
Is soccer anything more than Poisson noise? - panarky
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2014/06/tuning-in-on-noise/
======
lukev
The article manages to be factually correct while still missing the point
entirely, because he conflates _uncertainty_ (randomness) with pointlessness,
and the ability to _describe_ something probabilistically with _reducibility_
to mere randomness.

When two chess grand-masters meet, the odds of the outcome may be sufficiently
close to 50/50 that you could obtain a similar statistical distribution of
wins/losses with a coin flip. But I think almost everyone would agree that the
_content_ of a chess match is profoundly more interesting than a coin toss.

Soccer, although I'm not a fan personally, is exactly the same. Sure, you can
say "there's a X% chance that a goal shot will go in", and that's true as far
as it goes. But for each particular shot, for each particular block, it was
interesting because of specific human interactions. The stats were never
intended to tell the whole story.

Similarly, regarding his conclusion - Sure, I think almost any fan would agree
that the proxy of "winning a game" is a poor indicator for the overall skill
level of a team, particularly in close matches. But that's not what matters -
what matters to players and to fans is who played better, who was 2 inches
more accurate on that day, at that time.

~~~
Amezarak
The way I understood the author is that we don't really see who played better,
or what the story is, in anything but very lop-sided games because the low-
scoring nature of soccer means that we are constructing fictitious narratives
to fit the events of the game, which are often better explained by chance.

I agree that who played better and the whole story are much more interesting,
and I think the author agrees too. I believe his argument is that it's
difficult to really see who played better. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, though.

~~~
lukev
It's easy enough to see who played better if you actually watch the game.
There is absolutely no reason to build a "ficticious narrative" when the real
narrative being streamed to every corner of the globe in realtime.

I used to find soccer unutterably boring, until I had a roomate one time who
was really into it. He showed me the proper way to watch a game... you're not
sitting around waiting for goals, you're watching how they pass, how they
handle the ball, the skill and athleticism.

I still find it boring, but at least I appreciate it now.

------
dasil003
The stats could be really interesting, but the whole opening salvo against
sports fandom turned me off to much to continue reading. I don't know if the
author believes the ridiculous stereotype that all geeks hate sports and
therefore it's okay to make ridiculous unsubstantiated leaps of logic like
"attention devoted to the World Cup is founded on flimsy numerology", but it
certainly is not a smart thing to say for someone who prides themselves on
their logic and critical thinking ability.

The randomness of a football match is no different from the randomness of
every day life. People like sports because they identify with the players and
their human capabilities. Every moment on the pitch there are 22 people taking
action. A football match is not a sequence of random events, but rather the
continual human response to a changing situation that each one can affect only
in a limited way. When amazing "low-probability" events occur, it's often
because of tremendous human skill that anyone who's ever tried to kick a ball
can appreciate. If it was robots playing no one would care. The fact that
there are upsets and freak occurrences is just another part of what keeps it
interesting; absolute pinpointing of the objective "best" team is irrelevant.

~~~
timr
That's not an "opening salvo" \-- that's the thesis of the piece. His
contention is that soccer, more than most other sports, is a poisson machine.
He goes into the math.

 _" The randomness of a football match is no different from the randomness of
every day life."_

Well, no, actually. Some things in life are more random than others. And
however skilled they may be, the large number of (fallible) people on the
field playing this game certainly doesn't make it _less_ random.

As games go, soccer doesn't have many structural impediments to randomness.
We'd (hopefully) feel pretty silly if we got worked up every few years about a
global coin-flipping tournament, but, here we are, getting worked up over
teams of people engaged in an event where the outcome is dominated by chance.

(And oh, hey: it sort of pegs the irony-o-meter that you're accusing the
author of being closed-minded about sports when you can't even be bothered to
read an argument because you've decided that you disagree with it in advance.
Well played.)

~~~
dasil003
Come on now, this entire comment is unfair, it's like you're willfully
ignoring my post's actual content in order to grind your own axe:

> _That 's not an "opening salvo" \-- that's the thesis of the piece. His
> contention is that soccer, more than most other sports, is a poisson
> machine. He goes into the math._

I don't object to the thesis, I object to _the opening salvo_.

