Come on now, this entire comment is unfair, it's like you're willfully ignoring my post's actual content in order to grind your own axe:
> That's not an "opening salvo" -- that's the thesis of the piece. His contention is that soccer, more than most other sports, is a poisson machine. He goes into the math.
I don't object to the thesis, I object to the opening salvo.
> Well, no, actually. Some things in life are more random than others.
How does this refute my point? Everything in life is random to some degree or another. Football also is.
> And however skilled they may be, the large number of (fallible) people on the field playing this game certainly doesn't make it less random.
What does fallibility have to do with it? Look, my point is that it is not a roulette wheel, there are humans reacting, and that human endeavour is what's interesting to people, not the precise quantity of randomness in the result.
> As games go, soccer doesn't have many structural impediments to randomness.
It also doesn't have much impediment to strategy, tactics and individual skill drastically altering the probabilities of each individual event.
> We'd (hopefully) feel pretty silly if we got worked up every few years about a global coin-flipping tournament, but, here we are, getting worked up over teams of people engaged in an event where the outcome is dominated by chance.
Clearly football falls somewhere in between a coin-flip tournament and say 9-ball pool. But, again, randomness keeps it interesting. Remember, we are not just looking at results, we are watching players play. In individual situations players make decisions and physically control what happens. You can argue about the randomness of these events, but that just leads towards the tiresome free-will-is-an-illusion debate.
> (And oh, hey: it sort of pegs the irony-o-meter that you're accusing the author of being closed-minded about sports when you can't even be bothered to read an argument because you've decided that you disagree with it in advance. Well played.)
What an uncalled for and arrogant remark that can do nothing except derail reasonable debate; if you squint hard enough everyone is a hypocrite. I did read the argument, and I was addressing the opening presentation.
Yes, and I argued against precisely the opening paragraph, I did not argue against the stats legitimacy. It simply does not follow that because there is a great degree of randomness in sports results that sports fandom is based on numerology. Sports fandom is based on the fact that people like playing and watching sports, not reading the result in a paper having never seen the game and making grandiose conclusions about which team is better based on specious reasoning. Everyone knows the better team doesn't always win, it's self evident. What matters are the plays that brought us to that point.
The whole thesis that sports viewing is pointless because it's random is an infuriating straw man. Why not just stick to the thesis that soccer is random and leave the value judgement aside? The exact same thing could be presented without pissing people off with an implicit value judgement of something which the author doesn't care to understand. This sort of innocent condescension is a big reason some youthfully exuberant geeks get picked on in school.
> That's not an "opening salvo" -- that's the thesis of the piece. His contention is that soccer, more than most other sports, is a poisson machine. He goes into the math.
I don't object to the thesis, I object to the opening salvo.
> Well, no, actually. Some things in life are more random than others.
How does this refute my point? Everything in life is random to some degree or another. Football also is.
> And however skilled they may be, the large number of (fallible) people on the field playing this game certainly doesn't make it less random.
What does fallibility have to do with it? Look, my point is that it is not a roulette wheel, there are humans reacting, and that human endeavour is what's interesting to people, not the precise quantity of randomness in the result.
> As games go, soccer doesn't have many structural impediments to randomness.
It also doesn't have much impediment to strategy, tactics and individual skill drastically altering the probabilities of each individual event.
> We'd (hopefully) feel pretty silly if we got worked up every few years about a global coin-flipping tournament, but, here we are, getting worked up over teams of people engaged in an event where the outcome is dominated by chance.
Clearly football falls somewhere in between a coin-flip tournament and say 9-ball pool. But, again, randomness keeps it interesting. Remember, we are not just looking at results, we are watching players play. In individual situations players make decisions and physically control what happens. You can argue about the randomness of these events, but that just leads towards the tiresome free-will-is-an-illusion debate.
> (And oh, hey: it sort of pegs the irony-o-meter that you're accusing the author of being closed-minded about sports when you can't even be bothered to read an argument because you've decided that you disagree with it in advance. Well played.)
What an uncalled for and arrogant remark that can do nothing except derail reasonable debate; if you squint hard enough everyone is a hypocrite. I did read the argument, and I was addressing the opening presentation.