And by that I don’t mean the fans yelling and throwing things, or the judges trying to make a fair decision facing someone bigger, stronger and more popular than themselves. No, it’s now a proven fact that football is quite dependent on chaos. Recently, a German mathematician did a statistical analysis of matches which showed that 40% of goals in football are based on luck (read more if your German is up to it).

Actually, this is something I’ve been wanting to prove for a long time, it’s also one of the reasons why I don’t like football. I dislike like the way one team can be on top of a league one season and then suddenly have to fight to keep the 10th place. The way I see it, this comes from the structure of the game, the fact that the goals determine the winner, and that there are not very many of them (which also adds to the boredom factor, I might add). You see, in a football match, the team that is really better may have more chances or play better in general, but it takes just one small lucky break for the other team to get a goal. We’ve seen examples of this recently in the European Championship, where the Czech keeper who made just one mistake caused his team to loose their chance of staying in the game. There is also the issue of this new ball which is designed to wobble in the air, it’s actually meant to be more unpredictable. That makes me feel sorry for the keepers, even though I don’t really care about football.

Now, of course, the proof that I mentioned only confirms my theory about how football is quite dependent on luck, but I’ve come to think about how maybe that’s just what makes it so popular. The fact that not so good teams can suddenly beat the champion team creates more excitement, both for fans and bookmakers. Still, how someone can watch a ball bouncing back and forth for 90 minutes because there’s a small chance of something like that happening is beyond me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 1:19 pm and is filed under This and that, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.