stealthpapesURZZZZstealthpapes Once we've got that out of the way, there's enough data out there to be able to estimate the contributions of skill and of luck to football matches.
I think I've got a decent book that goes into it, explains how it comes to the answer. Give me a day.
Well, luck of course plays a part, there’s no denying that. Goalkeeper errors, bad referee decisions, ricochets etc etc...
But I just cannot possibly see how it can correspond to explaining how well/poorly a team does over 46 games
If you can provide the data to reject that claim, then I’ll concede the point but from where I’m standing, I don’t see how it’s possible
My first point was, basically - how do you know 46 games is a big enough sample. Is it just a gut feeling? Is it just the way things have always been done? By what number of games do you think you've achieved a big enough sample?
As said in the second post, I'll have a look in the bookshelves tonight and see what I can find.
In any given game, there has to be a 'typical' value for the effects of random chance on the result of that game. It probably changes with the level as well (I can see it increasing as the teams quality get worse or more equal over the whole league). It almost certainly comes with error bars.
But its there, and once we've all accepted that, its a very different debate, wouldn't you agree?
You raise an interesting point. 46 would normally be a small number but then when you consider that's 4,140 minutes and let's say (total guess) incidents per minute (pass, tackle, run, shot) being 10 per minute, and each of these could be lucky or unlucky that's over 40,000 football incidents over a season, a very small proportion of which would be lucky or unlucky. Looking at it that way it's probably right to say luck tends to even out.
And this must be the case because generally good teams do well and crap teams don't.
BUT of course it does play a part in the course of a season AND my opening post isn't just about this sort of luck but the much broader picture (injuries, momentum, mood, investment etc) which is a different sort of luck, as I describe in another post above.