Lionel Messi Is Impossible (2014)
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
Maybe Maradona was that way in his day -- I'm barely aware that he was a good player of yesteryear -- but his drug problems (and the fact that his heyday was so long ago) make him much less relatable or exciting to investigate as a inspiration.
As an English football fan, that cheered me up (it still hurts). I suspect no English football fan could accept Maradona as the greatest.
Do you know about Pelé?
When I was a kid, it seems everyone (even non fans) knew Pelé was the greatest.
everyone celebrates this goal. No fan has ever given him shit about it
The Hand of God is a clear foul, but the Goal of the Century is clean as a whistle. Funnily, these two goals alone — both so different — are pretty much the summary of Diego Maradona
I'm not sure it makes sense to compare greats of different generations. In athletics we can clearly see the improvement from generation to generation so if you plucked them out at their heights Messi is probably a better player than Maradona and Maradona a better player than Pelé, but had they all played at the same time who knows?
By the way, both Maradona and Messi when previously asked, have answered something along the lines that that he was the greatest.
Nice one. I think this post will go over most peoples' heads but I had a good laugh.
How on earth do you reconcile these two sentences lol x)
Hence Einstein was a dummy with poor grades at math (he was not) or failed his exams (he did not).
I loved to see Maradona play. Messi is just a good player who finally got his WC win.
Is that real that the rich, VC types give growth hormone to their children?
He always pointed at food, that the generations after him had access to better stuff and more milk. The shortest member of my family is my niece who is totally anti-milk, but that's just anecdata.
So it might be some other macro-factor influencing growth, with milk being the most glaringly visible item on the table. But it does kind of make an intuitive sense, and the dutch are freakishly tall while they have some of the best dairy products in the world
Apparently, aside from better food, natural selection also had an effect [1].
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rspb.201...
(And yes, I’ve only ever seen Europeans doing this, not people from any of the other parts of the world where it’s also called football).
Is it really so hard for you to accept that there are different words for things in different countries, and that not all cultures are identical to your own?
You can’t really expect people in all places to use the same words for things.
It may also surprise you to learn that water closets are called restrooms in other countries that speak English.
In fact no, we shouldn’t, because different languages and dialects have different words for things, and that’s just a fact of life.
This phenomenon isn’t unique to English, by the way. Every language spoken in more than one country (AFAIK) has some words that vary between countries.
Your argument is a bit ridiculous IMO, it’s like saying neovim should merge every patch that gets merged to vim.
of all the arguments in the world this is the worst one. A nationalist leftover reminding us that while the internet has potential for global unity, someone will forcibly drag it down to worldly borders
Just means "grab your football" in Spain, but means something completely different in Argentina ;)
I'd assume is the same in Argentina, but I do not know that for certain.
US should just adopt the metric system and start calling their sport handegg :)
In every English-speaking country, whichever of these related games is most popular is simply called “football”.
It’s unclear whether the name derives from kicking the ball with the foot (which happens to a greater or lesser extent in all such games), or from the fact that they’re played on foot (rather than e.g. on horseback).
1889, socca, later socker (1891), soccer (1895), originally university slang (with jocular formation -er (3)), from a shortened form of Assoc., abbreviation of association in Football Association (as opposed to Rugby football); compare rugger. An unusual method of formation, but those who did it perhaps shied away from making a name out of the first three letters of Assoc. Compare 1890s English schoolboy slang leccer, from lecture (n.).
The word "football" has been used to describe games played without kicking for centuries. A possible etymology is that it means not a game played with the feet, but a game played on foot. It could describe any of the games played by peasants, as opposed to the equestrian sports (racing, polo, dressage) played by aristocrats.
As opposed to all those other popular ball games which are played sitting down?
I just erased a long rant about this, because no one needs to read another one.
But I'll summarize: Our refusal to adopt the metric system is really a symptom of everything that's wrong with the country today. I blame organized religion.
But today it just seems hardheaded. And it's not just metric...you have ANSI vs ISO, electrical systems, 4g and 5g radio bands, etc. With a world population 20 times the US population, I foresee a lot more companies just deciding it doesn't make financial sense to bother with the US market. We already see that with smartphones.
You have no idea how accurate and profound your statement is. The mid 1800s religious extremism still survives in the US and plagues its public discourse and institutions in the form of anti-intellectualism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism#United_St...
