Speculations On Chaos, Football, And Analysis
Chaos is usually defined, in mathematical terms, as the property of a dynamical system whose evolution is highly sensitive to small changes. A system that is not chaotic is said to be stable. In order to understand the difference between those two kinds of system, it is useful to look at this video where we can see at the start the behavior of a stable system — the single pendulum — and at the end the chaotic behavior of the double pendulum. The importance of that distinction is in the predictability: the quality of a prediction on a stable system decreases linearly with the time lapse for that forecast. If the system is chaotic, the prediction is exponentially worse. This means that the chaotic system quickly becomes completely unpredictable in practice. The only way to deal with this problem is to treat chaotic systems under a probabilist point of view.
What about football? Football as a low scoring contest shares the sensitiveness to chaotic systems. One shoot on the post instead of the back of the net makes a big difference, as those seemingly insignificant inches could transform one situation into another and have a big impact in the game’s state. Therefore, this makes football highly unpredictable at some point. We can even say that it is chaotic in the same way as dynamical systems, as a whole gameplan can be made obsolete in the first minute of a match: an early goal, an early red card. This cannot be said of volleyball, basketball or handball, for example. Football lives in chaos land, and as everything that lives there, can only be understood probabilistically.
Let’s use a game from the last World Cup as an example: Brazil vs Belgium. Belgium had a plan: to deploy three star players high upfront, even when Brazil had possession, in order to be able to counter-attack quickly. And this strategy paid highly, as Belgium made it 2–0 in the first 45 minutes with a brilliant goal from a counter-attack. But, as football is always a game of 11 vs 11, if you choose to have numerical advantage somewhere, at the same time you are choosing somewhere else to be undermanned. Belgium’s defense, while well organized, where not protected by its attacking players and for a few inches, Belgium escaped paying the price in Thiago Silva’s attempt after a corner just three minutes into the game. Not only in those moments, but every corner Brazil took became a moment of danger to Belgium and also to Brazil, as Belgium set up dangerous transitions after regaining possession. From that reasoning, it is clear that Belgium chose a game of exchanging blows against Brazil and who scored first would have a big advantage. And then there was Fernandinho’s own goal. Strategies in football are bets, that can be more or less smart, but bets nevertheless.
At each moment the outcome of that game was unpredictable, at least until Kevin de Bruyne’s outstanding shot made it 2–0 and stated clearly who was to chase the game and who was to defend the lead. However, it was not hard to find an analysis in the media that explained the result as purely the outcome of a clash of gameplans, that had nothing to do with chance or probabilities. Now, if we cannot predict the outcome by the gameplans, it makes no sense to explain it, after the fact, using only the gameplans. This mistake is known as the narrative fallacy (see [1] for a deep explanation on this).
My main point is that we should be aware of analyses that have a too deterministic view of the game, players, and tactics, and do not recognize the role of chance in the outcomes. Football is far too complex, as is life itself, to that kind of approach. That was personified by the ancient Romans in the image of the goddess Fortune, veiled and blind, with a ship’s rudder, deciding the destiny of those aboard.
[1] Taleb, N. N. (2007). The black swan: The impact of the highly improbable (Vol. 2). Random house.
– Maciel
