For British bookmakers, Leicester City’s chances of winning the Premier League in 2016 were 1 in 5000. However, by the end of the season the foxes, as they are called, were lifting the trophy. It is moments like these that distinguish football from other great sports.
Every year, teams from the major North American sports leagues (ice hockey, basketball, baseball, American football) hire players through complex procedures, the “drafts”, designed in such a way that the worst teams have an advantage. in buying the best players for the following season.
These are sports in which the relative strength of the teams is decisive for the result. Without the draft, the richest teams would simply hire the best players, gaining a decisive advantage to win and become even richer, which would unbalance the league and kill the fun of competition.
In soccer, chance is as important as the strength of the teams, which makes the results more unpredictable, even when some teams are much weaker. As I explained here, this is linked to the fact that there are few goals in each match: a single goal, obtained in a stroke of luck or inspiration, can give the underdog victory.
But, according to work by researchers at the University of Oxford published at the end of 2021 in the journal Royal Society Open Science, this is changing.
Using ideas from network science, the area of mathematics that studies complex systems of relationships such as the internet and social networks, these researchers developed a predictive model of soccer match outcomes, which they applied to nearly 88,000 games played in 11 European leagues between 1993 and 2019.
They concluded that the results of games have become much easier to predict in advance than in the past: the accuracy rate, which was 60% at the beginning of the century, was already at 80% at the end of the last decade. This effect is even greater in the richest leagues (England, Germany, Spain, Portugal), where the abundance of money exacerbates inequalities in purchasing power between teams.
This is not to say that football will become boring overnight, but it is a worrying phenomenon to be monitored by all who want to preserve the magic of the sport. I am especially sensitive, because the Leicester City case shows that as long as football is football, there will be hope for Glorioso Botafogo FR!
