Stumbling and Mumbling

Goalkeepers & the action bias

It's a cliche that goalkeepers are mad. But this new paper shows that they might also be plain wrong. A group of Israeli academics looked at a sample of penalty kicks from top matches around the world, and found that keepers' chances of saving them would be much higher if they stood still, rather than diving.
They estimate that a custodian of the onion bag who kept still would have a one-in-three chance of making a save, compared to a one-in-seven chance if he dived.
However, keepers very rarely stay put. In 93.7% of the 311 kicks studied, they dived, even though 28.7% of kicks went down the middle of the goal.
This suggests the best goalkeepers don't optimize their chances of saving spot-kicks. Why not?
There are several possibilities*.
One is that the purpose of diving is to put pressure on the striker. A striker who knows the keeper will dive must either aim for the corner of the goal or try to dummy the keeper, which adds to his chances of missing. But a striker who knew the keeper would stay put would possibly have an easier job.
Another possibility lies in the mix of social norm and regret minimization. A keeper who dives and fails to save a pen gets no blame. He's expected to dive and miss. But one who stays still and fails would get stick: "why didn't you try to save it?" he'd be asked.
Perhaps keepers put a higher priority upon not getting flak than upon maximizing their chances of saving. As Keynes said, it is better for one's reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.
This problem, though, might not be confined to goalkeepers. Governments and bosses are also expected to do things, even though inaction might be best. "Just stand there" might be good advice for them too.
* For example, a diving save looks great, and keepers value the small chance of this more than they do the bigger chance of a routine save. Or perhaps there's a social norm - revealed by the stick Nani got recently - against making one's opponents look stupid, which a standing save would do.

Is the FA Cup draw fixed?

Another Cup draw, another easy match for Chelsea. There was only a one-in-15 chance that they would have been drawn at home to a League One side today. And it came up.
Of course, rare events do occur - that's the inevitable nature of the draw. But it's amazing how often they come up to benefit the money launderers. Last year, I calculated that there was only a one in 500 chance of Chelsea's easy matches in the first three rounds being drawn by true randomness.
Barring Saturday's away match at Wigan, this year has continued the sequence of easy draws in the early rounds; they were home to QPR in the third round.
The question raised by this isn't just the footballing one. It's about the nature of statistical inference.  The fact that an event is prodigiously unlikely to have happened by chance is not proof that it didn't so arise. Which raises the question: what, if anything, can probabilistic statistics prove?

Newcastle and the rationalist error

If we can stop laughing, there’s an important lesson to learn from Newcastle United's troubles.  It’s that Newcastle’s board and fans are suffering from an illusion. It’s not just the illusion that Newcastle are a big club. It’s the belief that successful organizations can be built from scratch, if only you can give the job to the right man.
Very often, this is wrong. It‘s the rationalist error, believing that conscious human agency has unbounded powers.
Instead, successful organizations are grown over time by piecemeal improvements. Take the two most successful football clubs (I‘m ignoring mere money launderers who just buy success), Arsenal and Manyoo. Wenger and Ferguson took over teams with a strong core - some good players and a fanbase with a passing acquaintance with reality. They could therefore make piecemeal improvements, such as persuading players to be occasionally sober. Success emerged over time.
Of course, sometimes a genius will create a great team from nothing, as Shankly did at Liverpool and Clough at Derby and Forest. But such men are prodigiously rare, and it’s almost impossible to identify them in advance, or even after they’ve been in the job a while; Clough‘s first season at Derby, and Shankly‘s first at Liverpool were lacklustre. Had they been held to the same standards Geordies demanded of Allardyce, we might never have heard of them.
“Find a genius” is not a viable strategy.
My point here is not just a footballing one. Football can illuminate less important areas of life such as politics.  What Geordies don’t have - and what has got their team into its current position - is what Michael Oakeshott in this truly great book called the conservative temperament - a scepticism about rationality, a preference for the grown over the built, for the tried rather than the untried, for the actual rather than the possible.
But then, as Oakeshott said, “if the present is arid, offering little or nothing to be used or enjoyed, then this inclination will be weak or absent.”   

