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Science

European Soccer Matches Have Become Predictable, Study Finds (npr.org) 60

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
Soccer games that make you sit on the edge of your seat may be a thing of the past, according to new scientific research. From a report: After analyzing 26 years worth of European soccer matches, in 11 major European soccer leagues, scientists have determined the games have become more predictable over time -- and the home field advantage has vanished. The work appears in the journal Royal Society Open Science. Taha Yasseri is a computational social scientist at University College Dublin and a soccer fan (though he'd say football). "I realized that I might be able to use network science and network analysis methods to make predictions about the results of football matches," Yasseri said. So, he built a computer model and analyzed nearly 88,000 European soccer matches. He found that stronger teams beat their weaker rivals more often as the years went by.

"Football is so exciting because, you know, there is always a possibility for the weaker teams to win. But, unfortunately, pouring money into the sport and not regulating the wealth or income of the clubs might take that away from the fans," Yasseri postulated. He found that financial inequality among teams also went up over time. He compares it to gentrification -- but in sports. Better teams win more games and rake in more riches. Then, they buy even better players and win more games. "As a football fan, that's really hard for me to take," Yasseri lamented.
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European Soccer Matches Have Become Predictable, Study Finds More

European Soccer Matches Have Become Predictable, Study Finds

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  • "He found that stronger teams beat their weaker" (Score:4, Funny)

    by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @04:29PM (#62092013) Journal

    "He found that stronger teams beat their weaker rivals". that's absolutely shocking.

    That's a HUGE problem, according to about 25% of the population.
    The rest of us just sigh and roll our eyes at those 25%.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      The point is that it used to be less predictable. It isn't any more, likely because it went from amateur competition to precision science in last half a century. Which reduces variability.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jrumney ( 197329 )
        As the stronger teams get more money due to their growing supporter base, they pull the better players away from the less succeessful clubs, and the gap just becomes wider. The growing wealth gap isn't just leading to less exciting football matches either, it is ruining society in a number of other ways.

      • And instead of raw action, you end up with a borefest that might as well be a well rehearsed high budget Broadway theater production.

        Sometimes perfection really sucks.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          I agree completely. This is why I personally prefer to watch amateur/grassroots sports. It's way more fun to watch. But unevenness of level there has the opposite tendency of creating steamroll games. Those are really boring to watch as well.

          But well matched amateur teams going at each other? Best entertainment ever. You never know what's going to happen next.

      • The point is that it used to be less predictable. It isn't any more, likely because it went from amateur competition to precision science in last half a century. Which reduces variability.

        Quite. They now won't let anyone with a points average of less than 9.6/10 into the team.

        I mean the first few times it's entertaining to see a perfectly executed reverse inwards twist double pike before face planting just inside the penalty box, but they've got so good that there's just no variation any more.

        https://youtu. [youtu.be]

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          For the record, I'm far more into grassroots amateur sports than high end professional sports. It's way more random and fun to watch.

          • Yeah. There's also just something extra pathetic about professional football at the moment. You have these hugely highly paid players faking and whining and arguing and they are allowed to get away with it. Why are they allowed to argue with the ref? All it ever does is waste time.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

              Oh, the whole "arguing with the ref" starts at around 4th division at least in my country. Amateurs watch professional sports and try to mimic them.

              But since refs at that level are also amateurs, the conclusions can be hilarious in of itself. Everything from ref literally swearing up a storm right back at the player trying to argue with him to just pointedly ignoring the player doing the whole "I'm dying, look, look, I'M DYING!" act on the field as the game keeps on going. There's nothing quite as satisfyin

      • "The point is that it used to be less predictable. It isn't any more, likely because it went from amateur competition to precision science in last half a century. Which reduces variability."

        And the millionaires playing it don't want to risk any injury whatsoever.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

          Actually, they're often really into extreme stuff. But their team managers and their managers tend to forbid it because of how much of an investment each such player is.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      Reading comprehension.

      If stronger teams beat weaker teams 65% of the time in 1990, and now they beat them 85% of the time in 2021, that really is making the game way more predictable and way more boring.

      Yes, you'd expect the stronger team to win more often - that's why they're stronger. But when things turn into a curbstomp 'fight' no one's going to really want to keep watching.

