“Actually if you shoot down the middle every time, the keeper will understand what your strategy is and they’re going to stay in the middle,” Mr Watson said.
“So what you want is a mixed strategy, where you shoot in the top left a percentage of the time and the top right a percentage of the time.”
He said his dissertation impressed his tutor, who suggested he would look to publish it in Math Plus Magazine at University of Cambridge, external – and it achieved an impressive first-class mark of 85.
Following England’s quarter-final success against the Swiss, Mr Watson said Cole Palmer, Jude Bellingham, Bukayo Saka, Ivan Toney and Trent Alexander-Arnold “broadly” followed his model.
“They didn’t shoot down the middle and they shot left 60% of the time and right 40% of the time,” he said.
“Something else I found interesting was the difference between [Manuel] Akanji’s penalty and [Xherdan] Shaqiri’s. Akanji shot low, making it quite an easy save for [Jordan] Pickford, but Shaqiri shot high.
“Even though Pickford guessed the direction of both penalties correctly, the extra height in Shaqiri’s made all the difference. This is exactly why my model prefers shooting in the top corners over the bottom.”