> _Well, no, actually. Some things in life are more random than others._

How does this refute my point? Everything in life is random to some degree or
another. Football also is.

> _And however skilled they may be, the large number of (fallible) people on
> the field playing this game certainly doesn 't make it less random._

What does fallibility have to do with it? Look, my point is that it is not a
roulette wheel, there are humans reacting, and that human endeavour is what's
interesting to people, not the precise quantity of randomness in the result.

> _As games go, soccer doesn 't have many structural impediments to
> randomness._

It also doesn't have much impediment to strategy, tactics and individual skill
drastically altering the probabilities of each individual event.

> _We 'd (hopefully) feel pretty silly if we got worked up every few years
> about a global coin-flipping tournament, but, here we are, getting worked up
> over teams of people engaged in an event where the outcome is dominated by
> chance._

Clearly football falls somewhere in between a coin-flip tournament and say
9-ball pool. But, again, randomness keeps it interesting. Remember, we are not
just looking at results, we are watching players play. In individual
situations players make decisions and physically control what happens. You can
argue about the randomness of these events, but that just leads towards the
tiresome free-will-is-an-illusion debate.

> _(And oh, hey: it sort of pegs the irony-o-meter that you 're accusing the
> author of being closed-minded about sports when you can't even be bothered
> to read an argument because you've decided that you disagree with it in
> advance. Well played.)_

What an uncalled for and arrogant remark that can do nothing except derail
reasonable debate; if you squint hard enough everyone is a hypocrite. I did
read the argument, and I was addressing the opening presentation.

~~~
timr
I have no axe to grind. I read the post; you _said you didn 't read it_ in the
first line of your comment.

~~~
dasil003
Yes, and I argued against precisely the opening paragraph, I did not argue
against the stats legitimacy. It _simply does not follow_ that because there
is a great degree of randomness in sports results that sports fandom is based
on numerology. Sports fandom is based on the fact that people like playing and
watching sports, not reading the result in a paper having never seen the game
and making grandiose conclusions about which team is better based on specious
reasoning. Everyone knows the better team doesn't always win, it's self
evident. What matters are the plays that brought us to that point.

The whole thesis that sports viewing is pointless because it's random is an
infuriating straw man. Why not just stick to the thesis that soccer is random
and leave the value judgement aside? The exact same thing could be presented
without pissing people off with an implicit value judgement of something which
the author doesn't care to understand. This sort of innocent condescension is
a big reason some youthfully exuberant geeks get picked on in school.

------
tolmasky
The math is interesting, I'm not sure about the larger point he's trying to
make however, as all the "bad" aspects of the sport actually arguably make it
a _better_ sport:

1\. If you want to prove that its a waste of time to watch soccer, its much
easier to state how nothing relies on it. Trying to compare it to other time-
wasters like basketball seems like a very strange exercise in subjectivity.
Especially because I can easily make the competing argument: if the other
sports more predictively give the expected results, then isn't it _less_
useful to watch them? If I could predict the result of a game with probability
1.0, then it would be 100% useless to watch the game. What fun is it to watch
a coin that always comes up heads?

2\. It is separately well understood that games do not necessarily correlate
with "expected" skill. Case in point, many tournaments switched from a
everyone-plays-everyone model (that is far fairer) to a single elimination,
precisely because it is noisier and thus more exciting.

~~~
Daishiman
> 1\. If you want to prove that its a waste of time to watch soccer, its much
> easier to state how nothing relies on it.

Which is not even a good point for the author, since football matches have had
_profound_ significance; they have helped prop up and destroy military regimes
(such as in the history of football throughout the military dictatorships of
Latin America in the 70s), led to race riots, political activism, etc. I'd say
that football is much more important in that aspect than we may think at first
glance.

------
cwyers
What on Earth is the point of all this? Yes, there is a random element to
soccer. No, the outcome is not purely random. The fact that there is a random
component to the outcome does NOT mean that "the attention devoted to the
World Cup is founded on flimsy numerology and might even be called a
tremendous waste of time and money." And to the opening question, "is soccer
anything more than Poisson noise?" Of COURSE it is.

