
 The Statistical Problem With Soccer - Anon84
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24182/
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heyitsnick
\- "In fact, Skinner and Freeman have carried out an extensive statistical
analysis of the scores at the last World Cup. They point out that if the
outcomes of games were a true reflection of the teams' abilities, then the
situation "Team A beats Team B beats Team C which beats Team A" should never
occur. They call this an intransitive triplet."

The outcome of the game is never meant to be a "true reflection" of the teams'
abilities, but a reflection of their ability against that side, on that day,
in those conditions. A round-robin style tournament is used to have a team
playing different opponents, a mix of different styles. Central attacking
sides. Defense and counter-attack. Wide open matches. Closed central movement.
Teams alter their strategy against specific opponents and try to find holes in
their game and exploit an edge.

This seems like a problem with the statistical model, not with the sport,
because "A > B > C > A" is possible in a team sport, and not just because of a
luck factor. One team may have strengths that exploit certain weaknesses in
other teams. That are uncountable examples - Team A lacks fitness and is
weaker in the last 20 minutes; but this will only be exploited by a team who
have a high fitness level. Team B has as weak left wing, but this will only be
exploited by a team with a strong right winger. The list goes on.

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xiaoma
That was my thought exactly. Pikemen beat cavalry who beat footmen who beat
pikemen.

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jimbokun
I think this is at the root of what really bugs (some) U.S. Americans about
soccer, but they are unable to express it.

Sports popular in the U.S. almost seem designed to allow for statistical
analysis. Baseball is the ultimate game for a statistician, as you have data
for every single pitch thrown and the outcome. American Football breaks the
game down into series of discrete events (downs) each of which has a numerical
outcomes (yards gained or lost). Basketball generates 10s of events every game
with a definite outcome that can generally be assigned to a single player
(shot made, missed, turnover, free throw, rebound, etc.).

All of this gives fans ways to analyze and rank individual players and teams
in a fairly objective way. Thus, the immense popularity of fantasy leagues.

Soccer is inherently more subjective, as there are far fewer events with an
objective outcome. With scoring a rare event, and no obvious ways to assign
numerical values to all the things that happen between scoring chances,
subjective analysis is all that's available.

Which ties back into the original article in that freak occurrences and dumb
luck can have a much larger impact in soccer. One team can play much better
for most of the game, but a freak goal, controversial call or uncharacteristic
error can have an outsize impact in a low scoring affair. This is mitigated in
the round robin format rounds with accumulated wins and points, but is very
much a factor in one-and-done games.

I believe I read before that at one time even the final round was a multi team
affair, with the champion determined by cumulative totals against the other
teams, but it was done away with because fans wanted a definitive championship
match between just two teams.

~~~
philwelch
Dumb luck plays an even bigger role in American football though. In American
football a small amount of turnovers can dictate the result of the whole game.
It is way more unpredictable than even soccer, which has some 90 minutes of
uninterrupted play where each team continuously tries to either hold or gain
possession and make an attack.

Plus, soccer has more statistics than you'd realize: proportion of possession,
number of corner kicks, number of crosses, number of shots, percentage of
shots on target, possession per area of the field, etc.

~~~
mdg
When discussing a players career though, typically its goals, and appearences
per club.

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cromulent
Soccer is a low scoring game. It's not a "statistical problem", it's a
feature.

Treating it as "an experiment to determine which of the teams is the best" is
not a good approach. There are a thousand contests in 90 minutes, but probably
only two or three of them result in a goal, one of which may be from a penalty
anyway.

High scoring games are much better at determining the best team on the day.

I believe that one of the major reasons for soccers massive worldwide
spectator popularity is the low scoreline. You watch the game even if your
team is obviously outclassed, as you can still win, and you can still win with
just a few minutes left in most cases.

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ovi256
I can't remember how many games I stopped watching 5 minutes before the end,
because I was disappointed, only to later discover that the team I supported
scored. Even better are score, counter-score, then score again.

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chickamade
It might be true the best team only has 28% chance of winning the World Cup.
Though, we should know that it leaves only 72% chance for the rest of the 31
teams to win, and they are not uniform. So maybe 28% for the best team, 20%
for the 2nd best, 12% for the 3rd best, etc., which sounds fair to me.

There are 32 teams playing the World Cup, if one of them is a 1:3.5 dog, they
have a pretty DAMN GOOD chance. The betting odd is usually sth like 1:4 or
1:5, I think.

More importantly, the team which wins is the better team, by definition. It is
a question whether they can perform consistently in a series of matches with
the correct strategy each time, whether they can adapt to changes, whether
they are focused at the important moments. Certainly there will be luck and
drama, but the team which plays better (for most of the match duration) wins
much more often than that number 28% tells you.

Look at professional poker. You can for sure say that there is more luck
involved, but times and again the familiar faces show up at the final tables.

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chickamade
Actually I made a mistake, 28% would be 1:2.5 dog in betting lingo, and that's
a HUGE when there are 31 other competitors.

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ars
The game would be pretty boring if the best team always won.

It's a game, it's meant for fun, it's not a science experiment.

By having it semi-random, you spread out then ups and downs.

Someone did an analysis of video games (posted on slashdot, but I can't find
it), where they showed that the best video games don't have solid excitement
all the way, but rather ups and downs.

The same it true here. If your team always won you would be bored pretty
quickly.

