I’ve read that book, and to be clear, their conclusion was half luck and half skill. The hundreds of millions being spent by elite clubs is an attempt to make that skill part as strong as they can.
That’s very nice, but the clubs are in fact businesses. If you want them not to act like businesses, I think you’ll do better arguing for some sort of legally mandated German-type system than you will demanding that club owners just keep ignoring their financial self-interest in the name of Tradition and Community.
Of course nobody is saying football is ENTIRELY or even mostly random, but it certainly seems obvious that the chance of a clearly less skilled team winning a particular football match is much greater than in, say, basketball. It’s not unusual to see lower division sides upsetting Premier League teams in the Cup competitions; it’s impossible to imagine any NBA team losing to a college or semi-pro team. Baseball is another sport that offers underdogs a relatively good shot in any one game. It doesn’t mean one sport is better or worse, it’s just a difference.
Man U has been attempting to be a world brand before Glazers were owners. At very least, I owned a computer soccer game in the early 90s where you played as Man U. I learned a lot of the names of the top squads in Europe by playing that game. I don’t know if England had moved away from home-grown microcomputers and were mostly using IBM compatibles such that the game might have sold well in England and just happened to get released in the US as well, but in earlier times, the game would have had to be ported to the typical US computer platform.
I remember that game as being one of those that was timed according to the computer’s processor speed, and thus you needed to have Turbo toggle button on the right setting for the game to run at the right speed. On a newer computer with Turbo on the wrong setting, it ran at an insanely fast speed.
I’m not aware of any competition being won by pure luck.
Individual games, sure.
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make with this. I do, in fact, favor the German model and, if I was a fan of an English club, I would want my club to spend all of its revenues on the betterment of the team. The fact that they are instead being operated as businesses for profit is exactly what I don’t want and what ManU fans don’t want either. That’s why they were protesting.
Have you read your article 
.
As for not being able to predict the World Cup… how well do experts do in college basketball’s March Madness?
Euro 2004?
That is obviously wrong. As we’ve noted upthread, and is plainly obvious from a brief examination of the league tables, European soccer leagues are extremely competitively imbalanced, much more so than North American pro sports leagues.
If the results of their games were highly random, that could not happen. EPL teams only play 38 league games a year; Bundesliga clubs only play 34, etc. If the games were more random than other sports then you couldn’t have the same handful of teams dominating year after year; the odds of that would be statistically beyond any probability of happening.
Not at all. The Greek style of play was clear and well executed if not exciting. They didn’t get lucky six times in a row.
They were surprising champions but football allows for technically less proficient teams to make progress if they are tactically or athletically more competent.
I also like the German system or some other structure that would keep teams from being used as cash cows for billionaires. My point is that that isn’t going to happen without some sort of political intervention. Street protests demanding that these clubs stop doing what they’re financially incentivized to do aren’t going to work. Fans can threaten to boycott the club, but from the owner’s POV, the club going completely bankrupt isn’t a worse outcome than the club having to operate as a nonprofit; both cut off their source of income. So falling revenues won’t persuade them to change course.
I’ve seen this claim about Football being a matter of chance from US centric sports commentators before, but that was some time ago.
At that time there had been quite a lot of publicity about the development of a US national soccer league which didn’t materialise as hoped.
Obviously there were plenty of US enthusiasts that had roots in Euro nations and also Mexico so it seemed there might be a lively soccer potential.
I also remember this same old hackneyed stereotyped argument on this message board, and its something that pops up from time to time in various guises, things such as US sports fans having the attention span of a gnat and cannot concentrate for a whole 45 minutes in one go, that soccer is somehow a girls sport - which in fairness it is a sport for all genders, unlike most of US sport and is actually to the credit of soccer.
The pro US field sport fans were saying that soccer looks so ‘random’ when in fact it demands a different sort of eye for detail than US sport, and soccer wasn’t athletic - the counter being that US sport is 15 seconds of action and then a huge break in which adverts may be squeezed, until someone pointed out that basketball is continuous and incredibly intense, and so all the pointless arguments went around in silly little circles.