The American anti-intellectualism is far stronger compared to all the forms of anti-intellectualism across the world, and its surprisingly wide-reaching - a lot of the anti-intellectual behaviors of the religious American crowd of 1850s survive today and manifest themselves in different forms. From opposing science to conservatism in silly things like the resistance to the metric system and more.
English engineers much prefer a 12-based system where you can design, construct and build easily— dividing measurements by 2, 3, and 4– where practicality is foremost.
I do think French atheism is at the root of it yes.
P.S. completely trolling/kidding!
P.P.S. Long before the metric system, the French were calling a dozen dozen “grosse”. The prejudice goes long back and it isn’t from us Angle-ophones!
Hell yeah it is - the never-ending English, later British propaganda against France goes back 600 years. Against Spain, it goes back 500 years. A lot of that seems to have been carried over to its former colonies.
I'd imagine any country with a pre-existing sport called "football" would tend to call it soccer.
Also, soccer was invented by the English, let the virus spread, then switched back to football.
But I've heard a lot of Americans say "no it's called soccer" when they heard the term football
FIFA is "Fédération internationale de football association".
I never claimed that French people couldn’t call things whatever they like in their own language :)
They definitely could not
>Hint: look at Barça.
What do you mean
>>Hint: look at Barça.
> What do you mean
This is a reference to the Barcelona teams built with basically unlimited budgets that have dominated the European Cup.
Of course, Qatar sort of does have a UEFA team called Manchester City via the state-run Qatar Airlines sponsorship. It has a basically unlimited budget and has dominated the English premier league for a while now (although it has struggled in European competition).
PSG and City are glorified marketing vessels for human rights abusing autocracies. Very different.
Another point: You can have the best team in the world, but it won't be the best team unless it plays against someone else (preferably many other teams). The game is interesting because the winner is uncertain. If the winner becomes certain at all times (or worse, all the rankings) then there is no reason to play the game anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_FIFA_World_Youth_Champion...
[1] https://www.firstpost.com/sports/firstpost-explains-how-does...
Looking at the figure, for example, one thing I noticed was the gap between the two upper points and the rest. It's hard for me to imagine there aren't some missing points there.
In other fields or areas, I think you have to start asking about things like fraud, other vice, or circumstances.
As you suggest, there's probably also some unique things about international football that make it difficult to generalize to other things. Everything is probably a little unique in certain ways really, but the incentives are so extreme and the play is very visible.
[1] https://olympics.nbcsports.com/2020/04/21/usain-bolt-beijing...
Usain Bolt did so on a special occasion, he explained he just didn't know where to eat
It's pretty obvious his average meal is not "fast" food, he would never have reached this level else
And empirically, you have Gretzky in hockey, Jordan in basketball....
There's still studies of relatively raw distributions and it still looks normal. The biggest deviations from normality are due to an excess mass in the lower range due to disease, and a tendency for scores to spike a tiny bit at certain numbers, probably due to people administering the test fudging a bit sometimes for various reasons.
How are you going to tell me that an L1 norm is equivalent to an L2 norm, for example?
In the end it doesn’t whether we go to infinity in one norm or the other.
Note that I am talking about finite dimensions, so I guess you didn’t mean the L^p norms or \ell^p for integrable functions or sequences but the finite-dimensional p-norms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDsztJOgqUg
TL;DR / TL;DW: Messi is a dog. The ball is his.
It's a lovely but also profound literary article in the subject of Messi never losing sight of the ball, while also a critique on modern day analysis of the game and its influence on player behavior.
I think it is interesting to ask why Messi is such an outlier. But maybe you think the fact that someone has to be best makes it all uninteresting.
And yes, I think that the fact that someone will be the best makes it uninteresting, or at least a lot less interesting than if a skill could be universally taught to the point where everybody would be very good at it and it would be productive.
Professional sports is roughly at the same level of interest to me as a circus.
And his WC Final rival and PSG team mate.
p.s. Schumacher drove a car, so I'm not sure he is a fair comparison to physical sportsmen
Going past an opposition player in basketball, football or rugby is very similar. Sprinting to the line to keep a ball in play is something tennis players, footballers and cricketers all do.
Driving is entirely different, and not really comparable.
> would destroy most athletes from other sports
This is pretty hyperbolic, I wonder if you might like to reconsider it.
