7 ms·

I love watching extreme outliers in play - its one of the main reasons I watch. Guys like Messi, Jordan, Ali are so high above the standard (and often so differ

I love watching extreme outliers in play - its one of the main reasons I watch. Guys like Messi, Jordan, Ali are so high above the standard (and often so different) that they elevate the whole sport just by taking part.

rjtavares 12y ago
We have the rare opportunity of watching two top 10 forwards of all time at their prime at the same damn time. One of those sport rivalries to tell your grandchildren about.
- rohit89 12y ago
  Similar thing in tennis with Federer and Nadal. Nadal's stats on clay is incredible. He's lost just 11 matches and won 270 odd in the last 9 years.
  - NolF 12y ago
    I think an even better example would be Nadal v Djokovic on the 2012 Australian Open final. According to Nadal the best game he ever played and consolidated Djokovic as one of the greats. And you could see how one lifted the other up to do better and be better. Such an amazing game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Australian_Open_%E2%80%93_Men's_Singles_final http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Australian_Open_%E2%80%93_...
    - dasil003 12y ago
      What about Nick Kyrgios defeat of Nadal today at Wimbledon?
      - megablast 12y ago
        Well, one man can only dominate for so long.
      - kitd 12y ago
        Quote from Kyrgios before the game: "Between us, we have 14 Grand Slams, so it should be a great game". The guy's got a great future.
    - kamaal 12y ago
      That game was such a amazing thing to watch, I would be hesitant to assign a winner or loser to that game, I would say both won the game. I remember at the presentation ceremony the players were finding it difficult to stand due exhaustion and Nadal started his speech[Post match] with a 'Good morning' since it lasted so late into the night.
Jacqued 12y ago
I wonder if these kind of stats are available for players of past eras. I would be fascinating to see what Pelé or Maradona would look like compared to Messi ! It is true, though, that you only really become a football legend when you win the World Cup (or show some insane talent at the World Cup). Pelé, Maradona, Zidane, Ronaldo et al. all won world cups. And Pelé is considered the greatest of all time precisely because he won 3 world cups out of the 4 he participated in.
- dabeeeenster 12y ago
  Very much doubt it - it's all about http://www.prozonesports.com/subsector/football/ http://www.prozonesports.com/subsector/football/ Pretty impressive kit.
  - ninguem2 12y ago
    I don't understand the point of this link. Is this related to the comment you replied to or is simply spam?
psychometry 12y ago
The cricket player Donald Bradman [1] is the outlier among outliers. Even compared to greats like Michael Jordan, the statistical significance of his achievements almost defy belief. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Bradman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Bradman
- jquery 12y ago
  If you're willing to branch out beyond physical sports, Marion Tinsley [1] is perhaps even stronger, losing only 7 games in his 45-year career of checkers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Tinsley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Tinsley
  - qq66 12y ago
    I don't think checkers is comparable, since there's no luck component in checkers. In a physical sport with random winds/ground conditions/ball imperfections/bat imperfections/etc, you have to be that much better than your competitor to beat them consistently (and that margin varies by sport, where baseball, for example, has many more random factors than tennis).
    - jquery 12y ago
      This is a false conception people have about sports like checkers, chess, go, etc. It depends on how you think about luck. Sure, if you're an omniscient being who knows the entire decision tree for a given move in [checkers/chess/go/etc...], there's no luck, in the Monte Carlo sense. But, except for simplified positions, nobody is fully aware of the consequences of their move in these games. This "fog of war" is a good analogue for the random winds/ground conditions/ball imperfections that you mentioned in other sports. It's often why great players in these games sometimes lose to far worse players.
      - qq66 12y ago
        That's an interesting perspective. Thanks.
nly 12y ago
It's the same in tennis... Rafa and Federer have both been titans, in a class of their own, for years, but sport generally is just getting more and more professional, competitive and extreme as we hone our ability to analyse performance.
rickdale 12y ago
Another player to add to this list is the hockey player Pavel Datsyuk. IMHO he is the most underrated player of this generation, although a perennial all-star and stanley cup champion. The way he handles the puck and dekes people out is unreal. . . He is unique on this list as he is not a dominant superstar, but he is an unstoppable outlier.
abstairly 12y ago
I think one thing that's interesting is how this relates to things like pay equality. People throw their arms up and say "How the hell can a CEO pay themselves 1000 times what the lowest paid staff gets paid" But that CEO may be a "Messi". Some people really are 1,000x more productive/as talented as the average person. And so should be compensated accordingly.
- peter-row 12y ago
  Statistically, high paid CEOs are worth less than low paid ones. There's a negative correlation between CEO pay and stock performance.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  High pay isn't really the issue so much as spiraling executive pay while other wages are stagnating and the economy is screwed. Also, if tech was run like modern football, the engineers salaries would be far higher. Tech is more like the old days of football before the players got more control over their contracts.
  - greg5green 12y ago
    Definitely. Sports star salaries aren't keeping up with growing gate receipts, concession sales, TV DEALS, etc. Especially when you at the short careers and how injury can derail things. Owners/club execs are laughing all the way to the bank. It's almost more like a guy going broke trying to invest his life savings on a stock tip than a CEO. You fail to ascend to superstardom? You end up with no money, no roots since you've moved around 30 times in five years, few employable skills outside of being physically fit, but wait... you're not physically fit because your body is broken from years of abuse.
- x0x0 12y ago
