Tim Harford takes this opportune moment to summarise a few key points from the book Why England Lose, by statisticians Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper:
- England do about as well as you’d expect, given their size, economic power, proximity to football’s “core” in Western Europe, and footballing history. That is, you’d expect them to usually make the last 16, sometimes make the last 8, occasionally make the last 4 and make the final very rarely. And they do.
- Managers don’t make much difference to a team’s expected performance.
- There is no correlation between the qualifying performance (which in this particular campaign was outstanding) and the performance at the championship itself.
Looks pretty convincing today. Perhaps Capello was secretly working on behalf of this book's publicity campaign.
A psychologist might say that when it comes to football we have a persistent excess of positive illusions.
Szymanski was my economics professor for my MBA. He does challenge sport orthodoxy on a regular basis (e.g. hosting the Olympics has a really bad business case). And the dude has a really good point - maybe there's nothing wrong with the team or the manager, maybe there's just something wrong with *our* expectations......
Posted by: Elemjay | June 29, 2010 at 06:04 PM