If you read my other comment you will see my line of reasoning. At no point have I denigrated racing drivers, so there's no need to rush to their defence.
Apparently, a good batting average for a modern-day batsman is 40+ with those above 50 being exceptional. Bradman's average was 99.94. The second highest average of all time is 60.97.
As the parent poster points out, the next highest average is in the low 60s (actually 61.87 now[1]). Looking at the stats though, we see averages are roughly a normal curve, centered on 40 with a standard deviation of a little over 9[2]. This puts Bradman over 6 standard deviations above average!
[1] https://stats.espncricinfo.com/ci/content/records/282910.htm...
[2] https://www.significancemagazine.com/sports/24-did-don-bradm...
He's probably not as well known as someone like Gretzky in North America, so his name wouldn't immediately spring to mind on forums like this. In cricket, there just isn't any debate about the greatest - the only area of interest is about who comes next (Viv Richards or Brian Lara in my opinion)
I think you might find there are a fairly large number of Indian, Australian and English people on this forum who will find his name does spring to mind immediately. It's more about the timezone than numbers.
> who comes next (Viv Richards or Brian Lara in my opinion)
Tendulkar.
Viv Richards was amazing at his best but declined badly. Lara's best innings were better than anyone (maybe even Bradman) but he wasn't as consistent and unfortunately he was playing in a declining team.
But I'm old enough to remember his 1993 innings of 277 at the SCG. In some ways that was enough to hold off Australia being undisputably the best team in the world for another couple of years.
If you don't count his goals, he still has more points than the next guy. Points are goals plus assists.
Something like 15 of the best 20 seasons in history by points are him.
Player of the year every year for a decade.
The only thing that makes it look less spectacular is that ice hockey is not the world's favourite sport.
Messi is the goat of a game that is massively popular on every continent, that you can find people playing in a park in almost every city.
However, these records are incredibly influenced by the era he played in. Look at a list of the highest scoring seasons for teams ever and it’s either far pre expansion or the late 70s and 80s - Gretzky’s era.
Messi’s records are astounding for the reason that soccer scoring trends have remained far more stable (imo)
And he just got his finals MVP in 2022, kind of the only thing people lamented about for their careers.
They have pretty interesting similarities: * their teams in their primes, GSW and Barcelona are both dynasty teams with highest level teamplay. GSW rountinely have the highest number assists in the league, Barcelona have more successive passes than almost any other teams. * they are both considered more technical and humble comparing to peers like L. James, and C. Ronaldo, which pocess more physical talents and show dominant personalities
I will remember this game for a long time. The dramatic twists and turns are so memorable.
How is 538 able to intercept my navigation away from their page?
That said, it’s basically just the front end’s version of a redirect. Unfortunately it’s been used a lot especially by malware sites to basically jail people into their site.
How common is it for FE devs to refuse to implement features that their employers tell them to implement?
That's a very "bold" choice of 538 if you ask me.
You can see it if you right click the back button after navigating to the article.
I think what they must have done is push some URL to the history state, using the History API, to fuck with the back and forward buttons, enabling them to intercept when you navigate back, by having added an additional page in there, that you never visited, but that they can use to serve you this interstitial.
Just my 2c
As for "entire team playing against a team of laypeople" - I would like to see something like this too. Best we can have is probably the match between American Samoa and Australia that ended 0-31
Average Joe/Jane just doesn't get to touch the ball. Period.
A layman person can’t realize how vast the gap is between him/her and a pro player, let alone elite players. My guess is that you wouldn’t even have the time to react because he’s so agile he can change direction in a fraction of a second. You wouldn’t trip and fall, you’d simply stood still and by the time you’d register what happened he’d be ten feet behind you.
I think it might have been a reddit thread where a commenter said that a guy came and played on their rec league that had played semi-pro hockey (maybe AHL) and even then nobody on the team could handle his passes. The commenter said it felt like his wrists were going to break.
I've also managed to hit with some former college guys who made top 500 ATP. they are insanely good with hard serves and insanely accurate ground strokes. the difference between those guys and a top level player is night and day...scary how good top athletes really are.
Also several years ago played in a pickup soccer game with a guy who washed out of Manchester United's academy as a 14 year old. In that same pickup game were guys who at the time were playing D1 soccer, and a few had spent time in MLS academies. The ex-United guy was lightyears ahead of everyone else despite having been out of the game for nearly 10 years and having a bad knee. The guys who make it to the top are utterly incomprehensible for a layman to understand.
