The Wisdom of Football Fans

August 19, 2009 in City
Tags: Bradford City, Lincoln City, Stuart McCall

We all see the game differently – that much is clear. Unfortunately, little else is clear. Should Thorne have been subbed last night? Was Boulding the man to save the game? Should the team have been booed for putting in effort but failing to get reward for that effort? Who should have taken the penalty? Is our narrow formation the reason we are yet to score?

Every fan has the right to have their say, but given the contradictory opinions I hear at every home match what value can be placed on the views of football fans (specifically Bradford City fans, in this instance)?

While we are all wise after the event (hindsight is 20/20, dontcha’ know), it is very difficult to predict in advance: which tactics will work best with the personnel available; which players will show the best form and frame of mind; who might be able to change a game in our favour (as an ‘impact sub’). We also lack inside knowledge – which players are carrying niggling injuries, who has been distracted by off-the-field matters, or other “unknown unknowns”. I think I’ve yet to hear a fan correctly predict which player will perform best in any given football match (although the outcome is subjective), while correct predictions of scorelines and scorers are almost equally rare (and this time the outcome is objective fact). Let’s face it – if football fans were that good at predictions, the bookies would all have gone bust by now.

Accepting that we are poor at predicting outcomes of football matches, I have to question why fans believe that their after-the-event opinions – for example, of what would have happened if only the manager had decided on the substitution they would have preferred him to have made – are valid. Sometimes the crowd (or elements of the crowd) are actually proved wrong. Anyone remember a section of the fans booing the introduction of Barry Conlon in one particular game? Bazinho proceeded to make the boo-boys eat their words by scoring City’s goal. I remember hearing fans around me on the Kop shouting in response to the subsitution “that’s shit McCall – shit”, making similar comments, and booing as the substitution was made. These fans believed that Conlon was not the man to make a difference on that occasion, but those fans were wrong. Yet the same people continue to believe that if McCall made different decisions (those they would have made themselves if they were manager, presumably) then City would see better outcomes. Frankly, they’re kidding themselves. This is only possible because their decisions remain hypothetical – they didn’t happen, so we cannot see (or judge) the outcome of them.

A further note

One thing that, as fans, we don’t seem to take into account is the part that chance plays in results. Against Lincoln, we could so easily have scored – shots saved by their keeper, goal-bound efforts that beat the keeper blocked by a defender, a penalty saved by the lad we tried to sign as our goalkeeper. Luck matters. I’m no statistician and I won’t pretend I understand risk and chance, but there is a website, understandinguncertainty.org, that has calculated that in the Premier League in 2008/09:

22% of the variability is due to chance and 78% due to genuine differences between the teams. This is a low contribution of chance, comparable with that in Greece and Turkey where the leagues contain a wide range of talent. Some leagues, in contrast, have contained teams of essentially equal ability where the league positions at the end of the season could be totally attributable to chance: for example the Scottish 2nd Division in 2002-2003 in which after 36 games each the teams all finished between 36 and 59 points: poor Cowdenbeath were at the bottom but the points show that they were really no worse than any other team, just the unluckiest.

22% of the variability in the Premier League is due to chance, and in other leagues where there are not significant gaps in quality (League Two, for example, hardly has a “big four” that are obviously better than the other teams in the division as has been the case in recent Premier League history) chance plays a bigger part. While commentators may claim that luck tends to even out over a season, I am not convinced that this is the case. Maybe luck plays a bigger part than they (or most football fans – including myself) realise.