Football, and happiness

Here at IC Towers, we've been wondering what are the best and worst teams to support, from the point of view of maximizing happiness?
The natural answer - Arsenal - won't do. Sure, they play the best football. But this is  offset by the fact that it's hard to get tickets, and when you do, you're surrounded by tourists. And tourists have no more business being at football grounds than women or the middle classes. By contrast, fans of smaller teams get to have a laugh with their mates, and get  the civic pride of supporting  their local team and not being glory hunters.
This leaves two theories.
1. People adapt to their circumstances. This predicts that the happiest fans will be those doing well relative to the recent past - Watford, West Brom, Man City - whilst the unhappiest will be those doing badly - S****s, Sheffield United.
2. Memory matters. My Evertonian colleagues seem happy enough, even though they last won the league 20 years ago. And Paul rarely shuts up about Forest's European Cup  wins. This suggests that the memory of good times can tide us over lean periods; it's not too bad to live in the ruins of an empire.
The thing is, these two theories conflict. If Forest and Everton fans take pride in the glories of 20-30 years ago, shouldn't S***s fans take comfort from the relative success of the last couple of seasons? But this seems not to happen, suggesting a non-linear relationship between past happiness and present happiness. Does this generalize outside football?
As the answer to the original question, how about Newcastle as the worst team to support? They don't have any glorious history, at least in living non-fictitious memory. And yet their fans seem never to have adapted to their team's mediocrity.

Wisdom of crowds in football

The wisdom of crowds has come to English football. Myfootballclub's takeover of Ebbsfleet means 20,000 people will vote on its team selection;  Hapoel Kiryat Shalom in Israel do a similar thing.
Can this possibly work? Brian and Gary are sceptical. So am I.
The problem is that there are two big conditions necessary for the wisdom of crowds to work, and only one is present.
The one that's present is that each individual's opinion must be independent, and not influenced by others or the media. This independence ensures that one man's erroneous under-estimate of a player's ability is likely to be offset by another's wrong over-estimate, leading on average to a correct opinion.
Now, Ebbsfleet don't get so much press coverage that opinion is likely to be overly moulded by a handful of idiot journalists. Nor are their fans likely to be so numerous and passionate as to cause information cascades or herding.
However, the other condition - that knowledge be fragmented and dispersed - probably doesn't exist.
Even if the crowd know tactics and the opposition better than the coach, there are some things the coach should know better: how fit particular players are;  how well they're doing in training; who's available on a cheap loan or transfer; and so on.  In this respect, the coach has an edge, and should have the autonomy to use it.
For this reason, I doubt this experiment will work. Which means that if it does, there's a threat to managers in all businesses; if crowds really can supplant football coaches, why should any boss in any business be superior to democratic control?
This is not to say, though, that democracy has no place in football. Quite the opposite. Myfootballcub are just going the wrong way. Rather than replace the coach, there's a case for the crowd electing club chairmen - Barcelona seem to cope with such a system - or perhaps even the coach himself; as I've said, chairmen are terrible at appointing coaches, so seem to have no skill that a crowd couldn't have.    

Low-powered incentives

This, I'm told, is the payslip of John Arne Riise, perhaps the world's best-paid bankrupt.
What's curious is just how low the bonus payments are, relative to his basic wage; appearance money and points bonuses account for just 3.5% of basic salary, albeit (I guess) for the month of August when only a few games were played anyway.
This suggests incentives are quite low-powered at Liverpool.
Which raises the question: is this rational? The case for bigger incentives might seem obvious - they'd motivate players more.
But there is a case for lower incentives. There's the Yerkes-Dodson effect, which says excessive motivation can lead to worse performance - a fact corroborated by some cunning economic experiments.   And high incentives might lower team morale, if players' disappointment at losing money causes them be become more critical of team-mates' errors.
Which raises the question. What is the optimum ratio of basic pay to incentives for players? Might it vary from team to team, or even from position to position?

The cost of ambition

Sammy Lee’s sacking by Bolton Wanderers raises a general point - that ambition can be economically damaging as it can lead to a misallocation of resources.
It’s widely agreed that Lee was an excellent assistant manager, but a poor boss, partly - it seems - because his efforts to assert his authority backfired.
Lee’s ambition to be boss has been bad for Bolton and perhaps for him too. Both parties might have been better off if Lee had shown less ambition and more self-awareness - if he‘d known that he was a fine number two but not a boss, as Portsmouth‘s Joe Jordan seemed to realize.
I suspect the Stupid Party and William Hague made a similar error in 1997. If Hague had figured in 1997 “I’d be a poor leader as I’m insufficiently telegenic and too young; my considerable skills would be better used in other roles” the Stupid Party might have been stronger.
And of course there are countless companies which have illustrated the Peter principle, by promoting people beyond their competence.
So, why does this happen? I reckon there are at least three problems:
1. Directors (and voters?) are bad at spotting talent. A man’s over-ambition would be no problem if the people hiring the boss could spot that he wasn’t cut out for the job. But they can’t - especially, but not only, if they are football chairmen.
2. Wage differentials between top bosses and their juniors are huge.  It pays better to be a bad boss (subject to keeping your job) than an excellent worker. So people go for the boss’s job simply for the money, not because they’d be good at it.
3. Autonomy is limited. People often want to be boss simply because it’s the only way to get freedom over one’s job, to make the difference to an organization they think you can make.
It’s natural enough for people to be ambitious, and to be over-confident about their abilities. But is it really rational to have organizational structures that increase vulnerability to over-ambition?