      • >Reading comprehension.

        > stronger teams beat weaker teams 65% of the time in 1990, and now they beat them 85% of the time in 2021

        The study says about 68% and 71%, depending on which country. France is 70% in the beginning, increasing to 71%. Greece went from 78% to 79%. Belgium decreased from 68% to 66%.

        Reading comprehension indeed!

      • "Yes, you'd expect the stronger team to win more often - that's why they're stronger."

        They are stronger because they're richer, they can buy better millionaires to play the game for them.

        But the lower classes wouldn't know what to do all day long without these games.
        Bread and circuses.

    • Re:"He found that stronger teams beat their weaker (Score:4, Interesting)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @05:17PM (#62092193) Homepage Journal

      Sports tend to adjust the rules to make the matches interesting and unpredictable. For example, Formula 1 introduced the DRS system to make overtaking easier, and uses tyres to force pit stops and more strategy.

      This study suggests that football needs to do more to negate the advantages that big, rich teams have. So does F1, for that matter.

      • It would help if they enforced the rules they have.

        Shirt grabbing? It's football, not rugger. Red card.

        Arguing with the ref? Red card.

        Nothing like watching a bunch of very highly paid athletes professionally whine for hours on a rectangle of grass.

        They should take a leaf out of roller derby's book. Even leaving the track for the sin bin too slowly is considered giving the ref attitude and you'll be booked for it.

        I think having a sin bin would help. Fuck around and you introduce more variation what with bein

  • it's mucking up everything else

  • This issue could be totally solved with a trivial rule change:

    After every goal, the officials flip a coin. If it comes up heads, the scoring team receives the point. If it come up tails, the other team gets the point instead.

  • But the riots [youtu.be]! What variety.

  • ... 100% probability of a flop.

  • Nobody, I mean nobody, could have predicted that Everton would _tie_ Chelsea.

  • Not news. Not for nerds. Not stuff that matters. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is seriously the antithesis of this website.

    Wow.

  • Easy fix... it's been done in All the other sports (Score:4, Informative)

    by lostmy4digitUID ( 2736503 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @04:48PM (#62092093)
    Create a salary cap... that's what makes it extremely difficult for teams to keep getting championships over and over agian after they won 1. The players value rises and you just can't keep them all because they want to get paid more after being Champs.
    • While I agree with you about a salary cap, it's not true in all other sports. Major League Baseball does not have a salary cap. The NBA has a soft cap; it's a percentage of "Basketball Related Income", so more popular teams that generate more ticket sales have a higher salary cap than less popular teams.

      In Football (Soccer to us Yanks), the big question is the business reason. Why do people go see Soccer games? While people espouse loyalty to a team, do people go to see the super stars like Ronaldo

      • FWIW, I was under the impression that baseball has a salary cap, so I looked it up. It appears to be considered a soft cap, as it's really a "luxury tax".

        An article from some site explains thusly:
        "The luxury cap is another name for a salary cap. The concept was introduced to the MLB (ed: after 1994 players strike) and the aim is to control the amount of money spent by the teams.

        The aim is to ensure that the little teams can compete and survive along with the big teams in the industry. However, the result is

    • Create a salary cap...

      Or some other sort of revenue sharing. Much as I like free markets, pro sports tends to not be a free market. The barriers to entry are quite high. You can argue it's fair too: a strong team wouldn't get any revenue if they didn't have anyone to play. Although, I'd like to have some Europeans chime in: in England at least, I thought teams moved up and down between leagues on a regular basis.

      Anyway, revenue sharing is what keeps the New York Yankees from winning the World Series (er, "North American Series")

  • Like with Hockey, the high scores make it exciting. :-)

  • time to hit the bookie!

    • Nah, betting is about beating the spread. They don't assume both sides have a chance in the first place.
  • Home field advantage has been mostly thru referee being influenced by locals.
  • He is definitely not a native then as football in Dublin would refer to gaelic football [wikipedia.org]. But the same gentrification effect can be seen in that sport, with Dublin winning every year for a very long time now

  • Let's see:

    * In what all aprox 8,000,000,000 humans call BaseBall, you hit a (more or less) round 'BALL' with a Bat, and run towards pentagons in the floor called 'BASEs'.