~~~
yaeger
>Of COURSE it is.

Yes, it is boring to watch. As outlined in contrast to other sports. Even a
minute before a random goal happens, the audience has no idea it is about to
happen. It is just a random back and forth across the field. With a lot of
resets as he puts it. Compared with Football where you slowly advance to the
opponents side and the audience knows when a goal becomes a possibility.

People say soccer didn't catch on in the US because you can't easily put
commercials in it. I disagree. You could neatly fit entire infomercials in
there and when you cut back to the action, chances are very high that the
score is still the same as when they left things.

Also the double standard of being cool with games ending in a tie like a
riveting 0-0 and on the other hand, at certain occasions, having to have a
shootout to determine a winner is more than weird. They could have saved
themselves 90 minutes by going to the shootout right away.

------
saosebastiao
The unfortunately necessary preface: I'm a huge soccer fan, and have followed
my favorite team (Benfica) since 1992 when I was introduced by my grandfather.

I think the author's mathematical assertions are correct. Soccer has an
amazing amount of random noise, but is influenced in one direction or another
by talent. However, my conclusion isn't that watching soccer is a waste of
time, but rather that the cup format for soccer competition doesn't prove
much. The season and point aggregation format makes much more sense (and it
makes much more sense in any form of low scoring / high variability sport,
such as baseball). Because of the variability, any sort of win-to-advance
behavior can heavily skew the entire competition towards those with early
luck.

~~~
ninguem2
Looking only at one World Cup, you are looking at something that can be hugely
influenced by chance, yes. But if you look at the history of World Cups,
patterns emerge and it's very clear which countries are better. So think of
the World Cup as one round of an extended competition.

~~~
metacorrector
sure, but as an analogy, can you see tic-tac-toe not as an obvious tie but as
one round in an epic game of attrition? Would it be fun to see who could win a
continuous stream of tic tac toe games, games played end to end for 24, 36, 48
hrs, maybe with no breaks for food? Cage Tic Tac Toe, where someone actually
does start losing due to their weaker constitution?

While that could be imagined to be a fun sport, just as the soccer you
describe is a fun sport, perhaps there is a way to play with some other rules
that achieve more fun for the fan, for the player, and which give a sense that
you know who is the best team in this tournament, rather than who comes from
the country with the better long term immigration policy with respect to the
game of tic tac toe?

~~~
ninguem2
I've actually been enjoying following the World Cup for a few decades now.

------
3pt14159
By design games that are popular end up having a certain amount of random
noise in them, otherwise they would be terrible to watch. Furthermore, teams
are run by rational actors who have seen fit to put millions of dollars into
getting slightly better players, which seems to suggest that there is a
certain amount of talent involved in winning the game.

So his conclusion that a 3:2 beat means that there is only a 5:8 chance that a
team is better, perfectly makes sense in my mind. Popular sports are fun
because they are close to watch.

------
PhasmaFelis
The xkcd comic is funny, but it's not a very good insult, since it applies not
just to sports commentary but to essentially all human experience.

~~~
ajuc
Everything runs on quantum mechanics, which is a lot of weighted random number
generators. So yeah.

------
mturmon
It turns out that others have noticed the Poissonian characteristics of soccer
scores, and taken the idea farther. See:

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.0797.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.0797.pdf)

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0047678)

------
Someone
By that logic, chess is a Poisson process, too.

However, I think there isn't really any logic here. A claim that something is
a Poisson process should be followed by some statistical test. I wouldn't know
which one, because we do not know the various probabilities and because they
change over time (for example, P(Spain:whoever) seems to have dropped quite a
bit recently, and nobody knows when that happened and by how much), it will be
estimate them.

