Football greed proposal - Euro Super League

The Game Room
221

Sure, but the comparison to basketball is still apt, I was just shortcutting the handwaved math. If you’re comparing basketball team A and basketball team B, and find that team A is x% better at possessing and also y% better at scoring given a chance, and then also compare two soccer teams with similar skill ratios, and the two soccer teams play a single game, and the two basketball teams play a single game, the “better” basketball team will win the game more often than the better soccer team does.

Similarly, if two soccer teams play a series of 15-minute games, and then a series of 10-hour games, it will be much less common for the worse team to win a 10-hour game than a 15-minute game. Because of how probabilities converge over time.

And that’s fine! It’s not an insult to soccer. It doesn’t make soccer a worse sport.

222

Not being familiar with typical soccer standings, I looked up this season’s English Premier League standings. The top team, Manchester City, finished 26-6-5 (using NFL style notation meaning 6 losses and 5 ties) for a .770 win rate. The bottom team, Sheffield United, finished 6-29-2 for a .167 win rate. In the NBA this season, the Utah Jazz finished with the best record at 52-20 for a .722 win rate. The Houston Rockets had the worst record at 17-55 for a 0.236 win rate. Based on these numbers, the NBA is more dependent on luck than the English Premier League. MLB is even more dependent on luck, the NFL less so. So compared to American sports, soccer as played in the EPL is less dependent on luck than MLB and the NBA, but more dependent on luck than the NFL.

223

We’re definitely getting off into “everything any of us says is probably wrong because none of us are expert statisticians” land here, but a few points:
(1) You’re assuming that the difference in quality between the best and worst EPL teams is the same as the difference in quality between the best and worst NFL/NBA/MLB teams. Which I don’t see any reason to assume. Particularly given the difference in salary caps/etc (at which point my ability to meaningfully comment comes screeching to a halt).
(2) I think you’re also not understanding how extremely simple this argument is. Suppose you took the best and worst EPL teams, and they played a competitive match. What odds would the bookmakers give that the better team would win? Now instead of playing a single soccer match they play one mammoth marathon (with break periods) until 160 total goals have been scored. NOW what odds would the bookmakers give? MUCH higher for the better team to win. Alternatively, let’s have best and worst basketball teams play. Now lets have them play a super short game where they stop after only three baskets have been scored. How does that change the odds?

Obviously not a perfect analogy, yada yada yada, but I’m quite confident that the argument is fundamentally sound.

224

I’m not sure, what qualifies as an expert statistician? I spent a career fitting mathematical distributions/doing machine learning, or training/leading the people who did it…so I have some knowledge.

I’ve mentioned a few times the book The Numbers Game, so I got that out to look at their “soccer is 50% luck” chapter. They cited some studies & their own work, with three main types of analysis:

  • Looking at how predictive betting lines are for the various sports (short answer: soccer is the worst by far…again, as everyone points out, the scoring is so low it makes sense).
  • A professor at the Technical University of Munich and his team looked at video of more than 2.500 goals and coded them as lucky or not, with luck being funny bounces, deflections off players, rebounds off the bar, etc, and arrived at 44% “luck/random” as their number. I have mixed feelings about this one - on one hand, it’s subjective; one the other hand, they’d have to have some strange, massive bias to reduce that number a lot.
  • Finally, a handful of other studies used approaches of something called Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to look at the proportion of results that was random. The basic approach is to first calculate theoretical variance if all teams were equal, and then compare that to the actual variance of results. This is a standard approach in stats textbooks, and the one I feel most comfortable with. One study looked at a single year of the Premier League and arrived at 26% luck; another much larger one looked at decades of results across leagues and got closer to 50%.

None of this takes at all away from the game. But on a day when I watched a keeper after a heroic 89.5 minutes have a ball bounce off his gloves to the feet of Robert Lewandowski, I do have a lot of faith in luck. :slight_smile: -

225

Greece’s win was absolutely lucky. Even if you don’t want to get deep into it, they only advanced from the group on a tiebreaker.

Let’s say that Dr. Strange used the time stone to watch 14 million iterations of Euro 2004 instead of 14 million possible futures. Surely Greece doesn’t win all of those, right? It’s probably not a leap to say they won’t win a majority. If you argue, and I would, that they wouldn’t even get a plurality, then it was a lucky win. Hell, if they played enough iterations so that the final win numbers converged to true probabilities I’d be shocked if Portugal, Spain, England, France, Italy, and the Netherlands all didn’t have more wins than Greece. Probably the Czech Republic and Germany too.

They were a mediocre team that played to their strengths and parked the bus every game. If that increased their odds from 5% to 10%, then it’s great tactics and playing extremely well for their squad, but it was still lucky.

226

Point 1 explains this extremely well. The amount of parity in all the big US sports is much much greater than in any of the big 5 leagues in Europe. Yearly payroll of Sheffield is ~20M. For Man City it’s ~140M. 7x.

Jazz to Rockets is 133M to 129M. Looking at a handful of other teams and the highest and lowest were ~170M and 95M. Nowhere near the disparity in pay.

227

North American leagues also have amateur drafts, which adds an additional parity mechanic that isn’t reflected at all in salary differences.

228

Depends on rookie salary restrictions, no? If they’re paid a market rate, then it is reflected. I seem to recall in the NFL there’s a bit of a discount vs what you would expect a salary to be based on production, but I may be misremembering and that might not hold for other sports.

