Football fallacies

Football is not only a game. Football is life. I think that everybody will agree. Maybe in the past football was only a game, but in present-day society it is not simply a game anymore, but it is fully lived experience like, say, work, study, or marriage. However, isn’t every game lived experience, even if it is of minor importance for you and society? Can we separate games from life, as if they don’t belong to it? Can we compartmentalize life into “real life” and games? Of course not. In fact, every game is life in a sense.
Being life football is also vulnerable to its fallacies and dilemmas. Here are some of them.

- The sunk cost fallacy. People commit it when they feel bound to what they did in the past instead of rationally evaluating what is better to do in the future, just in case it would be rational to break with the past, as I explained in a former blog. They don’t want to give up a bad investment because then they must admit that they have made a mistake. This fallacy is typically observed in sports, so AI tells me: “It describes the tendency of teams – coaches, managers, and owners – to keep starting underperforming players or retaining struggling coaches because of the massive resources (high transfer fees, large salaries, or draft capital) already invested in them.” It's also an example of an irrational choice. Irrational? It sometimes happens that a player gets a revival after some time, indeed, but generally it’s better not to wait for it. Be rational and evaluate a player on current merit and look for someone who plays better.
- The Reep Fallacy, named after Charles Reep by Bill Gerrard. Reep was the pioneer of soccer analytics, using statistical analysis to support the effectiveness of football. Reep found that a majority of goals are scored from sequences of three passes or fewer. However, what Reep didn’t see is that most passing sequences in a match are under five passes. Therefore, “it is no surprise that most goals are scored from passing sequences with fewer than five passes,” so Gerrard (see here). Reep counted only successful outcomes of the passes and didn’t count the unsuccessful outcomes. Analysis by others showed that the relationship between the length of passing sequences and goals scored is flawed.
- The football leadership dilemma, mentioned by Martin Mulyadi and Jeff Coker. From a business point of view, football clubs need financial sustainability. However, from a sporting point of view they need to win. The dilemma is that business-first decisions can undermine the core sporting ambition.
- The football brand dilemma is analysed by Matthew Guschwan in an article with the same title. Football teams are bound to particular places such as Manchester or Madrid. However, marketing efforts to attract international fans can shift the club’s focus. So, for commercial reasons the boards of football clubs may want to relate the club to well-known international brands, which give the club status and money. This may cause clubs to alienate their local supporters, since decisions regarding pricing or scheduling often prioritize global TV audiences over match-going local supporters.

With the exception of the first one, these are a few fallacies and dilemmas specific to sports, especially to football. However, human as footballers, football managers, and football analysts are they commit also common human fallacies like Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Ridicule, Cherry Picking, Circular Reasoning, etc. You find some here, applied to football.
To end this blog, I want to quote yet a few football fallacies from a blog promoting the book The Ugly Game by Martin Calladine:
- The lying table effect: the unshakable belief in a sacked manager that he did the right things despite the outcome.
- The great player effect: falsely assuming that because someone was a great player, they are more likely to be right about something. (But don’t we think so about many “great” persons?)
- The one cap wonder fallacy: the willingness of managers, fans and pundits to generalise from a few games.
- The League Cup fallacy: the belief that something you experienced yourself is representative of the true picture.

Enjoy the FIFA World Cup matches, but don’t fall in the logical traps of the commentators, analysts, managers, and players!