But a statistical test still is needed to make any kind of claim of something
being a Poisson process. I guess that, if you posed a model for way in which
such probabilities change, you might be able to use some ELO-like system to
estimate those probabilities and, from it, do some test for Poisson
distribution. I fear such a model might have so many degrees of freedom that
it is too weak to prove anything. At the very least, it would be hard math to
wring anything out of such a model.

~~~
agarden
ELO ratings are available:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Football_Elo_Ratings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Football_Elo_Ratings)

------
tinco
He does a lot of math and fancy talk, only to conclude that when a match ends
in 3:2, it's not very conclusive who the better team was? No shit sherlock, it
doesn't take much of a genius to figure that out.

It would be more interesting if he'd actually take the time to do it proper
and calculate what the chance is that there is a team outside the top 3 that
is actually a better team (whatever that means) than the world cup winner. I'd
be surprised if that number was very high.

Every soccer fan knows you need a healthy dose of luck to win a match, but
every soccer fan also knows that you need a hell lot more luck when you play
against a team that's known to be better than yours, and when you get lucky
very often, maybe that's just a sign that your team is better than you thought
it was.

------
bkcooper
I agree with the overall tenor of the comments: this wasn't a very good
article. Much of what he's saying is well known to quantitatively minded fans
of sport, and the presumption that the game has failed if it doesn't identify
the better team with near certainty is silly.

However, I've liked that blog for a while and think there's a lot of
interesting stuff on there, for example this conversation between an economist
and a physicist:

[http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-
meets-...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-
physicist/)

~~~
metacorrector
he may have said it wrong, but you seem more wrong: it is not silly that games
should be designed to identify who is the better player.

I think you are confusing "the best team winning" with everybody knowing who
is going to win a priori.

Sprinting, marathoning, horse racing, downhill skiing, etc., they all
determine pretty clearly who won, and they do a good job to varying degrees of
seeming fair. That doesn't mean you know who will win, and when happens as for
example with skiing under certain conditions that later runs are disadvantaged
compared to earlier runs, that can vary the outcome but not in a satisfying
way.

Soccer could be a better game, but I get it, you don't like change.

~~~
bkcooper
_I think you are confusing "the best team winning" with everybody knowing who
is going to win a priori._

If the game goes to the best player with near certainty, then unless there's a
lot of noise in determining the best player beforehand, you will have
comparable certainty about who will win.

 _Sprinting, marathoning, horse racing, downhill skiing, etc., they all
determine pretty clearly who won, and they do a good job to varying degrees of
seeming fair._

Determining clearly who won is not the issue --- it is, after all, very easy
to tell who won a soccer game. What is at issue is determining who is best. I
don't find these examples convincing in that regard. We could do a better job
at identifying the top sprinter by looking at performance over multiple races,
instead of one race; this would make us less sensitive to things like
stumbles, bad starts, etc. I don't think that doing things in this way
(Olympic best of 15 100m contests!) would actually be more exciting, though.

 _Soccer could be a better game, but I get it, you don 't like change._

Um, ok?

~~~
metacorrector
<i>If the game goes to the best player with near certainty, then unless
there's a lot of noise ...</i>

that's what the guy is saying, that in soccer, the best team does not win with
near certainty. You understand now.

------
grayclhn
Two thoughts:

1) this is a somewhat bizarre exercise. It seems like it's more relevant to
work out the probability that the better team wins, for empirically relevant
values of what the author's calling "expectation value" \--- i.e., give team A
an expected scoring rate of (say), 2.0 goals per 90 minutes and give team B a
rate of 1.9 goals per 90 minutes, then see how likely each team is to win. (R
code, based on 10,000 simulations because I'm lazy and don't feel like working
out the probabilities by hand:

    
    
         > mean(rpois(10000, 2) - rpois(10000, 1.9) > 0)
        [1] 0.42
        > mean(rpois(10000, 2) - rpois(10000, 1.9) < 0)
        [1] 0.38
        > mean(rpois(10000, 2) - rpois(10000, 1.9) == 0)
        [1] 0.20
    

In words: the better team wins 42% of the time, the worse team 38%, and they
tie 20%;)

The numbers 2.0 and 1.9 were made up, and the disadvantage of this approach is
that you're required to get some data and estimate reasonable values of each
team's scoring rate, or make them up. I should note here that OP has to do the
same thing; the line