The fact that small market teams can afford them is a huge difference, due to more equitable profit sharing.

229

Umm…duh? But scoring is so rare that very often, wasting a few of those chances is enough to change the result. Maybe if you watch more games you will see this.

Right. Acknowledging that there is a fair amount of luck is a game isn’t an insult to the game. Baseball has far more luck, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

230

If it wasn’t for the possibility of luck intervening, few of us would ever watch a Man City - Southampton match.

231

It always amuses me that so many red-blooded, freedumb-loving 'Merkins who rail against socialism fervently support a league that practices income-redistribution, progressive taxation, and welfare, in the pursuit of equity. Guess those are more palatable when you call them revenue-sharing, luxury tax, draft picks, and parity.

232

Tons of those 'Mericans (I won’t compare them to pubic wigs, at least for this post) support small market teams who benefit greatly from all that socialism. It’s the same as the political realm; they full-throatedly endorse the policy when it benefits them and is to the detriment of those who live in larger urban areas on the coast.

233

You will have noted that I have not logged on SD since this post, I decided that my outburst was a sign of being over invested in Social Media and as a result I decided to keep away from it for a month. I hope you will accept this as a self recognition.

I probably would not have logged on for rather longer, but I have something that may be worthwhile to this subject - which I will put into the main body of this thread.

234

Having stayed away from this thread, and indeed the whole of SD for the last number of weeks as a cooling down period, I have not kept up with things here so apologies if I happen to repeat anything that has been posted during the interim - however it is unlikely that I will since this post relates to something else that might need to be considered.

Firstly - if there are any UK posters in this thread, they might have seen a tv show on Channel 4 called " Footballs addiction to gambling" - this was broadcast on 7th June 2021.

I invite you to register with the Chan 4 website and watch it online, that’s because it seems to me to be something of an AHA! moment.

This show was made as part of making the public aware of the UK gambling review of gambling which is reviewed periodically and is due for the latest round of scrutiny from the previous occasion some 20 years ago.

The results of this review are likely to inform any changes to legislation or codes of practice for the next generation.

Suddenly it seems to me you can make loads of connections between the Euro Super League and the motivational force behind it, and why grassroots support has not been considered.

The show exposes the sheer saturation of online gambling advertising, at one relatively minor Premier League match featuring Newcastle around 750 advertising exposures were noted during the game - on hoardings around the pitch, on team shirts, on coach and staff clothing.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about that exposure to online gambling is that at least 50% of it is not in any European language, its mostly in the far East, furthermore in languages from nations where gambling is actually outlawed - such as Thailand and China.

The way online sports gambling has changed is startling, the result is only incidental to the gambling companies, although of course many supporters will gamble on their own teams - put bluntly, the only reason these games are played for the online gambling companies is to produce events that can be measured and generate odds with a certain amount of randomiser - that’s it.

The only reason that the top teams are courted for huge sponsorship is merely to deliver a brand name to punters around the world - the idea of leagues, tournaments even winning and losing are utterly irrelevant to them except as way of generating gambling products - such as timing of goals, number of red cards, identity of players scoring, number of corners or penalties or whatever.

Once you realise that as far as online gambling companies are concerned football is just an event generator then the idea of having those high profile club names as ‘go to’ destinations for gambling online becomes far more obvious - in fact the very worst thing as far as they are concerned is to have promotion and relegation because it can affect the branding of the gambling product.

If you are Barcelona or Juventos etc playing in leagues where there is little genuine competition, then generating online gambling revenue starts to look a lot more appealing - the fans in the terraces are meaningless to the owners of these clubs, the competition is meaningless because they are so self entitled successful that they can never envisage being anything other than at the top of their leagues.

The point is to create an audience of addicts, not fans.

Obviously governments take a significant amount of tax revenue, lots of clubs - notably the mid to lower table clubs find this sponsorship makes up a larger proportion of their budget, without which they would struggle to find the resources to contract the players that might help them compete with the top 10 clubs in the league.

I seem to recall that US or at least many states have banned online gambling, in the UK betting companies such as Bet365 and Paddypower have made their presence felt hugely in advertising, but as I say, worth noting that much of the advertising actually as the matches is not in English, its in the language of nations where the gambling markets are burgeoning, I seriously doubt that nations such as China and Thailand have truly understood how much their own anti-gambling laws are now being undermined by online betting - sooner or later I expect they will and that will lead to interesting times.

235

I mean, it’s not socialism, it’s an association of businesses doing what they think is best for business. Funny joke and all, but I hope everyone realizes that as a commentary on reality, it doesn’t make any sense.

236

It is only not “socialism” because it relates to an activity rather than a wider society but the principles are absolutely the same.
Collective decisions, collective agreements, redistributions, safety nets etc.

237

The point of socialism is that it’s how the state and economy are organized, and stands in opposition to free markets and private ownership of the means of production.

If you start calling any sort of business cooperation “socialism” then the word ceases to have any meaningful purpose in language. All businesses involve cooperation, or else they wouldn’t function.

238

I said it wasn’t socialism but that the principles are the same.

239

American sports are socialism wrapped inside a cartel.

240

Then deep-fried and served with a choice of dipping sauces. USA! USA!