Sanderson on Soccer

Professor Sanderson's comments are incorrect in nearly every substantial way: factually, analytically, and culturally. They read like an exercise in applied ignorance. Please excuse the length of my reply, but a lot of space was necessarily required to unravel a lot of deception.

His main charges are:

(1) The result of a soccer match is insufficiently correlated to the "ability, hard work and ingenuity" of the teams contesting it

(2) Luck and chance play too large a factor in soccer when compared to American sports

(3) The bodies governing soccer have resisted changes to the sport that would satisfy its fans

Ability
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The only piece of data offered to support charge (1) is the Professor's observation that scoring "appears random – an occurrence that could as well happen by chance as from a clever game plan and good execution". For the sake of argument let's grant the Professor this point (even though it's completely without merit as anyone who plays the game will attest, after developing a "feel" for when the goal is most likely to come) because it's a qualitative statement and can't be quickly refuted. Even if it's difficult to judge a priori which of the many possessions during a game will lead to a goal, it's relatively easy to predict which team will score more and win. In soccer, as in American football, the more skillful team usually wins.

Rather than asking you to assume the validity of my observation as the Professor does, here's some supporting data. 32 teams from different member countries contested the 2006 FIFA World Cup. The tournament began with the 8 groups each containing 4 teams. Each team played each other team in their group of 4 once. Once finished, the top 2 teams from each group progressed to the next stage, while the remaining 16 were eliminated.

The initial group assignments were based on seedings. All 32 teams were seeded based on previous results and then broken into quartiles. Each group was then composed of 1 team from the first quartile, 1 from the second, 1 from the third, and 1 from the fourth. And funny enough, better seeding was directly correlated with better results:

- 100% of the top 25% progressed
- 50% of the middle 50% progressed
- 0% of the bottom 25% progressed

The best teams did the best, the worst teams did the worst, and the middle teams did so-so. The Professor implies that unlike in American sports, where the scoring has "some measure of justice or rationality to it", scoring in soccer is arbitrary. The results of the 2006 FIFA World Cup group stages refute this claim as explicitly as possible. If you were the in the top 25% more skillful teams you were guaranteed to win and progress, if you were in the middle 50% you had a 50% change of progressing, and if you were in the bottom 25% you had a 0% change of progressing. Further claims that the nature of scoring and winning in soccer appeal to egalitarian ideals that oppose a link between observable effort and a better outcome don't pass the laugh test.

There is one final comment worth making regarding the relationship between skill and winning in soccer. The Professor begins his section titled "Like Watching Paint Dry" by pointing out that scoring is infrequent and unpredictable in soccer, but by the time the section is finished has twisted this into implying that soccer itself is unpredictable. Although an obvious non-sequitor, a brief golf analogy decimates this twist of illogic even further. Making a hole in one in golf is a very infrequent and unpredictable occurrence; over the course of their careers, no PGA tour golfer will have a statistically significantly greater number of holes in one than any other. Does this mean that golf itself is unpredictable, and we might as well pick any golfer to beat Tiger Woods on any given day? Obviously not.

Luck
—-

Charge (2) is confusing and misleading. As demonstrated by data from the 2006 FIFA World Cup, there is absolutely no basis to the claim that soccer is arbitrary and determined by luck or chance. But not only is the Professor wrong about this, he's wrong even to claim that soccer is determined by chance more than American sports are. The most important form of competition in soccer is the league format. 20 teams from one particular country constitute a league. Each team plays each other team twice, and once they're all done the team with the most points wins. Period.

Contrast this with the American playoff format. It's a truism that in American sports it really doesn't matter how well a team does in the first quarter of a season because the playoff format rewards late season hot streaks. A team can go 5-0 in their first 5 games and still lose the Superbowl to the wild card that sneaked in through the back door. In the league format employed by soccer, it actually matters how well you do at the start of a season. Those 5 games matter as much as the last 5 games, or any other 5 consecutive games along the way. The soccer format encourages skill and consistency throughout the entire season, while American sports reward lucky late streaks (this should also be said about Major League Soccer in the USA, which uses a playoff format unlike nearly every other soccer league in the world).

Speaking of football, the Professor claims that sports like soccer and baseball appeal more to our national character because they use a best of 7 (as opposed to single elimination) format in the playoffs, which "reduces the probability that the weaker squad will pull an upset". Wrong. It's used in baseball because best of 7 tests the depth of a team's pitching squad better than single elimination does. And how about the Superbowl? Somebody should tell the Professor that the most popular sporting event in the country violates our national character.

He also betrays his own ignorance when discussing officials. Contrary to what the Professor will tell you, soccer has 4 officials (1 referee, 2 assistant referees, 1 fourth official) instead of 1. And they are all involved in control of the game; when France and Italy competed in the final of the World Cup and Zinedine Zidane head-butted Marco Materazzi in the middle of the field, if was the fourth official who spotted the foul and ordered a red card.

It's noteworthy that Professor Sanderson doesn't explicitly claim that people who like soccer are inherently stupid, but he tiptoes around it while talking about how heading is used to play the ball. A clarification for others like him who don't know a thing about playing the game: heading a ball in soccer doesn't hurt your head. It hurts your back and your neck.

Change
——

Charge (3) completes the slur with a bewildering display of ignorance. For some unknown reason, the Professor asks "why hasn't soccer changed more"? The rules of soccer have in fact changes dozens of times since FIFA was created (e.g. even is onsides, pass back to goalie). And many of these changes were exactly because of "perceived spectator interest to produce more excitement" as he claimed has never happened. Ignorance of the facts here should surprise no one by this point.

Also leveled is the common charge that soccer is silly because playing the ball with your hands is not allowed, and that this means the upper body is not important to the sport. This simply is not the case. More physical contact is allowed in soccer than in nearly any other sport (yes, including American football–look at how much contact you can have with a receiver before he catches a pass), and this includes the upper body. Attackers and defenders constantly wrestle, jump on, push, trip, and pull each other during a game. It's a different kind of dexterity than required than in basketball, baseball or football, but then again soccer is its own sport. If you want to watch people bouncing a ball with their hands, watch basketball.

The Sanderson Treatment
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My final though upon eviscerating Professor Sanderson's groundless claims about soccer was to apply the Sanderson treatment to American sports. Here are some facts about soccer when compared to American team sports:

- The average player runs more (5 miles) during a game
- The games last longer and require a player to be on the field longer
- It's orders of magnitude more popular than all American sports combined
- The season lasts at least 9 months during the year (often played continuously throughout the year)

Using the Sanderson method of equating a sport with the people that like it, we can conclude the following ridiculous assumptions about people who like soccer when compared to fans of American sports:

- They are more concerned about physical fitness and athleticism
- They are in better shape
- They are well adjusted to living in communities, versus the American antisocial loners
- They place a premium on performing well over extended periods of time

The Bottom Line
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The real reason Americans don't like soccer is that it was invented after the colonies severed our strongest cultural ties to Great Britain, and so there wasn't a healthy conduit for the sport to travel over here was it was discovered. This is the same reason why American sports haven't done well in Europe. You don't need to be a professor of economics with loads of cultural bigotry and prejudice to understand that.

First time I am re-directed from Cafe Hayek to an article so full of prejudice and ignorance. I love soccer, but I also love to read clever articles coming from americans who criticize (with sound arguments) the World´s Sport. This was clearly not the case. Rusell: you can do better…