It's just like how if you're playing a GM in chess, and you might be a decent enough player yourself, you won't even sniff a chance of doing well much less winning. Those same GMs turn around and get effortlessly destroyed by Carlsen or other top players. It's just a different level that us civilians cannot fathom.
I would also like to say that you must be quite athletic and talented to be playing with former ATP 500 tennis and D1 and youth professional football players. Congrats!
Football wise, even worse - I just picked up the game playing in college and in local games growing up but was never any good. The ex-United kid quit the sport and moved to the US for school and lived near the local pitch where the pickup matches were held and he would just wander over for yucks. He ran (walked, really, due to his knee) rings around everyone.
Magic only matters when you're trying to beat multiple players or someone who is roughly the same skill level as you, otherwise you can literally just run past them or beat them with a simple cut.
How it started for Brazil was certainly different from how it ended for Brazil in that World Cup.
Messi is the greatest and purest player of football.
I study Michaelangelo the same way I study Messi.
Art
I wander what a vote count over time graph looks like for this post. I assume everyone is going to disappear again in 5 min.
(also here during half time)
Edit: 20 comments at second half kick off.
EDIT: OR maybe not LOL.. France is just physically too strong... Technically? Meh.
Thank god for Patrick Mahomes...
This is not football, it's geopolitics.
I would buy that story if it were for China - look at all the ads and they even built the stadium. Too fantasy though since China men’s soccer team is a total joke
They spend 10 times more than the other countries to host the world cup. They want it to be a big hit. That's why FIFA has been saying that this is the best wold cup ever and bla bla bla.
They want something big to show the world. What better than having one of the best players ever win a world cup before retiring?
That's how I see it.
But hey, even a 7–1 beatdown of the favorites can make for a memorable and entertaining World Cup.
It is unusual enough to let people wonder.
Did someone count the number of cards and penalties against Arsenal last season?
EDIT: And just as I write this France draws a penalty!
That said, the denominator/ top team argument only holds if Argentina was the most dominant team in the cup by a landslide (considering the ratio of the total penalties). They weren’t, they performed mostly in the same pack of France/England/ Portugal. Brazil would be the only team that was blatantly more dominant. Another denominator could potentially be number of foul against, and I would be surprised if it is that lopsided.
Di Maria just destroyed that flank this game.
I'm not defending France or anything. I dislike both teams, my team got eliminated a while ago.
But take a look at Argentina - Croatia. Argentina was way superior after the first 20 min or so, but Croatia was still holding. After the penalty Croatia was no longer playing football. When Argentina scored the second goal the defense was scared of even approaching the ball. A penalty in a tournament like this can kill the morale easily.
Also I'm talking about Qatar here, not Argentina or France.
This is the money spent on the last world cups.
QAT (2022) US$229 billion[1]
RUS (2018) US$16 billion[2]
BRA (2014) US$19.7 billion[3]
RSA (2010) US$7.2 billion[4]
GER (2006) US$4.9(€3.7) billion[5]
KOR/ JPN (2002) US$7 billion[6]
FRA (1998) US$2.33 billion[7]
USA (1994) US$500.00 million[8]
ITA (1990) US$4 billion[9]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_the_FIFA_World_Cu...
I often compare it to medicine, where a football match is a drug that is tested with a randomized controlled trial with N=1.
If football matches had a p-value for "the best team won", it would be abominable.
FIFA’s job is to get the teams that make the glittering diamond to play in the WC without too much fuss and without making any problems. In that context doing shady shit on the playfield would even be counterproductive.
If all (important) national teams feel like the games themselves are fair and that they are heard when there are problems on the playfield then at least that‘s not an additional area of conflict.
For that reason I think it‘s extremely unlikely for corruption to actually extend to the playfield. It‘s just no needed and even counterproductive. I think that might actually be the thing that actually breaks FIFA‘s power, so I would think that they don’t touch it.
Still, it’s an egregious shame and it tarnishes the win.
Multiple 100+ year old sports seems to have coincided their arguably greatest of all time players play at roughly the same time. Lionel Messi, Christiano Ronaldo, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Sachin Tendulkar, Usain Bolt, Lebron James, Michael Phelps, Michael Schumacher, Magnus Carlsen.
