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PaperclipPerfector
15hr ago
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Soccer fans, something that has bugged me for years: how does soccer manage to combine low scoring with highly predictable outcomes?
In most similar sports, low scoring and low margin of victory correlate with unpredictability. But soccer is the most predictable sport in terms of finishes, very rarely have we seen real surprises at the top of the table or at the end of a major cup. It's the same few teams winning the big 5 leagues, the UCL, the world cup.
Across every other sport, one score games are so close to a coinflip in luck that much of analystics consists in softening or removing one score games from the data. In soccer a one score margin is completely normal, two scores is high, three a murder.
Soccer is predictable - most leagues have zero parity and zero financial parity (and I think this alone answers most of your question) and the same teams finish at the top every time. The predictable super teams make it to things like the Champion's League every time.
Yet.
Soccer is unpredictable - a lower ranked team can often draw (see this in the World Cup all the time) and sometimes even win. In some ways it is the most parity of ANY sport a lower ranked team, or a team from a lower ranked league can actually win.
If you ask gridiron football players they will tell you that an NFL team will beat the college football team 1000 times out of a 1000. A shit soccer team can catch someone sleeping, score a goal, and then hang on through teamwork and familiarity.
So in some ways I reject the premise - I think soccer outperforms most sports in variability, but the structural pressure of the game towards variation (driven as you note by its low scoring nature) is balanced by the complete lack of financial parity and the things that are downstream of that. Bayern is just that much bigger than everyone else in terms of talent acquisition, resources and so on. That counterbalances a lot of structural stuff.
The parity would completely change if they did 5 or 7 game playoff series. Yes you can catch someone sleeping but you won’t 7 times.
My gut says a pro soccer team would rarely lose in 1 match to a top level developmental team. But it may be more than American sports.
Notre Dame has lost to Navy which was sort of semi-pro versus completely amateur but it’s in a 1 in 40 event.
World Cup in many ways is like the first game of the year in football before teams develop chemistry and figure out strengths weakness and adapt. So that adds variability.
So I think a lot of the variance you describe would disappear over bigger samples and after teams have played more games together. Alabama might beat Jacksonville if Alabama was in mid season form versus Jacksonville playing essentially their first preseason game (a month of training camp).
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I don't think you're rejecting the premise, that conflict is the premise. Why does all the structure of the sport lean toward variability, but the result toward predictability?
While I hear you on the financial aspects in regular season league play, it doesn't explain the world cup. We see very few upsets in the world cup knockout stages or UCL knockout stages, relative to the NFL playoffs or NBA playoffs, which are just single games. The draw creates an illusion of regular season parity, but disappears in elimination rounds.
And the finances don't explain all of it, expensive MLB or NBA or NFL don't dominate cheap ones in the same way game-to-game, though they show similar advantages over time.
Structurally the sport trends towards variability - most performance in a match doesn't show on the score line and the whole sport is hard to moneyball. You win by being dominant in performance and grinding away the whole game (in the way you see in true mismatches), you get lucky (and lucky holding it), or you pick at the margins by being slightly better.
The league table in the premier league is longitudinal and you really need longitudinal performance to tell what the best teams are, any given game is not helpful for the reasons above.
Except the Champion's League has regular final games as does the World Cup (as opposed to basketball style series) and it's usually a usual team who wins?
What gives?
Well superstar players don't matter as much. Individual player skill doesn't matter as much as chemistry and vibes. And context. Messi is in a retirement league, but he's killing it right now (but for how long?). Teams make runs see Leicester. Teams outperform by non-selfish play and playing in internal leagues with a lot of familiarity with each other (see: Iran). This makes it confusing.
Soccer is hard from an analytics perspective because of these harder to track metrics.
You can easily paint some of the discrepancy you are noticing as something like "okay this team doesn't really play together normally and later in the World Cup that absent chemistry is built by being together for a month." Or because the group stage (as opposed to knock out) rewards more conservative play, or because you can't tie in knock out and greater skill and more star players usually shows in extra time or penalties.
The lack of surprise and upset in the latter parts of the knockout doesn't nullify the fact that Spain was 2 or 3 in the rankings and drew with a team outside the top 50. If you tried that in American Football people might actually die. Basketball? Baseball? Total blow outs it's just not possible.
Soccer involves intangibles (moral, chemistry, "creativity") and skill as much as physical gifts. Large swathes of the big three American sports have been drilled down into pure athleticism, Aaron Donald's moves aren't nearly as important as the fact that he's a total freak. Obviously Messi has terrific intangibles and technical skills but physically he's much closer to a normal human being - absurd body control, spatial awareness, and reaction time is easier to overcome than me trying to block Donald at the line.
Circling back to American pro sports the ethos is really one of profit sharing through parity for the most part. The NFL really actually has parity - any given Sunday plays out. This is financially enforced. Bad ownership is legit what holds teams back not coaching, location, or the team itself. The MLB and NBA aren't as good but still do much better. This is by deliberate design and the structure has good parts and bad parts (for instance relegation doesn't make sense).
I don't know how much you know about the way salary caps work in the various sports but if you aren't familiar that's a big missing piece.
Anyway sorry I think this turned into a bunch of disconnected thoughts that had a minimal through-line.
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