Football

by Stephen Mumford

  Such analyses, I believe, fail to grasp what sport is all about. A clue is to be found in the title of Skinner and Freeman’s paper cited above, which is ‘Soccer Matches as Experiments: How Often Does the “Best” Team Win?’ Football matches are not experiments to see how often the best team wins, nor, contrary to Kretchmar’s view, was a game flawed if the strongest team did not win. Sporting contests generally, and football matches in particular, are not just about determining which is the strongest side, nor should they be about arranging things to ensure that the stronger team can be guaranteed to triumph. Sport can give us so much more, including when it shows us that victory is sometimes possible against the odds. It seems plausible also that football would be not nearly so entertaining unless this were possible. Suppose the inconsistent triplets were 0% of the cases. Then when A has beaten B, and B has beaten C, what possible interest would A versus C be to anyone? Whether you support team A or C, it would be hard to get excited about it.

  A further comparison with rugby is relevant here. In 1998 I was becoming a bit curious about Rugby League again. I was born in a rugby city that had no football team and I had seen a few rugby games but without ever being gripped. I noticed, however, that Dewsbury, a small-town, second-tier team, had drawn the mighty Wigan in the knock-out Challenge Cup, so I went along out of curiosity. Being a football fan, I had some hopes of seeing the smaller club put on a show and give their illustrious visitors a right good game. The hopes were dashed. Wigan ran out winners by 56–0. Within minutes, I could see that it was a no-contest and it quickly became one of the dullest sporting exhibitions I’ve seen. Among the eight other Fifth Round ties that weekend, there were results of 78–0, 6–48 and 84–6. The problem was that there were no giantkillings. A small difference in ability can translate into a huge difference in score in rugby, and that’s boring. Because football is low scoring, and results can hinge on just a few key moments, everyone has a chance. Rugby League is a great sport with a rich sporting heritage, and the games between evenly balanced sides can be exciting. But it’s just not football.

  Out of control?

  Unpredictable results are possible in football because players and coaches lack complete control over all that happens. A shot can hit the crossbar and fall down on the line. It could then, depending on the spin, bounce forward and over the line or backwards and out. The player taking the shot does not have mastery over determining which of these two outcomes occurs. It is doubtful that the striker was aiming to hit the crossbar in the first place, even though a player might aim for just inside the post or bar. No one would aim to score specifically via the bar and goal line, with forward spin taking the ball in, for such a shot would be impossible to execute reliably. Most likely, when this happens, the striker was aiming away from the goalkeeper but inside the goal and the shot was not precise enough to avoid it hitting the bar. The difference in outcome between these two possibilities, once the ball bounces on the line, is potentially huge and could certainly be game changing. When the ball bounces on the line and comes out, it could be caught by the keeper or cleared by a defender. When it goes in, it’s as much a goal as any other. Outcomes can turn on these fine margins over which the players have little or no control, and in a low-scoring game such as football, it can be the difference between victory and defeat.

  We should be clear what we mean by chance, since this plays such a crucial role in the unpredictability of outcomes. Let us say, then, that chance is where there are at least two possible, significantly different outcomes where no one has any substantial control over which of these outcomes occurs. Long passes, blocks and corner kicks all have an element of chance. A good player can play a long pass more accurately than a novice, but it is still only in a rough direction. Think, for example, of a player trying to land a ball on the centre spot from out wide on the wing. We would expect a professional to be able to get it fairly close but still with a margin of error of a few metres. The problem is that if the ball leaves the boot just a few degrees away from the intended angle of impact, over a 50-metre distance this can translate to missing the centre spot by a number of metres. Blocks and tackles can introduce a large element of chance, especially when they occur near to goal and result in the ball unexpectedly changing direction. In the 2018 World Cup group stages, we saw a number of goals scored in this chancy way. Diego Costa scored for Spain against Iran, for instance, when an attempted clearance was kicked against his knee and went in the bottom left of the goal in a direction the goalkeeper didn’t foresee. Similarly, Sadio Mane scored for Senegal against Japan when the goalkeeper’s low punch rebounded straight back off the striker’s knee. Harry Kane scored his hat-trick goal against Panama without even knowing about it as a shot simply deflected off his heel when he was running across the 18-yard line. Paul Pogba was initially credited with a goal that turned out to be doubly lucky for France. As he was trying to control the ball, Australia’s Aziz Behich attempted a clearance that unintentionally looped towards the goal. It then hit the crossbar but fell a centimetre or two over the goal line. None of these goals was under the control of their scorers. Neither Costa, Mane, nor Kane was even attempting shots and Behich was aiming to clear. Yet two of these goals were match-winners, and another contributed to a 2–2 draw. When a chance event, over which players have no substantial control, works out in your favour in a significant way, we say it is luck. When it works out against you, we call it bad luck.

