There’s no point denying that Greece’s win was flukey. They played well but it was still a fluke, but that’s kind of the point; the fact it WAS a fluke proves soccer isn’t random. If soccer was random, no one would have noted how odd it was that Greece won, because there would be nothing odd about it. It wouldn’t have come up in this thread. A Greece win would have been no more remarkable than a win by Germany. You’d go into every major tournament just assuming Greece or Lithuania was as likely to win as Germany or Spain.
But that is obviously NOT true; most major tournaments are won by major soccer powers. There hasn’t been a Greece type side that won the World Cup in my lifetime, and I’m no young gun anymore. Most top level leagues are only slightly less predictable than a clock.
What about Leicester City? They finished 14th in the Premier League, then won it, then finished 12th, 9th and 9th. Another team that had luck on their side.
All sports have an element of luck. Some more than others. Baseball knows this, that’s why they play 162 games and their playoffs are best of 7. Soccer has a pretty big luck element, probably due to its low scoring nature. Sure, most competitions have winners that are among the best teams in the competition. League play has enough games that it will mostly wash out the luck. Tournaments will usually have one of the best teams win, but single game elimination means that there is a pretty big element of luck involved. You will never convince me that I’m '78 that Argentina was a better team than Holland.
You are kind of missing quite a major reason Leicester declined so quickly after winning the league. His name is N’golo Kante, arguably the best central midfielder of our generation.
Does soccer have some randomness and luck, of course. Is it more than other sports? I’m not convinced. For every Greece winning Euro 2004 you have the 2006 St Louis Cardinals. Playoffs create interesting runs. And of course in other sports teams have gone from worst to first and back in quick manner (the Minnesota Twins of the early 1990s come to mind).
Ah yes, the mighty Orange machine who showed their overwhelming superiority in the first round through a close run defeat to the footballing powerhouse of Scotland, battled to a 0-0 draw against the titans of Peru and then finally ran riot against the historically impressive and fearsome Iran.
No idea why you would insult US soccer, given that it our national team is by far the best in the history of the sport.
Oh, wait, did you forget that women play soccer as well as men?
Anyhow, it’s entirely possible that both the both of the following statements are true:
(a) Greece at 2004 Euros put together a brilliant strategy that absolutely maximized their odds of winning given the strengths of their players, and executed that strategy incredibly well, with their players absolutely rising to the occasion; and they deserved their win for any reasonable definition of the word “deserve”
(b) Greece got very lucky to win 2004 Euros, and their win was flukey
It’s a tricky question… sports in general is a weird mixture of skill and luck in a way that our general concepts don’t always cover easily. For instance, take a game of basketball where Michael Jordan hits a game winning shot. He’s obviously one of the GOATs, an incredibly skilled player who worked incredibly hard to be as good as he is. At the same time, there’s no spot on the floor more than 5 feet from the basket from which he literally shoots 100%. So maybe there’s a particularly tough under-time-pressure fade-away from near the 3-point line, and the other team denies him an easier shot. Maybe he’s 50% to hit that shot, under pressure, with the game on the line, whereas most other even HOF-level basketball players would only be 30% or 40%. It’s absolutely pure skill that his percentage is as high as it is. And yet there’s still a coin flip. He still needs to “get lucky” for the shot to go in.
But it sounds just ludicrously insulting to say that he “got lucky” when it happens.
Similarly, if you went back in time and re-ran Euro 2004 1000 times with the same teams and same matchups and everything, does Greece win 100% of the time? 50% of the time? I think you’d be hard pressed to argue they’d win even 25% of the time. They got themselves as well-marshalled and well-organized and well-playing as any tiny-underdog-seeming team ever realistically could going into a big international tournament. So their likelihood of winning was, I dunno, 1 in 10; rather than then 1 in 10000 that a non-big-name team would normally have going into Euros. And full credit to them for working so hard and being so good… but they still had to “get lucky” to a pretty ridiculous degree to actually win.
(And note that the same can basically be said even for a heavy favorite… how often is there a 32-team international tournament when the most-favored team is even 25% to win? And if you’re 25% to win, then 75% of the time you will NOT win. So… you have to “get lucky”.)
I can’t disagree with those odds nor with your thoughtful post in general, I guess the way you are using “lucky” merely encapsulates the sort of intangible luck that all successes need rather than the luck that suggests a random act of god.
