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The math is interesting, I'm not sure about the larger point he's trying to make however, as all the "bad" aspects of the sport actually arguably make it a bett
by tolmasky 12y ago
The math is interesting, I'm not sure about the larger point he's trying to make however, as all the "bad" aspects of the sport actually arguably make it a better sport:
1. If you want to prove that its a waste of time to watch soccer, its much easier to state how nothing relies on it. Trying to compare it to other time-wasters like basketball seems like a very strange exercise in subjectivity. Especially because I can easily make the competing argument: if the other sports more predictively give the expected results, then isn't it less useful to watch them? If I could predict the result of a game with probability 1.0, then it would be 100% useless to watch the game. What fun is it to watch a coin that always comes up heads?
2. It is separately well understood that games do not necessarily correlate with "expected" skill. Case in point, many tournaments switched from a everyone-plays-everyone model (that is far fairer) to a single elimination, precisely because it is noisier and thus more exciting.
- Daishiman 12y ago> 1. If you want to prove that its a waste of time to watch soccer, its much easier to state how nothing relies on it. Which is not even a good point for the author, since football matches have had profound significance; they have helped prop up and destroy military regimes (such as in the history of football throughout the military dictatorships of Latin America in the 70s), led to race riots, political activism, etc. I'd say that football is much more important in that aspect than we may think at first glance.