  There is plenty that the players cannot control. Consider a penalty kick. The penalty taker chooses whether to hit the ball left, right or down the middle. The kick scores only if the goalkeeper guesses wrong and doesn’t get to it. Clearly the striker has little or no control over which way the goalkeeper dives (there might be some control since there are no rules against deceiving the keeper, such as looking one way and then shooting the other). Similarly, the goalkeeper makes a choice whether to dive left, right or remain upright. To save the kick, the ball has to be shot within a reachable direction and, similarly, the keeper has no control over where the kicker shoots. There is skill in both penalty taking and penalty goalkeeping. The taker should at least get it on target, for instance. But whether a goal is scored is an outcome over which no one can claim complete control.

  There is no shortage of other instances of luck playing a role. There are blocks and ricochets in key areas, there are spinning balls that change direction unexpectedly, and there is sunlight that blinds the goalkeeper just as a shot is coming. Paul Peschisolido scored for Derby against Nottingham Forest in 2004 when the ball took an unexpected bounce off a plastic coffee cup that had blown on to the pitch just as the keeper was about to kick clear. Then, in 2009, Darren Bent scored an infamous deflected goal for Sunderland that went in off a supporter’s beach ball that had strayed into the goal mouth, entirely deceiving Liverpool goalkeeper Pepe Reina. Final score: 1–0.

  This last example raises another category that is beyond the players’ control, namely the decisions of the referee. A player cannot control what the others do, but nor can they control the referee’s choices. When Darren Bent’s shot hit the beach ball, the referee should have stopped play and re-started with a drop-ball, since the beach ball was an outside interference. But this is a rare incident in football and the referee made a mistake. The 2018 World Cup was the first in which use was made of VAR (video assistant referee) technology, which minimized the chance of certain types of refereeing mistakes. But it was used only for certain categories of decision, namely penalty awards and red card offences. The rest was still at the discretion of the referee. And even some of the penalties remained debated. VAR was indecisive in the awards of Iran’s penalty against Portugal and France’s against Croatia in the Final, since judgement and interpretation are still required. There will be borderline cases that remain indeterminate, no matter how many times they are seen, so opinions cannot be eradicated from the game. It has to be pointed out too that it is only the elite level of the game that can afford VAR and goal-line technol
ogy. Most football matches are dependent upon technologically unassisted decisions, which are crucial not just for penalty awards but also for offside calls, where goals can be scored or chalked off.

  It is clear that there are simply too many variables for any player, spectator or pundit to calculate and reliably predict the outcome of some particular incident or final score in advance. Even if football were a game of simple geometrical calculation, a bit like snooker, and all physical movements of the ball and players were entirely deterministic matters, so much of what happens in the game is down to individual choices of the players, coaches and officials. There is as yet no remotely plausible account of the mind in physically deterministic terms that would allow a physicist to predict individuals’ decisions. We have to assume that no one has full control over what happens in football.

  What’s the advantage in being the best?

  Skinner and Freeman were right that football is full of chance. But it is not entirely full. If results were entirely predictable, there would be little interest in them. But if results were entirely unpredictable, that would be no better. Coin tossing would make a poor spectator sport, as would any other game of pure chance. We don’t need that the best team always wins, but we want at least that the best teams will tend to win, otherwise it would not be a proper sporting contest of skill and effort. It would not be a contest at all.

  We must insist that being the best team cannot be determined solely by whether that team wins the game or not. This would make ‘being the best team’ explanatorily redundant, since it would be only true by definition that the best team was the one that won. We call this a trivial explanation: A was better than B since A beat B and beating a team is what it means to be better than them. The problem with treating the matter as trivial, in this way, is that being a better side should be a possible explanation of why a weaker side was beaten and such an explanation cannot be merely in terms of a definition.

  Victories are explicable in terms of one side having better skill, strength, speed and tactics than the other. These things – let us call them the sporting excellences of football – provide game advantages to the better team. We could interpret a game of football as a contest between the two sides’ relative sporting excellences. These excellences will be specific to football. They are the athletic virtues that tend towards success. Height is an essential advantage in basketball but not always in football, since some roles are best filled by players with a low centre of gravity. And speed is an advantage in football but not in weightlifting.

  Nevertheless, I am very deliberately saying only that the sporting excellences ‘tend’ to success. What exactly a tendency means is something that is often misunderstood, both in sport and in philosophy. A tendency is no guarantee of something happening. There is a tendency if there is a better than pure chance possibility of it happening, though. Thus, it is true that struck matches tend to light. It is perfectly possible to strike a match and it doesn’t light: for instance, if there is a gust of wind at the time. But struck matches often do light, whereas they have no tendency to evaporate or dissolve. Similarly, a team with relatively greater footballrelated sporting excellence than another will tend to beat that side. There is no guarantee that they will, since the weaker side might get lucky, in some way, or they might manifest their excellences better during the 90 minutes of play. It is one thing to have a skill, for instance, but another thing to manifest it. Lionel Messi is considered one of the most skilful players in the current game, but when Argentina lost miserably 3–0 to Croatia in the 2018 World Cup, he never really manifested any of it. Messi was one of the top five players in the world, but ineffective in this instance. Why it’s easy to manifest skills in one game and not in another is something the coaches of players will ponder, but one obvious answer is opportunity. A striker might have an expert skill at scoring free kicks from 25 metres. A good defensive option is to give no such free kicks away.