No doubt they are just that good but so many of them playing at around the same time is very interesting to me.
In saying that, Messi is on another planet, with perhaps Pelé , Michael Jordan and Ayrton Senna...
I agree!
> ... Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal,
And most of all Novak Djokovic. It's totally insane that these three were playing at the same time. Now Djokovic has 373 weeks as world number 1 (Federer 310 weeks, Nadal 209), 21 grand slams (Federer 20, Nadal 22), six ATP World Tour Finals -- arguably the hardest tournament ever-- (Federer six too, Nadal zero) and contrarily to the others (if I'm not mistaken) Djokovic also held the four Grand Slams at once (consecutively but over two years).
Even though Federer was a bit older these three mostly played at the same time and that is completely insane. It makes their achievements even more incredible: the records each of them would have had one of the two others not been there would have been even more unbelievable.
An analysis of Lionel Messi - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7972815 - July 2014 (129 comments)
The 1986 world cup was incredible, the impact of that WC run on the Argentinian national psyche, including the final but especially the Argentina–England game, just cannot be overstated.
[1] https://www.amazon.in/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Market...
If statistics showing Messi is a great player were just random we'd expect them to regress towards the mean. It's true that as he ages they have a little, but if we compare him to players who are also his age he remains a far outlier.
And even against the world's best, in the a tournament that matters (ie, this world cup) he ended up being the second highest goal scorer, second highest assist giver, highest chance creator and second highest dribble completer[1].
So yes, I'd like to understand how randomness applies here.
[1] https://www.foxsports.com/soccer/2022-fifa-world-cup/stats
Consider giving a fair coin to 5 random people and asking them to toss it 10 times. The probability that one of them will get 10 heads is 1 - (1 - (1/2^10)) ^ 5, which is less than 0.5%.
However, if you manage to get 10^2 people to toss the coin, the probability of someone getting 10 heads is about 0.10. This number goes to ~1 with about 10000 coin tossers.
Let's say you manage to get 10k people to somehow toss the coin, and one person, say Mr. A gets 10 heads in a row (as mentioned, the probability of this happening is close to 1).
With enough people tossing coins, you are bound to get a Mr. A. Should Mr. A be hailed as having special skills?
No, not really. Mr. A was just lucky. He was in the right place at the right time. The probability of him getting 10 heads in a row is still only 1/2^10. It just so happened that he was the person who got 10 heads out of the 10k people tossing coins.
Bottom line: With large enough sample sizes, even extremely unlikely events are bound to happen.
Let me clarify again: I'm not saying that Messi is Mr. A!
Yes, of course random walks are a thing. But that doesn't mean that skill isn't also a thing.
In an adversarial, high stakes game where there can be only one winner (like sports, but unlike the stock market where there can be multiple winners) differences in skill show up in statistics well.
There are techniques like true score theory[1] that separate skill from luck by looking at variation (which is essentially a way of looking at reversion to mean as I mentioned earlier).
Sustained performance over time when looking at skill-based statistics in sport (eg, passes completed in soccer) is not something where a random walk applies.
> I'm not saying it directly applies here, but it's a caveat worth mentioning.
No, it's not. It's worth mentioning why it doesn't apply here, but by just mentioning it you imply (incorrectly) that it does, which is both misleading an wrong.
It's interesting that you are objecting to my argument by referring to the true score theory, which quite literally provides a caveat to attributing skills to the observed outcomes.
> you imply (incorrectly) that it does
Of course it does because sports outcome are random. Randomness is not the only factor, but it certainly is one.
It's a very different sport and likely both would've not been that huge in each other's steps.
What I mean is that the sport is very different from what it was in the 80s, there was a different set of required skills back then and now.
The amount of fouls and violence that 80's football had was a different level, go watch the Maradona documentary, Diego would get punches in the guts every few minutes and there was no VAR or tv coverage like we do today it was not easy to see and spot.
Would've Messi thrived in such a sport the same way he did in the 2000s, when teams played very different strategies and football, when he would've needed to get immensely stronger phisically and be able to get beating after beating? Those fouls weren't even yellow cards back then, today all of those would be straight reds.
Maradona needed to put on 10 kilograms of muscles in Italy to be able to do well and completely change his play style.