  Besides the obvious inequality, and unlike Messi, ceos rig the game. If the company performs incredibly well, they receive dynastic levels of wealth. If they completely fuck up... they receive dynastic levels of wealth. If they're essentially fired for cause after 5 months... they receive enough wealth to retire ($7.3m for 130 days including weekends) [1]. If an already stunningly wealth ceo submits fraudulent expense reports trying to get in the pants of one of his employees (who doesn't seem to have been much besides eye candy), demonstrating at bare minimum incredibly poor judgement along with the possibility of sexual harassment, he's given dynastic levels of wealth ($40m) and merely made to resign. [2] In short, there's no performance requirement. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/14/technology/yahoo-ceo-no-severance/ http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/14/technology/yahoo-ceo-no-seve... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/backlash-against-hewlett-packard-grows-it-seems-mark-hurd-fired-because-company-scared-of-bad-pr-over-bogus-sexual-harassment-allegation-2010-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/backlash-against-hewlett-pack...
te_platt 12y ago
I've always wondered about what it is that kicks someone up from great to "how is that even possible?". For example Mozart being asked to remove a ring because his playing was so good an audience thought the ring was a talisman. It's one thing to be so good people think you cheat. It's another level when people think you are magic. Clearly opportunity, talent, and work play their parts, but there have been many people that have all three and don't turn out a Gauss, or a Newton, or a Pele.
- a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
  If you look into that wave of great central european composers most of them were third generation successful musicians/composers from big families. Natural selection in action. I'm sure genes played into it.
- te_platt 12y ago
  Actually, thinking about it a bit more I think there is a natural explanation. If measured ability follows a normal distribution then the farther out you go the more spread out (on average) individuals become. For example, draw a billion samples from the right half of a normal distribution with mean 0 and stddev 1. There will be more drawn between 4 and 5 than between 5 and 6. The extreme outliers will be in some sense more lonely. Edit: here are the most extreme values from a run of a billion draw with the distance to the next smallest value. 5.967211966 0.056293894 5.910918072 0.043174783 5.867743289 0.081026984 5.786716305 0.043416671 5.743299634 0.094533593 5.648766041 0.000088773 5.648737164 0.005932669 5.642804495 0.011669773 5.631134722 0.003206244 5.627928478 0.004643796 5.623284683 0.013723654 5.609561028 0.014653298 5.59490773 0.018714748 5.576192982 0.001690759 5.574502223 0.031026791 5.543475432 0.002331827 5.541143605 0.022237834 5.51890577 0.004242771 5.514662999 0.009347961 5.505315038 0.004298492 5.501016547 0.02271157
  - philwelch 12y ago
    "Ability" isn't a single variable either. There's a combination between natural talent and hard, determined work. For instance, many people thought Ricardo Quaresma and Cristiano Ronaldo had similar amounts of natural talent as young players, but Quaresma wasn't as determined as Ronaldo to become the greatest player in the world. Conversely, Michael Jordan's contemporary Charles Barkley didn't really have Jordan's natural talent, but made up for it by working exceptionally hard. So you have at least two (and possibly more) variables, all of which have to reach extreme outliers together, to produce an athlete like Messi, Jordan, or Gretzky.
bglazer 12y ago
Usain Bolt is an example of this. I remember being totally shocked when he ran the 100m in 9.59 [1]. Check out this awesome graph from the "Men's 100 m progression" wikipedia page. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nbjhpcZ9_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nbjhpcZ9_g [2]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/World_record_progression_100m_men.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/World_rec...
caligulatte 12y ago
Here's a thorough analysis that argues that Dennis Rodman was not just the best rebounder of all time, but that he dominated his position more than any other basketball player dominated theirs. http://skepticalsports.com/?p=112 http://skepticalsports.com/?p=112
lloeki 12y ago
Another outlier: Sébastien Loeb (paired with Daniel Elena) has been in a league above every one in rally. His abilities extend way beyond rally: you could throw him anything with four wheels and he'll pull something great out of it (see his team's 2nd place at Le Mans in 2006) The unfathomable thing is that in France, basically no one cares about his (and others) success, while everyone raves about the national men's† football team. † women's team apparently performs significantly better on the same period but it's a blackout too. I know why I'm not into football, the whole thing is pervasively biased in so many ways...
- MisterBastahrd 12y ago
  Not sure why that's unfathomable. Canada is nuts about hockey. Americans as a whole are indifferent at best, yet we share a border. Mexicans are crazy for soccer. If the US had the world's greatest soccer player, the majority of the country wouldn't care. Soccer is a sport that is played by about 30 million Americans a year, but it's a blip on the map at the collegiate and pro level here. People simply enjoy different sports, and the local culture reinforces it. Jim Brown was probably the greatest lacrosse player who ever lived, but his career was a footnote because the sport he played professionally was football, and he was an outlier at it.
- peroo 12y ago
  I watched rally for a few years, but lost interest after Loeb won his third straight WC. There was absolutely no suspense, everyone knew Loeb would win most of the rallies barring the winter courses. As for Women's football, there's a reason it's not really appreciated and that is the fact that the skill level is significantly lower. Far fewer women play, which results in less competition and less highly talented individuals. Another problem is that the goals are sized for men, while the women keepers statistically speaking are smaller and can cover a smaller area, which means it's far easier to score with cheap shots. It all makes for rather dull spectating, sadly.
- epsylon 12y ago
  Not true that no one cares about the success, but football is just much more popular than rally. Motor sports are incredibly expensive to practice and you can't expect them to have the popularity of cheap "universal" sports like football.
MisterBastahrd 12y ago
The most amazing part about them is their ability to adapt with age. The Michael Jordan of his first 3 years in the NBA was about attacking the basket with an insanely fast first step. The Michael Jordan of his second trio of championships didn't have that level of quickness or burst anymore, but he developed a post game along with a fadeaway jump shot that was virtually impossible to guard. The man had a 20+ point per game average after returning from retirement for the second time at age 40. I don't think the average person understands how quick and athletic NBA players are. A 40 year old man being able to play that game at that high a level with a terrible team around him for 82 games a season is insane.