  There is no necessity in the strongest team winning, therefore, but a tendency means more than that it has the mere possibility of winning. If the same two teams played each other over and over again, it would be rational to expect the best team to win more times than the weaker team (again, we will avoid treating this trivially, as true by definition). In a one-off encounter, however, such as a knock-out cup competition, the weaker team has a chance and can produce a surprise result. A full league season thus seems ‘fairer’ in the sense that there are enough sporting encounters for the stronger team’s tendency to win, to display itself. A weak team might fluke one win, but it is unlikely to fluke 38 of them. Whether you prefer to see league matches or knock-out games is up to you.

  The optimum balance

  The Otago philosopher David Ward once said to me that a good sport would have the optimum balance between skill and luck. I think that football has it. There are too many factors for anyone to control to ensure that skill will always win the day. If it did, it would be boring to see that the stronger team always prevailed. It is a mistake to think that the alternative to this is pure chance, however. That would be just as boring to watch. There is plenty of luck in football, but it is not all luck. The fact that 17% of triplets are inconsistent is not a game flaw. Instead it can be considered as just one quantitative marker of the balance between skill and luck in football. If that figure were 25%, the game would be all luck and no skill. If it were 0%, the game would be all skill and no luck. The fact that football is the world’s most popular spectator sport tells us that a figure of 17% might be just about right: the most interesting, the most entertaining, the optimum balance.

  That we want such a balance is revealing. Either to play or watch, we want sports in which everyone has a chance. Why bother playing if you have no chance? Why bother training and practising if it does not increase your likelihood of victory? Sport is for both the winners and the losers. Both have to get something from it. It has to be worth all the effort. This can only be explained if we accept that the better teams have a tendency – but no more than a tendency – to win. Tendencies can come in degrees, of course. The 2018 Manchester City side will have had a much stronger tendency to beat Accrington Stanley, for instance, than they will have had to beat Arsenal. You would not rate Accrington’s chances very highly, even in a one-off contest, but it is still worth it for them to turn up and give it their best shot. This is the key to sporting contests. It is what makes sport a contest.

  It is hard not to draw parallels between football and regular, non-sporting life. You cannot control everything that happens to you, or guarantee that you will get the rewards that you deserve. There is a flip-side to that, however, for which football can provide the lesson. Even if you find yourself in an adverse situation, where the odds are stacked against your success, you see that your best efforts might still get you through. This doesn’t mean that if you fail, it was because you did not try hard enough. Football teams often give their very best and lose. In football as in life, however, your best efforts can still come up short.

  6

  Victory

  Football stories

  It is all too easy to remember the victories and forget the defeats. Victory is the aim and the glory. Defeat is painful. Would it be any wonder if we had a selective memory bias towards victory and found it better to set aside defeat to some dark, neglected corner of the mind?

  I don’t think I am alone in having a selective memory, given what I hear from other fans. They all talk about their past glories. Liverpool fans reminisce about the ‘Miracle of Istanbul’ 2005 Champions League success, England supporters still talk of the spirit of 1966, and every time I’ve visited Oxford United there’s always some reference in the programme to their Milk Cup triumph of 1986. Liverpool fans won’t talk so much about the 2018 Champions League defeat in the coming years, the seasons they crashed out earlier in the competition, or the time they blew the Premier League title from a winning position in 2014, even though they had Luis Suárez in the team. England fans have to remembe
r 1966 since it’s the only competition the national team have won and the story since has been one of failure. And it’s understandable that Oxford United remind their success-deprived fans that they did once win a national trophy since they need to give them some hope.

  Stories matter to us; and a football club with a long history will have many of them. Stories do not just exist on their own, independently of our thoughts and wishes. We create them, and the same set of bare facts can generate any number of very different tales. A narrative can be woven from the basic material that football results provide. The cliché is for stories in sport to end with victory. Consider how many films about sport conclude with the final win, and then the closing credits roll. Such a narrative can be constructed for just about any team. Sheffield United have a recent history of failure, for example, but I can still tell you how six seasons in the third tier finally resolved when former player Chris Wilder took over as coach in 2016, got the team playing proper football with attacking flair, and took the division by storm. The reality is, however, that there are no end credits to be rolled in football. There is always another game to be played and another season ahead. The lift that a win gives to the fans might last only a few days until the next match, when defeat is risked once more. Still, it’s the win that will be remembered and the defeat forgotten.

  As with all matters that we view through a philosophical lens, though, when we look deeper we see that the relationship between fans and victory is more complex than the above account pretends. There is seldom an absolute rule in philosophical theories. There are, after all, occasions when fans enjoy a tale of tragic defeat. This does not mean that those fans enjoy the defeats, of course, but loss can feed into a narrative with which fans identify and take some pleasure in recounting. There can be one-off instances of monumental defeats that feed into a particular outlook of shared suffering, such as when Brazil’s 1950 World Cup loss became part of the national psyche. There are also stories of heroic defeats, especially from underdog teams who push a bigger opponent hard but then lose at the last moment. Honour can be maintained in such circumstances.