…and now we get the same ignorant comments being made again - all received sporting ignorance, soccer is not a matter of chance but there is a random element a bit like the slugger has a remote chance in the boxing ring.
US sports fans like what they like - fair enough but don’t dig up ancient quote spouting the same old same old - we’ve heard it all before and it isn’t true - and if you have to dig up loads of ignorant quotes then it merely demonstrates your lack of knowledge and perhaps you should take those ill-educated opinions and put them in the jock protectors - you ain’t saying anything.
There is literally a citation in the thread that a significant part of soccer is random (want a number? according to one analysis, about 4%). Much of that is detailed in the book “The Numbers Game” (which for whatever reason is sitting right next to me at this moment, under my copy of “Das Reboot”), and I recommend reading at least the first chapter of that.
Yeah, whatever, how much soccer have you actually watched, and by that I mean at the highest level, not some kid girls teams haunted by soccer moms.
Heard it all before from US sports types, its a sort of colonial arrogance that these funny foreigners play a game that you don’t understand so you go to some crappy website to get your ‘evidence’ because you haven’t got the experience or expertise to evaluate the sport for yourself.
Its that dismissive attitude of US sports fans that gets right up the nose to be honest - I will be fair and also add that Soccer fans around the world also often take an ignorant and jaundiced view of US sport - where the top teams are champions of the world in a sport that no-one else plays - or wants to play.
Not interested in your hackneyed arguments at all, this is simply threadshitting - I get it, you don’t like soccer, this is a soccer thread - you don’t like it, then don’t comment on it - stick to sports you do like, or sports where you have some knowledge and expertise instead of spouting borrowed knowledge from a bunch of self proclaimed experts who also have extremely limited knowledge of the game.
Here are the facts - if soccer were a game of sheer chance do you genuinely believe top end credible organisations and businesses would be chancing their financial arms on signing up players for fees in excess of $150 millions? Really - use your logic either all those folk are idiots and yet have become billionaires, or your quotes are wring and your knowledge is lacking - in fact, please explain to us your extensive experience and knowledge of the game.
Are you a soccor coach? Have you played professionally? Are you a talent scout? Do you run book on soccer matches?
If not I would suggest you are lacking in knowledge.
Huh. Let’s see, soccer is my favorite sport, been a Bundesliga follower since the early 90s, was a Premier League follower for a while but stopped, have attended both PL and BL matches (Craven Cottage is still my favorite venue), have read loads of books on the topic, and as recently as two posts ago cited a book written by two professors, one a retired German keeper and one a former baseball player. But do go on.
Jesus Christ dude, what is the matter with you? Nobody is saying that soccer is completely random, just that the best team doesn’t always win. Why are you acting like someone pissed on your grandmother? Why do you assume Americans don’t like or understand soccer? You apparently don’t even know that we’ve had a pro league here for nearly thirty years!
But you’re American so you can’t possibly like or know anything about soccer. All you need to know about someone is their nationality, and then you know all about them. If you’re a bigot, anyway.
This thread is not about dumping on the sports fans of different nations, it’s about the Super League proposal. This deviation from the topic will cease at once.
RickJay
Moderator
They didn’t? After Euro 2004, they finished last in their Confederations Cup group, scoring 0 goals. And they failed to qualify for the 2006 World Cup. Their history prior to 2004 is nothing to write home about. Their Euro 2004 win was a lot of luck.
Neither before nor after matters. Teams wax and wane, particularly when your style is one-dimensional, in which a subset of individuals are pivotal and that can be counteracted by changes in opposition tactics.
What matters is how did they play in the 2004 tournament?
Did they not make the most of their limited pool of players and utilise a style that wasn’t pretty but worked. Were the rest of the teams not sub-par? Were they unable to break down Greece with regularity? Who else stood out?
I watched all the games of Euro 2004 and there is no doubt it was no classic. I’d argue that the way Greece played was ugly, boring and negative but hey, the world of football is littered with runs of success by motivated teams of limited players but with unity of purpose and with the ability to stick to a gameplan.