The Most Shocking Result in World Cup History
fivethirtyeight.com
fivethirtyeight.com
Statistics may generate interesting facts after an event but for populations of people as small as two soccer teams there's no way they can predict individuals' actions. Maybe it works better for baseball because each individual has a sufficiently narrow range of potential impacts, but in soccer each person can do relatively whatever they want at any time.
This world cup has been remarkably predictable on the whole. The favored team won the overwhelming majority of matches in group stages and in the rounds of 16 and 8. And most of favored teams qualified for the Cup in the first place. Soccer isn't unpredictable because of the impact of individuals or size of the teams or the nature of the game. It's just as predictable as any other sport, which is why bookmakers are able to set neutral odds that attract an equal amount of betting on both sides.
Of course there will be highly unpredictable results, and they will cause people to question the common sense idea that the most likely thing usually happens. Five Thirty Eight is a bit on their heels here because they have chosen to give themselves the job of explaining a predictable world to human minds that aren't built for understanding statistics. It's a difficult job and I don't envy them. This won't be the last time we see them talking about edge cases and outliers instead of just saying "The odds are right most of the time, which implies that sometimes they will be very wrong."
(Source: http://www.sportingintelligence.com/2014/06/24/bankers-and-b...)
Now baseball is another matter. A much more rigid game. Easier to predict.
You know, we see this all the time in politics. How many upsets over the years? The models need to be thrown out every year. But it's expensive. So the US media clings to their same old models and is "shocked" when an upset occurs. And then they usually search so fast for a reason, they miss the real reason in the process. Hollywood has been missing the mark too. They also need to throw out their models and start over. BADLY.
Anyway I sometimes wonder just how far away we really are from Asimov's "Psychohistory ".
This seems to assume that the US media is interested in having an accurate model of reality. I think it's far more reasonable to assume that the US media is driven by self interest, and 'shocks' and 'upsets' are part of what consumers are interested in. Speedy answers, not accurate answers. The model works for them.
To quote Steve Jobs from a Wired interview in 1996:
"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."
And, it's not like news media are the only people who try to predict elections. Eric Cantor and Mitt Romney had vested interests in winning their elections, but they still got it surprisingly wrong.
Based on what? I work in the film industry, and studio level (ie larger budget) projects are heavily data driven. Considering the slipperiness of the input factors, I think Hollywood does a pretty good job actually. Do your remarks have a quantitative basis, or are you expressing your dislike of Hollywood's output?
Story factors are almost impossible to quantify reliably. There are some popular story schema like the Hero's Journey, and some pacing guides, like Black Snyder's 'Beat Sheets' that look at the structure of many successful movies to make guesses about the optimum time for story structure - eg if it's an action movie you need a fight scene by minute 15, or the Villain has to be appear within a certain time frame and get x minutes of solo screen time - but those tools are fashion-driven and if anything they contribute to the cookie-cutter approach. Whenever someone produces a better-than-average guide to what makes popular movies tick, it is quickly imitated as widely as possible.
I've written several screenplays and dislike templates, but I don't know in detail what people want to see. When I write or am working on film production I just have to keep playing the story like a movie in my head and and attempt to gauge whether it's sufficiently involving and consistent over time. The bigger the budget, the more conservative production decisions are likely to be, since executives and biased in favor of repeatability.
World Cup knockout games are rare and are single-elimination. Same with U.S. elections. That makes it easier for the final outcome to be determined by outliers or lower probabilities.
Broader trends can still be predicted, though. It's not like North Korea just defeated Brazil 7-1...Germany is a well-known powerhouse. And in U.S. politics, quite a few people predicted that a protracted conflict in Iraq would hurt Republicans, and it did in 2006 and 2008.
Basketball is an instructive example --- as recently as 10-15 years ago, it was thought that this game couldn't be quantified/predicted nearly as well as baseball, that it had a lot of the same fluid properties of soccer and (US) football. Fast forward and a lot of work has been done to push basketball much closer to the baseball-side of the spectrum. Whose to say whether or not taking detailed data of every movement of every player in a soccer match might yield similar breakthroughs.