    
    
        "We can turn the Poisson distribution around, and ask: if a team scores N
        points, what is the probability (or more technically correct, the probability
        density) that the underlying expectation value is X?"
    

is nonsense without a Bayesian interpretation, which requires a prior density
(which is the equivalent of making up numbers like the 2.0 and the 1.9 I used
above, and weighting them by how likely you believe they are). Note that I
could put a dogmatic prior on 2.0 and 1.9---a point mass for each team at one
of the points---which would make me believe that the "expectation values" are
2.0 and 1.9 regardless of the actual score. Clearly that would be a bad prior,
but it's not clear that the implicit prior used in the article is a good one.

2) More important: teams sit on leads, so the probabilities aren't constant. A
team that outclasses another team probably won't win by 19-0, because at 8-0
they'll focus less on scoring and more on playing defense and avoiding injury.
The same concept applies less dramatically with a 4-1 win, a 3-2 win, etc.
Modeling strategy is much harder, so I'm not going to provide R code :). But
one effect is that a poisson process will probably predict too many extreme
scores.

That said, the OP's thesis is self-evidently true: "My thesis is that soccer
is an amalgam of random processes whose net effect produces rare events—those
more-or-less unpredictable events spread more-or-less uniformly in time." It's
a game with about 3-5 goals scored in 90 minutes. They're rare!

------
shkkmo
The author seems to have missed the point of the "Let's use them to build
Narratives" line.

The World Cup is not popular DESPITE having a fairly random outcome. The World
Cup is popular BECAUSE it has a fairly random outcome.

The point of the World Cup is not to find the best soccer team. The point of
the World Cup is to build a strong shared narrative.

In this case, much of the strength of the narrative being built comes from the
integration of unexpected events. More of the strength comes from the
interaction between the narratives of the stadium audience, and the live team
as random events occur.

Perhaps this is why introducing random events into tabletop RPG's is
effective.

------
vdaniuk
Many posters here criticize the a anti-sports bias, but perhaps this bias is
useful to an individual and a humanity?

Popular games became popular because of the path-dependent random development
some time ago, should we continue on with the status quo?

Or should we try to engineer a new type of game with massive popularity that
would be more beneficial to the society and the players and the watchers?

I guess the latter. Afterwards, football, soccer, hockey sports popularity is
based on marketing and are successful in large part because of the huge
switching costs.

~~~
jdmichal
I was under the impression that soccer was popular because all you need is a
ball and a pitch. Low cost of entry leads to high engagement.

------
gd1
Strange argument. How does modern soccer (quite attacking these days) compare
to the number of goals per game in ice hockey, touchdowns per game in the NFL,
or home runs in a baseball game?

~~~
mturmon
This is addressed in the article, but I think it's worth expanding on, because
the article is (I admit) unclear and imprecise.

NFL gameplay has a state variable (field position) that strongly affects score
probability. This state variable accumulates over long periods of time in the
game, and is thus influenced by skill.

On the other hand (the claim goes), scoring potential in soccer is mostly
affected by possession of the ball, which changes frequently, and there isn't
a persistent state.

The effect is that, with each possession, there is a small chance of Team A
scoring. The ball passes to Team B, and then back to Team A. Team A then has
another shot at scoring, which (due to lack of persistent state) is largely
independent of its earlier chance.

To be more definite, the final score of Team A is:

    
    
      S = C1 + C2 + ... + CN
    

where the Ci's are almost statistically independent, 0/1 random variables,
with P(Ci = 1) rather low. Each Ci indicates a score on a given ball
possession. This is a situation where the Poisson limit
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_limit_theorem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_limit_theorem))
is applicable.

The NFL situation does not decouple this way, because the Ci's are not
independent, due to the field position issue. The corresponding state
variables with baseball are balls-strikes and players-on-base.

If you believe in the Poisson model, then Poisson model + low counts is an
unfavorable regime to determine if Team A's score-probability is less than
Team B's. On the other hand, if it's high counts (i.e., S is large) then it's
easy to tell. This validates a commenter nearby who says he thinks season-wide
scores provide more insight than tournaments.

