the fate of a football match. While previous research has mainly examined how goalkeepers anticipate shot direction, little is known about how penalty takers anticipate goalkeeper movements when using a keeper-dependent strategy. The current study examined how temporal constraints shape the penalty takers’ ability to anticipate the movement direction of the keeper, and whether expertise plays a role in such anticipation. Participants (N = 253; 130 experts; 123 novices) completed a temporal occlusion task in which they viewed 64 penalty kicks filmed from the taker’s perspective. On each trial, participants indicated whether the goalkeeper would dive left or right. Videos began 4 s before simulated ball–foot contact and were occluded at four time points (0, 200, 400, 600 ms before contact). Overall performance remained above chance across occlusion times (ranging from ~94% at 0 ms to ~52% at 600 ms) indicating that individuals can anticipate goalkeepers’ movement directions before movement onset although anticipation accuracy decreased as occlusion occurred earlier, with significant differences between adjacent occlusion levels. Furthermore, experts outperformed novices across occlusion times. Additional analysis show that this effect is mainly due to experts playing, but not watching football. Together, these findings quantify perceptual constraints on anticipating goalkeeper movements and suggest that passive and active forms of experience contribute differently to anticipatory performance.