The unpredictability of football — a case study: FC Barcelona 6–1 Paris Saint-Germain
March 8th, 2017 — La Remontada (The Comeback)
Football is truly remarkable. It has everything you could want from a sport: a team spirit, incredible passion, gigantic rivalries, a set amount of play-time (I’m looking at you, 5-day cricket matches) and an international fan-base that connects people from all over the world. Did you know that over half the entire world’s population watched the 2018 FIFA World Cup? (courtesy of fifa.com) What keeps fans coming back is the unpredictability. Anything is possible on the pitch.
For the sake of an international audience, I am going to refer to the sport that is sometimes known as soccer, as football. Let’s be universal about the universal game.
The unpredictability of football is what makes it beautiful. Not knowing what could happen in 90 minutes, is like an adrenaline rush for football fans… I’d never be able to recount the number of times I was watching football and felt my heart going a million miles an hour. To a non-fan, it may seem like an exaggeration, but this is the truth. The more invested you are in the outcome of a match, the more alert you are, the more personal you take the players’ mistakes, and usually the louder and more passionate you become. Everyone takes on multiple roles while watching a game; for example, I become the best manager/club president/commentator the world has ever seen. My level of analysis becomes very loud and aggressive, too: “Let Messi play as a false 9!, why are they in a 4–2–3–1 formation, SELL ANDRE GOMES, we miss Ronaldinho, Xavi, Iniesta, why do we even have all these players if they’re always on the bench, BARTOMEU OUT” etc.
I am clearly a Barça fan!
However, we don’t only watch football for the game, we watch while listening to the commentary. You may assume that match commentary is as simple as summarising what is happening on the pitch, but it’s so much more than that. The commentary is just inane babble without analysis. Analysis consists of knowing the players individually, what each of their playing styles are, the manager, what their coaching style is, what the team vibe is when they all play together, how the defenders, midfielders and forwards all pass to each other to achieve their one common goal, and the environment in which they are playing in — will the fans be for them or against them? — all of these factors and more, are key to analysing WHY things happen the way they do. You can only analyse after the fact, because whatever you analyse beforehand are just predictions and speculation about what MAY happen. Unpredictability plays a role in all situations of life and in the case of a football match, it can have the greatest impact of all.
For example, and my most favourite example, was when Barça was behind 4–0 against PSG on aggregate and in the final 10 minutes of the second-leg match (including stoppage time), we pulled off the impossible and scored the all-important 6 goals to carry us over into the quarter-finals of the Champions League. If someone saw the score of both games, they would have felt some level of amazement, but if you were a part of, or had the honour of watching La Remontada, you would know that it was no ordinary match and that that match is a perfect example of unpredictability in football.
Firstly, it wasn’t a final or even a semi-final match up. It was a round of 16 match between two great clubs and teams, that would determine who would get into the quarter-finals. And of that, it had to be played at home and away, which adds even more uncertainty into the mix because, while you can be confident that you will win on home-ground, who’s to say the same is likely to happen when you’re on stranger turf?
Looking at the score itself, we were 4 goals behind, which meant we needed to score 4 to tie and 5 to win and move forward. This became extremely difficult when PSG scored another goal in the Camp Nou, because they not only scored an away goal, giving themselves an even higher advantage against Barça, they gave themselves a confidence boost (as if they needed one) and showed the Barça team and the fans that they meant business. Some fans lost hope and left, and can I just say, as a die-hard Barça fan and a lover of football, that is one of the most disgraceful things you could do. We live in a day and age of disloyalty, where finding someone loyal is like finding treasure, and then you have people using football teams to divide and conquer society. In the case of many ethnicities, I can say that because football is so inherent in the culture, it is a big deal and is part of our identity. A Colombian friend of mine said, although Latin Americans hate people within their own country, town and even neighbourhood, when it comes to national games, the ENTIRE country rallies together against the outside.
After PSG scored their fifth goal, my heart fell, I was so devastated, to not only lose, but to lose so badly too…. and I can be a pretty sore loser. All the posts I was seeing on social media after PSG’s 4–0 win in the first leg, in particular, of Di Maria shushing the crowd, was making my blood boil.