And just thinking further, a better example of truly lucky tournament winners might be Denmark in '92.
They weren’t good enough to qualify by right but had rely on civil war in Yugoslavia to gain a place at the last moment.
That’s what I’d consider lucky (but then when they did get there they did play well)
But is there really a difference? I mean, some things “look” much luckier than others. If we play a game of basketball and your star “gets hot” and just sinks a bunch of “normal” looking shots in a row, but to an extent that is a significant statistical outlier, and then we end up winning the game on a freakish full point heave at the buzzer… did we get “luckier” than you?
Like I said… it’s an issue that is tricky to discuss without seeming to be dismissive of genuine skill.
Well you were good enough to be in such a position at the end of the game regardless of the incredible streak of the other team and that closeness probably wasn’t a result of ongoing luck. (confession, I don’t know what a “full point heave” is)
I mean, is a hole-in-one “lucky”? A topped iron that hits the stick at 90mph and drops dead in the hole certainly is. However, consider a beautifully flighted 8 iron that is bang on target, bounces, grips and spins back into the hole. Still some luck involved for sure but seeing as the player executed it exactly as intended that result doesn’t deserve the label “lucky” in the same way.
Whoops, I meant “full court heave”. Like, throwing the ball the length of the basketball court into the basket. Something that even the best basketball players can’t even pretend to do consistently.
I full court basketball shot or a hole in one is clearly “lucky” in a way that is much more visible than someone consistently overperforming their baseline expectation to an extent that is equally statistically unlikely.
But back to the question of “does soccer have a lot of luck”… I think that because soccer is so low scoring, the results of any single soccer game are more likely to be determined by “luck” (with all the previous discussed caveats) than a game of basketball. Suppose team A is 10% more likely to score on any given attempt than team B. If teams A and B play a game of soccer, and there are only 10 serious scoring attempts per team over the course of the game, and the likelihoods of scoring per attempt are .1 and .11, then the odds of team B winning are quite robust. If they’re playing basketball, and there are 100 serious scoring attempts per team per game, and the likelihoods of scoring per attempt are .5 and .55… then the likelihood of team B winning is TINY, even though the “difference in skill” between the teams in soccer vs basketball is the same. (Obviously I massively overgeneralized a lot of things here.)
And I don’t think that sort of analysis (at least when done right by serious boffins) diminishes or insults soccer as a sport.
Exactly. This seems so self evident to me that it’s weird that there’s push back against it. Maybe it’s the knee jerk defensiveness that many soccer fans have when they hear criticism of the sport as too low scoring.
Right. But this may be the knee jerking I mentioned above. I’m a big fan, but think that a bit more scoring would make the sport even better. But soccer fans have been so hammered my low scoring criticisms that they can get pretty sensitive to any suggestion that more goals are needed.
But it’s not self evident because that example operates on the assumption that both teams get the same number of scoring chances.
I mean, have you ever watched soccer? The biggest difference, by FAR, between a superior team and an inferior team is that the superior team dominates control of the ball and gets way more scoring chances.
I’m not sure this is necessarily true in terms of expected goals per chance.
Consider a team that’s putting eight behind the ball against a technically superior team. They might give up 25 shots in a game, but if these shots are generally out of the area, taken at narrow angles to the goalmouth, or played off crosses at speed, the goals they give up might be considered comparatively “lucky.” On their offensive end, though, they might get a small handful of real chances over the course of the game and have the same amount of expected goals over the course of 90 minutes. It’s been called “the right of the weak” in Inverting the Pyramid. The inferior team can get fewer rolls of the dice but at better odds through tactics and team organization.
So in some circumstances, the weaker team can play tactically in a way that enhances its overall chances.
Of course, betting on the inferior team is still rather foolish - but over 90 minutes they will sometimes make it work. And if, say, Greece puts together four of those 90-minute performances in a Euro 2004 final, they get a very nice cup for their display case.
Or consider a team which is superior but not decisively so. If they go up a goal in the first half, they might well assume a defensive stance against the inferior team both to burn the clock and to free up their own counterattackers to have better chances against a team that is pushing more of its own players into the attack to try to equalize. In that case, “better team == more possession” is not necessarily the rule.