As you mentioned, hockey would seem to be another good parallel to soccer (I
think). It was smart to notice that.

Incidentally, I don't care one way the other about any of these sports, but I
think the probabilistic analysis is interesting.

~~~
kybernetikos
The discussion of the 'state variable' was interesting. However, it seems as
if your model would give a wrong result for a game where one side had near
100% possession (and so relatively few possession changes). In particular,
being stronger at maintaining possession often leads to multiple attempts on
the goal because of the rules about corners). Perhaps that model would be more
applicable for basketball?

The other strange thing about this whole discussion is that it seems to
suggest that you could field a team of random people and have a nonzero
(within normal human experience) chance of besting the top team in the world.
This is so false it's laughable. Even in top tier play, where the teams are
all closer together, there are predictable differences in skill and teamwork
that ensure some teams would almost never win against particular other teams.

If the Poisson noise theory is correct, I would hope it could lead to specific
predictions at odds with the way current professional bookmakers evaluate
teams chances, and could therefore lead to a quick and easy way for this
author to put his money where his mouth is.

~~~
mturmon
The notion of "possession" plays a very strong role. As noted by other people
on this thread, there is strategy in sitting on the ball once you pull ahead.
In the light of the simple model above, this can be seen as controlling "N",
the number of possessions, rather than any single Ci (goal). The model above
does not allow for such an "N" (i.e., where "N" is a function of the partial
sum C1 + ... + CM). It basically assumes possession trades back and forth a
significant number of times, independently of other stuff.

"team of random people...so false it's laughable..." \-- Absolutely true. This
fallacy is implicit in some of the language in the OP, which, incidentally,
seems chosen to goad fans.

But I don't think it's a problem for the model. Basically, there are two per-
possession goal probabilities when team A plays team B (call them G_AB and
G_BA; they are between 0 and 1).

These numbers are a function of both A and B, because if Team A is really bad,
and B is good, then G_AB ("chance A scores on B") will be really low. But if C
is just as bad as A, than G_AC will be moderate.

The expected points scored by A is N * G_AB, and by B, N * G_BA. The model
allows G_AB << G_BA, and indeed G_BA ~= 1, so then it predicts B will almost
always win the game.

Note that the Poisson limit will not apply if G is not pretty low (say, less
than 0.1), and you need N moderately high (say, bigger than 10) so that N * G
will itself be moderate.

 __*

The issue (not well articulated in TFA) is that when both Poisson variables
are expected to have low counts, it's difficult to distinguish slightly-
different per-possession probabilities.

~~~
kybernetikos
When one team is dominating another, they get multiple attempts to score for a
single possession event (powerful shots on target are commonly redirected by
the keeper which allows the attacking team another chance from a corner or
rebound), and their probability of scoring from any shot increases because
their control of play allows them to take more certain shots. And of course,
brief possession in a teams own half does not really translate into any kind
of scoring chance for them.

Of course I'm not sure that those factors are enough to completely sink the
model, but there certainly are such factors in play.

> The issue (not well articulated in TFA) is that when both Poisson variables
> are expected to have low counts, it's difficult to distinguish slightly-
> different per-possession probabilities.

I take this to mean that in a match up between broadly comparable teams, the
outcome will be indistinguishable from chance, which most fans would accept as
completely fine (and possibly even preferable). I still find it hard to
reconcile this with the dominance of a few teams over quite long periods of
time in international soccer, even in the presence of relatively low scores
although I suppose I would have to do some actual number crunching to tell
whether this was relevant or not.

------
taliesinb
It was linked in the comments of this post, but the blog post of my colleague
uses machine learning to predict the outcome of knockout matches with some 70%
accuracy: [http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/06/20/predicting-who-will-
win-t...](http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/06/20/predicting-who-will-win-the-
world-cup-with-wolfram-language/)

------
jedberg
No sports have enough data to say that "the best team won". There just simply
aren't enough matches.

But most people's enjoyment of sports comes from watching the execution, not
the stats. The stats are just icing.

Yes, there are people who get enjoyment just from the stats (baseball is
notorious for this), but for the most part the stats are just an interesting
side show for the main event.

