Half of soccer is luck. You might hear fans say that out of frustration or exaggeration, but it's a serious point in an interesting new book on the science of world football. The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong was co-authored by a two Ivy League social scientists, one a behavioral economist and the other a former English goalkeeper turned professor of government. Quoting studies dating back to the 19th century and adding their own examinations, the authors make a persuasive case that only half of what happens in a soccer game or season can be controlled by the players and teams. The other half is random, making soccer the most luck-dependent professional sport played on Earth - which says a lot about Newcastle's last two seasons, not to mention the club's prospects for the future under the hand of Mike Ashley.
Faithful readers of the blog know I'm the stat-head of the operation. As such I could go on and on about how the authors arrive at their half-of-soccer-is-luck conclusion; I'll spare you except to say, the rarity of goals in soccer makes them more important than scoring plays in other sports, and the high number of things that have to go right to get a goal means more of the scoring in soccer is subject to luck than other sports. You might not agree. But let's suppose this is right.
Immediately we gain a greater understanding of the rise and crash of Newcastle United the past two seasons. Statistically, the 5th-place '11-'12 club looks eerily similar to the 16th-place '12-'13 club. In fact, the club that narrowly escaped relegation looks better in some key respects than the club that went to Europe: increased possession, better passing, more chances. The one glaring exception is chance conversion. Far fewer chances turned into goals last season, especially off the foot of Papiss Cissé, who declined from one of the top chance-converters in the world to perhaps the worst in the league.
That itself could be in part a matter of luck. In studying strikers' statistics I've noted that chance conversion is more variable from player to player and among individual players from year to year than chance creation, which could explain some of what's happened to Cissé. Getting the chance seems more a matter of skill on the part of the striker and the players serving him, while putting the chance in is a matter of other things over which the striker has less control - the goalkeeper's positioning and reaction at the moment, for example. There's no question Cissé bears responsibility for his decline as a scorer; we can see the difference in his skill and pace and confidence with the naked eye. But his decline has likely been exaggerated by luck - the breaks went his way two years ago and not last year. Similarly, there's no question Newcastle's entire squad wasn't as good last season as the previous season - that's also obvious from the naked eye. But the team's crash, like Cissé's, was likely exaggerated by luck one year and lack the next.
If soccer is indeed half luck, it bodes ill for Newcastle's future as a club whose ambition is open to question. The historical Premier League survival line is about 37 points. But if a team controls only half its points, the level of real safety in the Premier League is something approaching double that: 65 or 70 perhaps. To put it another way, only the top five or six teams in skill and talent have no fear of relegation due to bad luck as a given season unfolds. Results bear that out: In the relatively short history of the Premier League, only seven clubs have never been relegated, and of those, Aston Villa was in as close a scrape as Newcastle last season.
Fans accuse Mike Ashley of having no more ambition than to keep his club mid-table and take a profit. There's plenty of supporting evidence for that in Newcastle's player acquisition approach. The problem is, soccer may be too volatile to guarantee a mid-table finish for a mid-table-quality club. If The Numbers Game authors are correct, the only way to be safe from relegation is to aim for Europe. In soccer, more than any other sport, fortune favors the bold.
Can you imagine Cisse trying a shot like this now? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msTFZ1zrzao
Posted by: Sean Berry | 10/11/2013 at 03:37 PM