Note: This post comes with a Geek Alert!
Television has had a profound influence on football: the players, agents, business models of clubs, the relationship between league play and international football - you name it. Importantly, it also affects how people see and understand the game. Few television programs are more loved by fans than highlight shows like the BBC's Match of the Day, which has been on the air with interruptions) since 1964. MOTD is the Granddaddy of shows (like the German ARD's Sportschau or Fox Soccer Channel's Premier League Review Show that highlight all the day's action for easy consumption. It's not hard to imagine why most people would opt for watching an episode of MOTD over reading this blog or staring at an Excel sheet to understand football. Highlight shows are fun to watch, and their entertainment value is inevitably higher than watching two mid-table teams grind out a 1-0 result over 90+ never-ending minutes. It's kind of like the McDonald's version of watching a football match.
Highlight shows like MOTD are fun. But, curiously, they also make it more difficult for viewers to appreciate what really happens on the pitch during the 90+ minutes of a match.
The trouble with such shows is that they provide but a small and very unusual sampling of what happens during the course of a match. After all, the whole point of review shows is to highlight extraordinary feats of athleticism and skill, and do so in a very compressed period of time. This means we get to see all the great goals, unusual free kicks, and spirit-breaking counter attacks in less time than it takes to watch a single match from beginning to end, but we don't have to watch the badly hit shots that went astray, endless passes back to the goalkeeper, ping pong back and forth in midfield, or goal kicks that go out of bounds.
This matters in several important ways. First of all, it means that the football of MOTD is a game of outliers - things that don't actually happen all that much. This makes the task of analysts - to provide an accurate representation and analysis of what does happen on the pitch - more challenging. After all, the power of statistics is to zoom out from the very specific and unique. With the help of many data points of what happens in many matches over many weeks, statistics help us put what is normal and what ends up on the highlight reel in some kind of perspective to each other.
But highlight shows aren't just a compilation of outliers - a collection of unusual events. They also lead fans astray because they play to what psychologists would call their cognitive limits and biases. Because humans have selective memories and in fact often construct them from scratch, they are more likely to "remember" or "know" things they want to remember, things that happened recently, and things that are vivid and connected to emotions. MOTD plays into these ways of remembering things about events, and in fact makes people believe that football is what highlight shows reveal and what they recall from watching them.
But wait, wait: there's more. Perhaps the biggest problem with highlight shows is that they commit one of the cardinal sins of statistical analysis: they engage in selection bias. Selection bias - or a non-random sampling from the population of cases in this instance - comes into play because highlight shows are more likely to show successful than unsuccessful events than occur in real life - shots that go in, not those that go off target, for example. Thus, were we to conduct a study of what leads to goals, we would be likely to draw biased conclusions. This is a classic example of what scientists call selection on the dependent variable because we are restricting the variation of outcomes we are trying to understand.
As an analyst, one of the things that's always made me a little bit worried is people's tendency to remember the unusual and forget the mundane. We are programmed to selectively perceive events to be more likely than they are in reality - we remember the stuff we want to remember, not everything that actually occurs - and this tendency is only enhanced when coverage of the game is strongly tilted to almost exclusively focus on the rare events in a match that, admittedly, are fun and emotional and of course important.
So next time you have an argument at the corner pub, don't let the other side get away with making their case with a point about a single match or event they remember all too vividly from last weekend's coverage. Ask them to think of at least two - the more, the merrier! If they can't, they should have to buy you a drink.
Television has had a profound influence on football: the players, agents, business models of clubs, the relationship between league play and international football - you name it. Importantly, it also affects how people see and understand the game. Few television programs are more loved by fans than highlight shows like the BBC's Match of the Day, which has been on the air with interruptions) since 1964. MOTD is the Granddaddy of shows (like the German ARD's Sportschau or Fox Soccer Channel's Premier League Review Show that highlight all the day's action for easy consumption. It's not hard to imagine why most people would opt for watching an episode of MOTD over reading this blog or staring at an Excel sheet to understand football. Highlight shows are fun to watch, and their entertainment value is inevitably higher than watching two mid-table teams grind out a 1-0 result over 90+ never-ending minutes. It's kind of like the McDonald's version of watching a football match.Highlight shows like MOTD are fun. But, curiously, they also make it more difficult for viewers to appreciate what really happens on the pitch during the 90+ minutes of a match.
The trouble with such shows is that they provide but a small and very unusual sampling of what happens during the course of a match. After all, the whole point of review shows is to highlight extraordinary feats of athleticism and skill, and do so in a very compressed period of time. This means we get to see all the great goals, unusual free kicks, and spirit-breaking counter attacks in less time than it takes to watch a single match from beginning to end, but we don't have to watch the badly hit shots that went astray, endless passes back to the goalkeeper, ping pong back and forth in midfield, or goal kicks that go out of bounds.
This matters in several important ways. First of all, it means that the football of MOTD is a game of outliers - things that don't actually happen all that much. This makes the task of analysts - to provide an accurate representation and analysis of what does happen on the pitch - more challenging. After all, the power of statistics is to zoom out from the very specific and unique. With the help of many data points of what happens in many matches over many weeks, statistics help us put what is normal and what ends up on the highlight reel in some kind of perspective to each other.
But highlight shows aren't just a compilation of outliers - a collection of unusual events. They also lead fans astray because they play to what psychologists would call their cognitive limits and biases. Because humans have selective memories and in fact often construct them from scratch, they are more likely to "remember" or "know" things they want to remember, things that happened recently, and things that are vivid and connected to emotions. MOTD plays into these ways of remembering things about events, and in fact makes people believe that football is what highlight shows reveal and what they recall from watching them.
But wait, wait: there's more. Perhaps the biggest problem with highlight shows is that they commit one of the cardinal sins of statistical analysis: they engage in selection bias. Selection bias - or a non-random sampling from the population of cases in this instance - comes into play because highlight shows are more likely to show successful than unsuccessful events than occur in real life - shots that go in, not those that go off target, for example. Thus, were we to conduct a study of what leads to goals, we would be likely to draw biased conclusions. This is a classic example of what scientists call selection on the dependent variable because we are restricting the variation of outcomes we are trying to understand.
As an analyst, one of the things that's always made me a little bit worried is people's tendency to remember the unusual and forget the mundane. We are programmed to selectively perceive events to be more likely than they are in reality - we remember the stuff we want to remember, not everything that actually occurs - and this tendency is only enhanced when coverage of the game is strongly tilted to almost exclusively focus on the rare events in a match that, admittedly, are fun and emotional and of course important.
So next time you have an argument at the corner pub, don't let the other side get away with making their case with a point about a single match or event they remember all too vividly from last weekend's coverage. Ask them to think of at least two - the more, the merrier! If they can't, they should have to buy you a drink.