~~~
ownagefool
Actually, all the sports I know of have a pretty simple method of dictating
who the better team on the day was. Otherwise, how would we know who won?

Still, for many the debate is part of the fun. :)

~~~
taeric
I think the assertion is that "who won the game" is not, strictly speaking,
the same as "who is the better team."

That is, it could be akin to saying that "this particular coin shows heads
today" because that is what the last flip did. Definitely true, but does not
tell you anything about the nature of the coin.

~~~
ownagefool
When the object of the game is to win, you can pretty much determine the
better team by result. You might not always agree with how they achieve it,
but you can't really argue results.

That said, I was specific to say 'On the day'. Typically, it's pretty poor
sportsmanship that sees most of us arguing that the better team lost.

~~~
taeric
But can you? Imagine if your goal was to find which coin is the biased one,
but you could only flip once a week.

Though, I should be clear that I doubt the better team loses most of the time.
More that I just think the static view where there is a clear "better" team is
flawed anyway.

------
cja
I might be completely missing the point (haven't studied probability since
1998) but go on then, tell me who's going to win the World Cup. Or just
Croatia vs Mexico, which is starting now.

Unless you can do that fairly accurately then I don't see why you're picking
on football. Surely life is just random events, some executed better than
others!

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notahacker
This has got to be parody right?

Assuming that Team A can meaningfully be assigned a prior score for the
expected number of goals against Team B (and, independently, vice versa), and
assuming _without reference to any evidence_ that the number of goals they
actually score over a period is independent from the number of goals the other
side score, and assuming the outcome of the match is determined by a random
number generator along a probability distribution based on said statistical
priors, and not by a bunch of quick-witted athletes and a ball... you get a
set of results with quite a high variance.

Any fan who struggles with basic arithmetic will tell you it's an interesting
sport _precisely because_ teams with significant disadvantages have a non
trivial chance of achieving a result.

But no, that's not important because if you assume things that are palpably
untrue, like there being no indications of one team being more likely to score
next from general play, and scoring attempts being a matter of probability
rather than ingenuity, skill and physical effort... then it would be a bit
like watching a random number generator.

Admittedly, he doesn't follow soccer.

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beachstartup
the very clear anti-sports bias and rhetoric (how very original...) prevented
me from finishing the article.

however, i'll just say this: a team of amateur soccer players will lose to
professionals every single time. this isn't throwing dice or drawing cards.
both teams have to be VERY good at soccer to reduce the outcome of a pro match
to anywhere near "random".

like in anything else, it's only when skills are evenly matched that the
outcome of a game cam be influenced by small variables.

------
devindotcom
"My thesis is that soccer is an amalgam of random processes whose net effect
produces rare events—those more-or-less unpredictable events spread more-or-
less uniformly in time."

What? What proportion of events in soccer is he proposing are random? This
seems a very poor start for any kind of examination of sport whatsoever.

~~~
hderms
It's disingenuous but he assumed it because he wouldn't be able to cram it
into a statistical model as easily otherwise

------
dang
The submitted title was "Attention devoted to the World Cup is founded on
flimsy numerology", which does appear in the post. But to make it less
linkbaity, we changed it to the question that appears in the first paragraph
and describes the article more neutrally.

~~~
myrmidon
Thanks! Transparent moderation is always great, but I feel that de-baiting
links is _really_ important and generally underappreciated... Keep up the good
work!

------
Dewie
> It’s a bit off-topic for the series, but I can’t even go to Google now
> without being reminded of the World Cup and soccer this, soccer that.

An American complaining about content not really geared towards his culture on
the English-speak Web? That's rich.

~~~
wmil
I am surprised that after all of the years of tracking Google still hasn't
realized I don't care about soccer. It seems like big brother is phoning it
in.

~~~
yaeger
I have switched homepages to google.com away from my local google homepage as
that one does not bore me with yet another damn soccer doodle.

