This is the question! If you really want to, you can make a case for there being no such thing as luck at all in football: The reason you get free kicks is you put yourself in the best position; the reason you benefit from another team's loss is that you won enough other games to be thereabouts, etc, etc.
Yep.This is the question! If you really want to, you can make a case for there being no such thing as luck at all in football: The reason you get free kicks is you put yourself in the best position; the reason you benefit from another team's loss is that you won enough other games to be thereabouts, etc, etc.
But as a guy who runs stats on football teams for fun, I am struck by how often football numbers look random, or at least like a normal distribution:
Why is it so hard to reliably tip at better than about 70%? Why is it that people who don't know much about football tip with a similar success rate to people who study it a lot? How can Sydney enter the 2014 Grand Final as mild favourites and lose by 10 goals? In 2014, how does 18th-placed St Kilda beat 2nd-placed Fremantle 118 to 60?
Maybe:
1. There are hidden factors that most people can't see or account for, even indirectly, which strongly influence the outcome of football games. But with full information, you could, for example, predict that the dodgy pasta Pavlich ate the night before Round 18, 2014, would cost Fremantle three goals.
or else:
2. Football has a lot of randomness baked in, which no-one can predict even with full information.
In practice, these might actually be the same thing. For example, it might be that the mood of each player before a match is an important factor, but even if you measured everyone's emotional state, it would still be too difficult to calculate how they all might combine on the field. So while in theory it's knowable, in practice it's unpredictable. I'd call all this "luck," i.e. anything that's unpredictable even to a well-informed observer. Yes, putting yourself in the best position to win free kicks is skill, but that's not the whole story, not even close. A lot of the rest is luck.
And while a lot of life is like this, football seems especially random. It seems extremely random. Which is by design, of course: Who wants to watch predictable matches? But if that's true, it means that a lot of football analysis is finding patterns in white noise, inventing meaning where there's none.
This is the question! If you really want to, you can make a case for there being no such thing as luck at all in football: The reason you get free kicks is you put yourself in the best position; the reason you benefit from another team's loss is that you won enough other games to be thereabouts, etc, etc.
But as a guy who runs stats on football teams for fun, I am struck by how often football numbers look random, or at least like a normal distribution:
Why is it so hard to reliably tip at better than about 70%? Why is it that people who don't know much about football tip with a similar success rate to people who study it a lot? How can Sydney enter the 2014 Grand Final as mild favourites and lose by 10 goals? In 2014, how does 18th-placed St Kilda beat 2nd-placed Fremantle 118 to 60?
Maybe:
1. There are hidden factors that most people can't see or account for, even indirectly, which strongly influence the outcome of football games. But with full information, you could, for example, predict that the dodgy pasta Pavlich ate the night before Round 18, 2014, would cost Fremantle three goals.
or else:
2. Football has a lot of randomness baked in, which no-one can predict even with full information.
In practice, these might actually be the same thing. For example, it might be that the mood of each player before a match is an important factor, but even if you measured everyone's emotional state, it would still be too difficult to calculate how they all might combine on the field. So while in theory it's knowable, in practice it's unpredictable. I'd call all this "luck," i.e. anything that's unpredictable even to a well-informed observer. Yes, putting yourself in the best position to win free kicks is skill, but that's not the whole story, not even close. A lot of the rest is luck.
And while a lot of life is like this, football seems especially random. It seems extremely random. Which is by design, of course: Who wants to watch predictable matches? But if that's true, it means that a lot of football analysis is finding patterns in white noise, inventing meaning where there's none.
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It's funny you mention that.
Not in Melbourne.
Right! And what's interesting is how you can get predictable patterns out of complete randomnesss. For example, imagine a footballer who takes 10 set shots each day and the number of goals he kicks is purely random. Might be 0, might be 10, might be 3... each number is equally likely as the other. That's not realistic at all, because we know in real life he should have a lot more days of 7 or 8 goals than 0 or 10, like in your Gunston example.
Your luck is better than mine. I couldn't get anything but a Geelong win at 10% luck after 20 attempts. Even difficult at 15%.
Wow, that's a good one. Geelong have a real shocker, getting on the wrong end of huge turnarounds in two vital games, losing by 1pt to Hawthorn in extra time in the first final and then to Carlton by 2pts the next week to go out in straight sets.
I mean technically its 90% skill though right
Took me 27 minutes and about 100 attempts, but yes Hawthorn can win the 2009 premiership with 52% luck.