In soccer, you don't have a lot of data points to model against. The number of goals scored is typically low. Because of this, there is probably a higher level of uncertainty and variance in the outcomes of soccer games (and the prediction models as well).
Predictions on baseball teams probably fall through when a star player is injured.
Neymar wouldn't have marked Muller for the first goal. Nor would he have been at the back to clean up the second fuck up, and the many fuck ups thereafter.
Thiago Silva is an excellent defender who organizes his defense to ensure proper defensive shape. In his absence, David Luiz was in charge of the same, and he isn't a particularly great defender to begin with (decent attacker, sure, but not a good defender).
Further, football resists statistical analysis, unlike most American sports, because momentum plays a HUGE part. Upsets are a common phenomenon in football. Small teams beat the big fish ALL the time.
Which is exactly why their current models failed. The need to be flexible.
Lots of people lost money. Maybe it was done on purpose? The models I mean. Cause I bet someone made a fortune. Someone short-selling the game?
PS: Or maybe Neymar's injury was "managed". Humm.. a nice juicy conspiracy theory. Stranger things have happened in the game before.
The considerable amount of collusion required across fifa, the teams and players, multiple publishing industries, organizations, countries and cultures to have sports betting and publications like fivethirtyeight make shit up (to the point that they created a very detailed scoring system for their predictions, all for the purpose of lying about a lop sided 7-1 game) would have to be considerably large.
I think the the better, and frankly incredibly blindingly obvious, way to look at this is that this was just an unusual game that nobody expected and you can maybe take a break today from being suspicious about the whole world being manipulated by a nefarious few who conspire to create every fucking notable turn in history to screw you or someone else over.
But it's fun to think of "Illuminati".
My guess is that you're misinterpreting Silver's work and assuming he was "predicting" that Brazil "would" win. He wasn't, and didn't claim to. He said Brazil was more likely to win, and gave numbers to that effect (that in this case happened to be wildly wrong).
A poisson model is probably valid, but it should perhaps be refined a bit. Maybe it should account for a systematic drift if the whole team plays badly (or a vital player, like the goal keeper, has a bad day). But it's probably really hard to calibrate that, and it's probably not too relevant unless you want to model major upsets.
My reading of this 538 World Cup analysis is that the error bars are taken as being very large, and the relative numbers are mostly interesting as a means of comparing the impacts of various players and other factors in the model. Obviously there can still be major flaws in this method, chief among them being that the method tends to atomize the team's contributions. But that's not a horrible first pass, and still can yield some interesting insights.
Um, no. Please go read any statistics tutorial containing the word "standard deviation" to see one example of why you are wrong.
Thiago Silva is thought to be the best centre back in the world by most people. And by quite some distance. He provided leadership and organised that back four. Luiz, Marcelo, Maicon and Dante have never exhibited leadership qualities for their clubs.
I think that by suggesting Willian and Dante and Alves (even though Alves is ranked highly in the Guardian's top 100 list, he plays in the wrong position) would be adequate replacements was the biggest mistake.
Silver mentions that it was the lopsidedness of the score that made the game so surprising, and that the Elo model discounts increasingly lopsided games. As a consequence, this game would not be the "most surprising" game in the history of the world cup. Thus he removes the discounting term, re-runs the model, and poof this is now the most surprising game in World Cup history.
That just smacks of attempting to fit a model to one's intuitions. Was it any more "shocking" that Germany won 7-1 than that they were up 5-0 at halftime? I would presume that the "lopsidedness" discount is intended precisely to address the idea that once a team is winning by an overwhelming score the subsequent goals aren't really that surprising.
Really, though, a measure of "shockingness", at least as described in this piece, suggests more about what the Elo model cannot capture than it does about the subjective way that any one game was perceived.
(Although the league sometimes doesn't work like that either - I remember listening to Spurs vs Man Utd when Man Utd went in at half-time 3-0 down and ended up winning 5-3 in what is possibly the most epic half of football I've heard in 30+ years.)
Also, goal difference is important in leagues, so teams tend to play to the end even if the gap is large. Though I think this could be improved by changing to 2 points for a win, with a bonus point for scoring 3+ goals.
