Lefties choke under pressure!? An analysis of 30 years of soccer World and European Cups
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In comparison to athletes performing with a right side orientation, left-oriented performers appear advantaged in interactive sports (Loffing, Hagemann, & Straus, 2010; Puterman, Schorer, & Baker, 2011). The emergence of a lefties' advantage is assumed to be predominantly explained by negative frequency-dependent effects (Raymond, Pontier, Dufour, & Moller, 1996). Because lefties are less common, competitors fail to build up strategies to circumvent the specific perceptual, technical or tactical tasks used by lefties. The aim of this study was twofold. First, we considered whether this advantage was reflected in an over-representation of left-footed penalty takers in the World and European soccer Championships compared to the incidence of left-footers in the normal population. Second, we examined whether kicking left-footed was associated with greater success in low- (preliminary games) versus high-stress (playoff games) situations. Data from an analysis of 30 years of Championships in soccer indicate that left-footers were over-represented, although this may be explained by positional tactic demands (cf. Schorer, Cobley, Busch, Brautigam, & Baker, 2009). Interestingly, while left- and right-footed players performed equally well in low-stress situations, left-footed kickers failed more often in high stress situations (10% fewer goals). These results suggest there may be disadvantages connected to left lateralization in sports. Preliminary hypotheses will be discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".