Rawls, Wenger and work

One of John Rawls' most famous remarks is that the distribution of talent is "arbitrary from a moral point of view". An even greater man seems to agree:

“I have a lot of respect for people, not because of their talent but for what they do with their talent and how they get the maximum from their talent,” [Arsene] Wenger said. “They are really the quality people. What do you do to get talent? You have the right genes, or the right parents. But what you do with that talent is down to you."

This, though, raises the question. Is there really a substantive difference - one deserving differences in how much one is respected - between having talent and making the most of it? Is making the most of one's abilities really "down to you"?
Two things make me doubt this.
One is that the capacity to make the most of one's ability - to work and practice hard - might itself be a natural talent. Why should we assume that football (or musical or intellectual) talent is genetically determined but a capacity for hard work is not?
Secondly, how much effort one makes will be influenced by one's upbringing, something over which one has little control. Someone who's brought up surrounded by poverty could easily and reasonably infer that hard work doesn't pay. A cliched scene in 1960s kitchen-sink dramas goes thusly:

Father to wayward son: "Why don't you knuckle down and work hard, me lad?"
Son: "Aye. And look where hard work got you. Slaving down t'pit all your life for nowt."

By contrast, someone raised among richer people will see the benefits of hard work, and be more inclined to put in effort.
Arsene is not to be blamed for not seeing this second point. In football, it's clear that hard work does pay. But football is perhaps unusual in this regard.
What I'm saying here is that hard work is not necessarily morally admirable, and the poor especially are not to be condemned for being lazy, as it might  be a learned childhood response to their environment.

Brooking's wrong

In his playing days, Sir Trevor Brooking hurt my heart. Now he's hurting my brain, with his claim that the influx of foreign players is hurting English football.
Let's grant - which is highly doubtful - that there's a correlation between the strength of a national team and the proportion of foreigners in its league: Italy, the World Cup holders, have relatively few foreigners in their league, for example.
The question then arises - what's the direction of causality? Are there many foreigners in a league because there's a lack of native talent? Or are native players talented, but not getting the opportunities because of a large supply of foreigners?
There's one obvious test: look at the prices of native players. If native talent were scarce, prices would be high. But if it were abundant but overlooked, prices would be low.
And the money suggests native English talent is very scarce. Just look at the summer signings. Kieron Dyer and Scott Parker - at best, players on the fringe of the England side - cost £7m a piece. Darren Bent and Nigel Reo-Coker cost £25m together. That's more than the entire foreign-born Arsenal side that demolished Portsmouth  on Sunday.
So, isn't it obvious that the influx of foreigners is a symptom of the ineptitude of English footballers, not a cause?

Keane, MacIntyre and the virtues

The Times - peace be upon it - provides wonderful vindication today of my theory that the deepest insights into the human condition come from the back pages of a newspaper, not the front.
The front page lead is some copper talking unutterable tosh. On the back, we get this from Roy Keane:

Why is there such a big attraction with London? It would be different if it was Chelsea, Arsenal or maybe [my emphasis - CD] Tottenham, but when they go to a smaller club just because it’s in London, then it’s clearly because of the shops.
“Their priorities are not the same as mine. We will do the best for our players’ families, but we’ve had a player this summer who didn’t even ring us back because his wife wanted to move to London. And shopping was mentioned. It might astonish many people, but it’s true.
“That’s not a football move, it’s a lifestyle move. To me that player is weak."

What Roy's driving at here is something I've mentioned before - that big financial incentives can be counter-productive. When even average players are paid fortunes, their priorities change - from developing themselves as professionals to going shopping. The upshot is worse players.
But this isn't just a funny quirk of human behaviour. It raises a profound point about moral flourishing, made by Alasdair MacIntyre.
There are, he said, two types of goods. There are internal goods, the goods of excellence - being a great footballer in this case. And there are external goods, the goods of effectiveness - money, fame and laydees. The problem is that external goods always threaten to displace or undermine internal goods.
The "essential function" of the virtues, said MacIntyre, is to equip people to resist the corrupting influence of external goods. What Roy's calling for is for virtuous players, who can do just this.
And this is where there's a link with the Times' front page story about Peter Fahy's complaints about underage drinking. Of all the things Mr Fahy calls for, there's a big omission: he never calls for teenagers to be virtuous, in the sense of being able to drink like civilized people - that is, having a skinful without getting violent. As such virtues would make repressive legislation unnecessary, they are a vital support for liberty.
Could it be that Mr Fahy doesn't make this point because he knows (probably without being able to articulate why)  that society as it is currently constituted cannot produce a virtuous citizenry? Or could it be that a footballer with a violent past has a better grasp of moral thinking than a senior policeman?