rjtavares 12y ago

We have the rare opportunity of watching two top 10 forwards of all time at their prime at the same damn time. One of those sport rivalries to tell your grandchildren about.

rohit89 12y ago
Similar thing in tennis with Federer and Nadal. Nadal's stats on clay is incredible. He's lost just 11 matches and won 270 odd in the last 9 years.
- NolF 12y ago
  I think an even better example would be Nadal v Djokovic on the 2012 Australian Open final. According to Nadal the best game he ever played and consolidated Djokovic as one of the greats. And you could see how one lifted the other up to do better and be better. Such an amazing game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Australian_Open_%E2%80%93_Men's_Singles_final http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Australian_Open_%E2%80%93_...
  - dasil003 12y ago
    What about Nick Kyrgios defeat of Nadal today at Wimbledon?
    - megablast 12y ago
      Well, one man can only dominate for so long.
    - kitd 12y ago
      Quote from Kyrgios before the game: "Between us, we have 14 Grand Slams, so it should be a great game". The guy's got a great future.
  - kamaal 12y ago
    That game was such a amazing thing to watch, I would be hesitant to assign a winner or loser to that game, I would say both won the game. I remember at the presentation ceremony the players were finding it difficult to stand due exhaustion and Nadal started his speech[Post match] with a 'Good morning' since it lasted so late into the night.