I imagine I wasn’t the only one getting annoyed by PSG’s behaviour after the first leg. The second leg, however, was the most fulfilling, heart-wrenching and uniting match I have ever seen.
Not only did it take at least a full week for me to somewhat begin to calm down, seeing the posts later or coming across a highlight video of the match still makes me smile wider than the rest.
I had the unlucky pleasure of getting to only follow the Google live score feature for most of the game. That day, I had class at 9 am (Sydney time), so when the game started I was getting ready to leave for the day. I got to the train station and as it turned out, something happened to one of the power lines above the train tracks so all the trains were delayed. I was pissed I would be late for class, but was already nervous because of Barça. Not remembering this idea of unpredictability, my heart sank and I thought we didn’t have a chance. I knew we would score 1, 2, maybe even 3 goals, but could we get the 5 we needed to win?!
By the time I checked the live score for the game, the score was 3–1, Barça winning, but losing 3–5 on aggregate. How disheartening. I didn’t stop watching. The train finally came and my mum was with me, but she found a seat two rows behind me, so I couldn’t even share my anxiety with her. It being 7 am didn’t help either, because everyone I knew was asleep and I couldn’t pointlessly bother them about my football team trying to do the impossible because they didn’t understand or even care.
There I was, sitting on the train, squished on the seat, leaning forward out of anxiety, and carefully staring at the score on my phone. Then the 3–1 flickered to become 4–1. I didn’t believe it and refreshed the page, the page was confused about what it wanted to display, so I opened Instagram and checked the most recent stories and posts and nothing, then I opened Facebook and nothing, and then I opened my trusty Twitter, and there it was! I got confirmation that the score was now 4–1. Wow, this wasn’t looking so out of reach anymore! By the time I had confirmed the score, and gone back to the Google live score feature, the 4–1 flickered to become 5–1. My heart started racing; was I seeing what I wanted to see, or was this actually happening? We were now 5–5 aggregate… who would’ve thought that this would be possible just 2 hours ago? Only one more goal was needed to settle this, and we had about 4 minutes left on the clock. I frantically searched to find a stream to watch the final minutes, and hoped that I wouldn’t miss the possibility to watch an incredibly historic event. I finally opened the link, closed all the pop-ups (thank you free streams), didn’t even have time to make the video full-screen, and then it happened. The impossible had become possible. 6–1, thanks to Sergi Roberto. QUE EMOCIÓN! The absolute hero, who saw Neymar’s cross and stuck his leg out at the perfect moment, delivered the goal that made this game the biggest comeback in Champions League history!
Sergi Roberto’s heart-stopping goal in the final minute of the game sent the world into a frenzy. The Camp Nou exploded and so did social media.
Now for some statistics: there were 96,920 fans in the Camp Nou stadium, each and every one of them being the luckiest people in the world to have experienced the pure exhilaration of those last seven minutes! The match-winning goal generated so much noise from in and around Camp Nou that it registered as a 1.0 on the Richter scale, “officially making it a micro-earthquake.”* This was also the most tweeted match of the 2016–2017 football season, with about 6.1 million tweets for the duration of the match, with the highest spike in tweets coming through when Sergi Roberto scored the final goal with 138,000 tweets per minute!*
If football had been predictable, everyone would have just assumed that PSG would go into the quarter-finals and it would have been a very embarrassing result for Barça and Luis Enrique, then manager of Barça. Due to a range of factors, like the game being played at Camp Nou, the huge banner reading “Tots L’amb Equip” (Everyone behind the team) giving the team extra support, the PSG players not capitalizing on opportunities, and many other factors, the embarrassment was now all on the French side. Truly remarkable, the things that can happen in football. It makes it an absolute pleasure to be a fan, and not sleeping for a month just to watch the FIFA World Cup (living in Australia has its disadvantages), was worth it. I didn’t want to see France or Croatia win, but hey, we can’t have everything, can we?
Football, soccer, the world game, the beautiful game; whatever you choose to call it, it’s truly the greatest sport in the world.
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