Goalkeepers put their money where the coach’s mouth is: Knowing kickers’ preferences enhances anticipation of football goalkeepers

We investigated the influence of providing football goalkeepers with kicker’s prior preferences on anticipation and gaze behaviour to explore the interaction of top-down and bottom-up cognitive processing. Forty participants (20 experienced goalkeepers and 20 novices) were asked to anticipate the direction of penalty kicks in three experimental conditions: without information (control situation), with correct information (congruent condition), and with wrong information (incongruent condition) on a kicker’s prior preferences. An eye-tracking device was used to analyse fixations on areas of interest. The participants anticipated the direction of the kick in congruent situations better than in the other two conditions (p = 0.001). Experienced goalkeepers were superior to novices in the incongruent and control conditions (p = 0.001). In those conditions, experienced goalkeepers also fixated more (p = 0.025) and longer (p = 0.046) on the trunk, and longer on the hips (p = 0.036), non-kicking leg (p = 0.001), and kicking leg (p = 0.001). We conclude that providing congruent information on a kicker’s preferences positively impacts goalkeepers’ anticipation. This confirms a model that expertise differences between experienced goalkeepers and novices are more prominent when the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes is difficult.