    * In what all aprox 8,000,000,000 humans call BasketBall, you bounce a (more or less) round 'BALL' and try to get/put it on an elevated 'BASKET'

    * In what all aprox 8,000,000,000 humans call VolleyBall, you use 'VOLLEYs' to hit a (more or less) round 'BALL' over a net.

    * In what Aprox 7,500,000,000 humans call FootBall and Aprox 500,000,000 '

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      Handegg. That's what it's called.

      And if you want to have another one where US spelling is at odds with literally the rest of the world: Cacao vs Cocoa.

    • Re:Soccer? What is Soccer? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Friday December 17, 2021 @07:43PM (#62092599) Homepage

      You seem triggered.

      Take a breath, and chill.

    • * In what Aprox 7,500,000,000 humans call FootBall and Aprox 500,000,000 'muricans call "Soccer" (Aprox 15x less people), you use your FOOT to kick a (more or less) round 'BALL' around, traying to make a goal. In A VERY FEW special circumstances, you use your hands.

      * In what Aprox 500,000,000 'Muricans call FootBall, and Aprox 7,500,000,000 Humans call "That weird thing gringos play", you take a very weird 'OVOID' [i]thing[/i] with your 'HANDS' and try to get it to the end of the playing field. In A VERY FEW special circumstances, you can use your hands.

      Then I think is clear that the question is not: What is Soccer? But instead:

      What the heck is that weird thing that Gringos play? OvoidHand perhaps? American Rugby? HumanRAM Hybrid? Concusions Galore?

      Allow me to FTFY: In what Aprox 500M Americans (yes, there is a word for that) call "Soccer", Approx 60M Brits call "Football", and approx 7.4M people call whatever it is called in their native language, with the most popular option unquotable on Slashdot because it uses Chinese logograms, you hit a ball with foot, blah blah blah.

      Quite a different picture.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sfcat ( 872532 )
      Its called football because it is played on foot. Not because you hit the ball with your foot. Actually, you just don't intentionally hit the ball with your hand or arm. Many goals are scored with the head but we don't call it headfootball. So you completely fail at understanding why the sport is called what it is called. Also, it is called different words in other languages. Oh, and we called our sport football before soccer was called football. In 1879 when the first football game was played, socce
    • Isn't it just a weird clone of rugby?
  • Sometimes it’s 2-1 on an exciting day

  • They should do it like the NHL draft (Score:3)

    by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @06:36PM (#62092411)
    where the team with the worst losing record for the season gets the first draft pick for new players.

    After a number of years playing for that team, players can become free agents.

    Keeps the league more balanced.

    There's also a whole-team players-salary cap applicable across the league.

    • If bad teams get better draft picks, then many teams, especially middle teams, will tank their season to get better positioning for the next draft. The fans even encourage it: "Suck for Luck" comes to mind

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      But they have relegation. The last two teams or last four teams (or whatever that league uses) get demoted to the next tier down, and the same number of teams get promoted from that next tier. So the losing teams wouldn't even be in the same draft because they're no longer in the league -- if they even had a draft, which might well be considered collusion (to keep salaries down by locking new players to a single team, rather than being open to all offers) in such a league.

      There's a fundamental difference in

  • Always have been predictable it always the same (Score:3)

    by ClueHammer ( 6261830 ) on Friday December 17, 2021 @06:46PM (#62092449)
    A butch of men go to a public theater, play with their balls for a while while to voyeurs look on making a variety of animal noise. the men then leave and most of the voyeurs leave dissatisfied with the experience.
  • hence the name football. Meaning hands are not involved ! Whatever happens in the US where the egg can be held and thrown with the hands should be called something else. I suggest handfootegg.

  • Aren't all soccer games simulations already?

  • Always have been, a bunch of highly aggressive people, most of whom have incredible stories that start "I would have gone pro but..." but NEVER contain "I wasn't good enough" sit wearing gaudy colored towels very similar to those women used prior to the invention of sanitary napkins while yelling at predominantly undereducated, yet overpaid children who run around a grass field wearing shorts pajamas kicking a ball... in hopes of performing for the big people their new dance or war cry they've been practici

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