What Penalty Kicks Can Teach Us About Sticking With an Investment Plan
With the World Cup coming to the USA in summer 2026, the world will soon be watching a lot of penalty kicks. The glory of scoring a penalty is on a national level, score the cup winner and you are an instant legend. It’s one of the most pressure-filled moments in sports: the shooter steps up, the crowd roars, and the goalkeeper has a split second to decide what to do.
In the early 2000’s a team of Israeli researchers analyzed 286 professional penalty kicks from top leagues to see what actually worked best for goalkeepers. In more than 94% of the kicks, the keeper dived left or right. They stayed in the center less than 6% of the time.i
Here’s the twist: given where the shots actually went, the highest save rate came when the keeper stayed in the middle. In other words, they dived far more often than the numbers justified.
The authors called this action bias, our tendency to do something under pressure, even when standing strong would, on average, produce better results.
Action bias in your portfolio
When markets get noisy, most investors feel like they should “dive”:
- Selling whatever just went down
- Chasing whatever did well last year
- Moving to cash “until things calm down”
But just like the goalkeeper who guesses a corner on every shot, constant motion often lowers your odds of success: higher taxes, more costs, more timing mistakes, and a higher chance you abandon a good strategy right before it rebounds.
What “standing in the center” looks like in investing
For soccer goalies, “holding the center” isn’t laziness. It’s a deliberate choice based on probabilities.
In investing, this looks like:
- Choosing a clear investment philosophy
(evidence-based, diversified, long-term, low-cost). - Building a portfolio that matches your goals and risk capacity, not the news cycle.
- Writing that philosophy down in something like an Investment Policy Statement.
- Rebalancing and making changes according to rules, not emotions.
You’re taking purposeful actions anchored in a philosophy instead of headlines.
When it does make sense to dive
None of this means “never change anything.” There are good reasons to make real adjustments:
- Your life changes in a major way (retirement, business sale, inheritance, health event).
- Your long-term goals or spending needs change.
- Your true capacity or willingness to take risk has shifted.
- You can implement the same strategy more efficiently (lower costs, better tax structure, cleaner account setup).
Those are good “penalty kicks” to dive for.
Reacting to every scary headline, short-term performance dip, or market forecast? Those are shots you may have a better chance of stopping from the center.
Bringing it back to the World Cup
When the World Cup kicks off in 2026 and you see a keeper fling themselves sideways while a Panenkai style shot sails calmly down the middle, remember what the research showed: in the real data, goalkeepers stayed in the center far less often than they should have.
If you’ve taken the time to build a sound, diversified, tax-aware plan that matches your goals, then sticking with that philosophy, especially when it’s uncomfortable, is not neglect. It’s the strategy.
When the next bout of market volatility arrives and the urge to “make a guess” hits, it may help to think like the calm goalkeeper:
Sometimes the smartest move is not to guess a corner, but to trust your preparation and hold your ground.
i Bar-Eli, M., Azar, O. H., Ritov, I., Keidar-Levin, Y., & Schein, G. (2007). Action bias among elite soccer goalkeepers: The case of penalty kicks. Journal of Economic Psychology, 28(5), 606–621.
ii This type of shot is named after the Czech soccer player, Antonín Panenka, who made it famous in the UEFA Euro 1976 final shootout. On the deciding kick, he chipped the ball down the middle as the goalkeeper dived away — and the name stuck.
