Measure for Measure, what are you trying to say? That winning in football is so random that there is no clear difference between favourites and underdogs?
If that’s the case, how do you explain that of all the nations who participated in the World Cup only a handful have won it, and some repeatedly (Uruguay and Argentina twice, Germany three times, Italy four times, Brazil five times)?
And if you look at the all-time table, the big three, Brazil, Germany and Italy, gather far more points and score far more often than the other nations: Brazil shot 201 goals during 18 World Cups, Germany 190 in 16 (the stats are constantly updated on the side, so you will see their scoring go up during the next weeks, well, I very much hope so).
The better teams usually score more, win more games and have a much better chance to win the tournament than the other teams. I am pretty sure, the same is true for the traditional American sports.
If the link doesn’t work, here is another table but in German:
Who gives a fuck what the authors speculate? Unless they’re doing similar studies on other sports, their paper and their conclusions are worthless.
As I already pointed out, any randomness inherent to the World Cup is due to the knockout tournament structure, which is itself a product of the limited time frame.
There were only 6,000 tickets sold to English fans for the match, so you wouldn’t have heard them anyway in a 40,000 seat stadium.
Well, it should be “everyone jump on the ball”, but it’s actually, “first guy tries to scoop ball up and run with it instead of just diving on it, and 9 times out of 10 winds up batting it back to the other team, and then everyone jumps on the ball”.
England fans have perfected the “buy only a small number of tickets beforehand but flood the entire hosting country with fans leading up to the game” strategy. There’d have been far more than 6000 England fans in that stadium.
Did you watch the match? The English contingent was definitely less than a quarter of the stadium. It’s not that surprising; England supporters travel well to European venues, but quite poorly anywhere else.
I think it’s a shame that a fantastic word like vuvuzela (my early pick for word of the year) is associated with these things. If this is part of South African culture or whatever, they should pick a better element to highlight. They make some great music there but instead of that, they’re giving the world stadiums full of constant fucking buzzing no matter what’s happening in the game.
It might have been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but is there any viewership data that tells whether the vuvuzela is having an effect on TV ratings?
Our apartment was broken into a few months ago, and one of the things my wife has done in response is leave the TV on ESPN during the day (with the idea that a potential burgler would hear sports, think “there’s a guy here”, and move on. No idea if it works, but it keeps her happy).
Regardless, we’ve had to change the station because the buzzing was apparently making my dog skittish (she’s a small black dog descended from the N. UK, so I guess that makes her a Skittish Terrier). We didn’t realize this until we turned on the WC this past weekend, heard the buzzing, and our dog just starting barking and snarling at the TV.
I’m going to have to retract my previous support of the buzzing. It is much louder than I originally thought.
That is 4 times louder than a referee’s whistle and it doesn’t stop. I imagine it must be pretty difficult to play under those conditions, not to mention the permanent hearing damage it is causing.
I’ve only skimmed the paper: I certainly have not studied it. So take this with a does of salt:
In english: No, they are not assuming that team quality is constant per season. They are assuming that a variable which they call quality is constant. Think of it this way:
Team strength = Background strength (constant each season) + game-by-game strength.
Really, “Quality” is just average strength across a given season, while “Fitness” picks up variation from match to match within a season. The point though is that the fitness effect is washed out by the sheer randomness inherent in low-scoring games.
All the thrills of a wet blanket!
Fair question. My understanding is that Tier 2 teams basically never win. I suspect that the author would argue though that among Tier 1 teams, the odds that the best team triumphs is …28%. It may be true that the World Cup is only delivered to one of the 6 or 8 best teams. But that doesn’t contradict Skinner’s point.
No, in their paper their speculation took the form of a recommendation for further work. In my post, their speculation was intended as heuristic: by comparing other sports, you get a better idea of what they were saying about soccer.
I should probably end this hijack here. Those wishing to discuss it can visit the game thread, Trying to like soccer.