Edit: Also sadly, Turkey didn't make it to the World Cup in '98.
and is a paywalled API.
Nothing as dramatic as a 7-0 margin as suggested by the article's data though.
1) the psychological pressure put on Brazil's players to win the cup in their home turf by their local fans, worldwide fans, media and history of the team.
2) the injury of their most valuable offensive player.
3) the non-participation of their most valuable defensive player.
4) the failure of their coach with other international teams.
5) the general attitude of Brazilian football towards "Zogo Bonito", giving importance to offense and neglecting defense, against the very well organized team like the Germans.
it was pretty obvious that the Germans would dominate the game.
The shocking part for me was not the score. It was the psychology of the Brazilian defenders. They quickly lost their nerve. These players are supposed to be of world class, having played in top clubs and knowing how to handle pressure. I was wrong, apparently.
[Among semifinalist teams, only Argentina has maintained ball possession more often than Germany, and nobody makes more short passes per game than the Germans. Germany’s approach is to patiently work the ball into the opponent’s territory, passing it around until its players can create a high-percentage scoring opportunity. Brazil, on the other hand, loves to dribble the ball and create chances by taking on defenders in one-on-one situations.]
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/world-cup-semifinal-crib-...
So here's what happens in nearly every sport. A team focused on individual brilliance and passionate "opportunities" gets clobbered by a disciplined opponent who remains patient. Situations like this often turn into a rout.
The biggest one that jumps out at me is using single person to describe the teams. We generally describe a team as 'they' rather than 'it'. So we are more likely to see 'Germany’s win will also affect their odds in the World Cup final' than the way it's written in the article.
Has anyone else found any other Americanisms?
Offense (US) is Attack (elsewhere).
home-field advantage (US) is home advantage (elsewhere)
"Some of the goals that Brazil keeper Julio Cesar allowed were unavoidable, but he was not exactly Tim Howard in net. " (US)
would be [approx]
"Some of the goals that Brazil keeper Julio Cesar conceded were unavoidable, but he was not exactly Tim Howard in goal." (elsewhere)
Away from the article, the most jarring thing for a football (US: soccer) fan exposed to the US media is the use of "tie" instead of "draw". Of course there is also the US concept of an "assist" which has in fact now been embraced by the wider football community.
As well as differences in specific terminology, there is a broader and difficult to pin down difference in the "feel" of US coverage of football. To someone used to traditional football coverage it feels alien, maybe basketball or baseball translated into football rather than native football.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy American sport and love the rapid fire humour and passion of American sport journalism in all media.
There's another plural/singular one. It would more likely be 'in goals', or more colloquially, 'in sticks'.
> the use of "tie" instead of "draw"
That reminds me of another one, how the score is communicated. Americans say something like 'Germany won seven to one', I'd say 'Germany won seven one'. This then gets quite confusing for Gaelic football where we say things like 'Mayo won three twelve to one seven' (3 goals and 12 points to 1 goal and seven points)
The City Council is … The class is … The police are … The firefighters are …
The phrase "the police is" sounds so foreign to me, that I am almost certain I've never heard nor said it.
I hadn't noticed the wider use of singular groups previously, but that does make sense when you point it out. I suppose it was just more obvious because we rarely see american analysis of football outside of the world cup.
For programmers, we create an approximation to the real world and then refine the model as we (or the users) come across the imperfections.
Unfortunately, Nate probably still doesn't know how much he doesn't know.
> But there was almost certainly some bad luck for Brazil. It had more shots than Germany in the match
Comparing number of shots (or possession) is a bad metric if the playing styles are different.
Is the 538 model a good enough one? No - when we have two events it thinks are extremely unlikely (this and Netherlands-Spain 5-1), we should suspect that there's something going on it's not capturing.
Football is a highly unpredictable sport because individual contributions can completely change the course of a match. All it takes for a minnow to beat a big team is some organized defending and a lucky goal, like Switzerland vs Spain past WC.
In a sport where the margins of victory are small, it is difficult to apply statistical analysis correctly.
Germany was the clear favorite, better team, better individual players on most positions (especially in the crucial midfield) and better strategic education.
Dont think models need fitting to this kind of result