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mechanical_fish
_The game would be pretty boring if the best team always won._

Indeed, as many sports folks have pointed out, one of the most popular annual
sporting events in the USA is the NCAA college basketball tournament. A
single-elimination event which is pretty much _designed_ to improve the odds
of having the "best" team get accidentally disqualified by an improbable
fluke. The winner must win six consecutive games, while under enormous
pressure, without making a mistake.

As it happens, the distribution of talent in college basketball still makes
the seedings work _fairly_ well. Just as World Cup soccer seedings work
decently well, though it too becomes a single-elimination tournament after the
first round. But these tournaments could obviously be much better designed if
the objective was science.

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Danny72
Although the World Cup is the most well known (and watched) soccer tournament,
it isn't that representative of soccer.

1\. It's mainly a knockout tournament which obviously increases the variance

2\. International sides aren't a cohesive team like domestic club sides only
playing a handful of times per year leading up to the tournaments.

Compare this to the domestic leagues where the league format reduces the
variance and players spend most of the year working with who they're playing
with on the pitch. In the EPL, the #1 ranked side going into the season
probably wins the league 75% of the time. It's a much lower number though for
the domestic cups because of the knockout format.

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chimariko
The flaw of Gerald Skinner's approach is that he makes an assumption that
there is some kind of absolute abstract quality of a soccer team, whereas the
quality of a soccer team is defined by their results in a tournament.

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lionhearted
I used to play a lot of cards. Like, a whole lot. Every now and then a card-
playing friend of mine would complain about their luck, and I always answered
the same way:

"People don't gamble on Chess."

So very quickly:

> Their approach is to think of a soccer game as an experiment to determine
> which of two teams is the best. The question then is this: what is the
> probability that the outcome of the experiment truly represents the relative
> abilities of the two teams. And the answer, unfortunately, is not very
> probable.

This is not a bug; it is a feature. Spectator sports have drama and theatrics
and exist first as entertainment, and only second as a contest of skill.

In Major League Baseball, the New York Yankees are far and away the best team
this year. It's not even close. Almost all their position players are between
top 3 and top 10 at their position, they have a very solid top of the rotation
and mid rotation, and good to amazing relief pitching.

They'll compete with eight other teams to win baseball's championship, the
World Series. I'd put their chances around 22% of winning it all. But they're
far and away, clearly, the best team in baseball.

But that's why people watch. People don't gamble on Chess.

~~~
locopati
Furthermore, the contest is not skill-on-paper or skill-over-a-season, the
contest is skill-right-now. The NE Patriots won 18 straight American football
games (the only team to have an undefeated 16-game regular season), yet they
still had to try to win the Super Bowl. They came within a couple of minutes
of doing so until an improbable catch gave the Giants the chance to win the
game. As ESPN's Chris Berman once said, 'that's why they play the game.'

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dschobel
My biggest objection to this piece is the quantification of skill along one
axis, "the good scale".

A beat B, B beat C, A loses to C should tell you that there most be something
sophisticated going that your model isn't capturing.

American Football fans will surely remember when Vince Young was starting his
career with the Titans and all the commentators had this standard line "He
just wins games!" because his team was winning despite his terrible numbers.

This analysis doesn't strike me as any more substantial than that ridiculous
phrase.

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coliveira
One obvious problem with the approach taken is that soccer teams are not
static. They change from game to game. They can start playing badly and
improve during the competition, which could easily explain the observed
behavior.

Another problem is that soccer really has a level of randomness that is
considered a feature of the sport. We don't really expect that the best team
(in technical terms) always win. In Brazil, people commonly say that "soccer
is a little box full of surprises".

~~~
ovi256
Around Europe, we say : 'The ball is round and the game lasts 90 minutes. The
rest is all theory'.

This means, more or less, that there are so many unknowns that trying to
analyze the game is bullshit - just enjoy it. Even the quality of the grass
can change the game, or the humidity. But of course, sport journalists make a
living out of over-analyzing it.

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newsdog
All sports are like this - they try and eliminate it with multi game playoffs,
but you can't do that with intense games like this.

~~~
jimbokun
The NBA, NHL, and Major League Baseball do exactly that. They eliminate with
multi-game playoffs.

Or do you mean soccer's intensity is like American Football, in that it is
just too physically demanding to play that many games?

~~~
newsdog
Exactly - also the nba nhl etc with multi game playoffs LESSEN the prob of a
lesser team betting a better one - but it never goes away.

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oliveoil
I think that it is exactly because there is so much variance in the outcome of
soccer matches that the sport is so much more popular than any other sport
(here in Europe at least).

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chasingsparks
Link to the abstract (w/ PDF download):

<http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.4555>

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Deron
Italy 2006, Brazil 2002, France 1998, Brazil 1994, Germany 1990, Argentina
1986....

The end results do seem to favor the best teams.

The only people who don't recognize that are England fans, who routinely
overestimate their team anyway.

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miracle
It's called football not soccer.

~~~
newsdog
Correct. But we dumb North Americans need to make the distinction with the
weird violent USA game, which almost everyone in Canada cares about, myself
included.

Somehow, they convinced us it's important. I really want to know how they did
that.

~~~
hughprime
I'm sorry, that game is called "Grid Iron". The word "football" is reserved
for Rugby League.

(Not to be confused with Rugby Union, which is "rugby" or Australian Rules
Football, which is "footy". And definitely not soccer, which is "soccer".)