Jacqued 12y ago

I wonder if these kind of stats are available for players of past eras. I would be fascinating to see what Pelé or Maradona would look like compared to Messi ! It is true, though, that you only really become a football legend when you win the World Cup (or show some insane talent at the World Cup). Pelé, Maradona, Zidane, Ronaldo et al. all won world cups. And Pelé is considered the greatest of all time precisely because he won 3 world cups out of the 4 he participated in.

dabeeeenster 12y ago
Very much doubt it - it's all about http://www.prozonesports.com/subsector/football/ http://www.prozonesports.com/subsector/football/ Pretty impressive kit.
- ninguem2 12y ago
  I don't understand the point of this link. Is this related to the comment you replied to or is simply spam?

psychometry 12y ago

The cricket player Donald Bradman [1] is the outlier among outliers. Even compared to greats like Michael Jordan, the statistical significance of his achievements almost defy belief. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Bradman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Bradman

jquery 12y ago
If you're willing to branch out beyond physical sports, Marion Tinsley [1] is perhaps even stronger, losing only 7 games in his 45-year career of checkers. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Tinsley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Tinsley
- qq66 12y ago
  I don't think checkers is comparable, since there's no luck component in checkers. In a physical sport with random winds/ground conditions/ball imperfections/bat imperfections/etc, you have to be that much better than your competitor to beat them consistently (and that margin varies by sport, where baseball, for example, has many more random factors than tennis).
  - jquery 12y ago
    This is a false conception people have about sports like checkers, chess, go, etc. It depends on how you think about luck. Sure, if you're an omniscient being who knows the entire decision tree for a given move in [checkers/chess/go/etc...], there's no luck, in the Monte Carlo sense. But, except for simplified positions, nobody is fully aware of the consequences of their move in these games. This "fog of war" is a good analogue for the random winds/ground conditions/ball imperfections that you mentioned in other sports. It's often why great players in these games sometimes lose to far worse players.
    - qq66 12y ago
      That's an interesting perspective. Thanks.

nly 12y ago

It's the same in tennis... Rafa and Federer have both been titans, in a class of their own, for years, but sport generally is just getting more and more professional, competitive and extreme as we hone our ability to analyse performance.

rickdale 12y ago

Another player to add to this list is the hockey player Pavel Datsyuk. IMHO he is the most underrated player of this generation, although a perennial all-star and stanley cup champion. The way he handles the puck and dekes people out is unreal. . . He is unique on this list as he is not a dominant superstar, but he is an unstoppable outlier.

abstairly 12y ago

I think one thing that's interesting is how this relates to things like pay equality. People throw their arms up and say "How the hell can a CEO pay themselves 1000 times what the lowest paid staff gets paid" But that CEO may be a "Messi". Some people really are 1,000x more productive/as talented as the average person. And so should be compensated accordingly.

peter-row 12y ago
Statistically, high paid CEOs are worth less than low paid ones. There's a negative correlation between CEO pay and stock performance.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
High pay isn't really the issue so much as spiraling executive pay while other wages are stagnating and the economy is screwed. Also, if tech was run like modern football, the engineers salaries would be far higher. Tech is more like the old days of football before the players got more control over their contracts.
- greg5green 12y ago
  Definitely. Sports star salaries aren't keeping up with growing gate receipts, concession sales, TV DEALS, etc. Especially when you at the short careers and how injury can derail things. Owners/club execs are laughing all the way to the bank. It's almost more like a guy going broke trying to invest his life savings on a stock tip than a CEO. You fail to ascend to superstardom? You end up with no money, no roots since you've moved around 30 times in five years, few employable skills outside of being physically fit, but wait... you're not physically fit because your body is broken from years of abuse.
x0x0 12y ago
Besides the obvious inequality, and unlike Messi, ceos rig the game. If the company performs incredibly well, they receive dynastic levels of wealth. If they completely fuck up... they receive dynastic levels of wealth. If they're essentially fired for cause after 5 months... they receive enough wealth to retire ($7.3m for 130 days including weekends) [1]. If an already stunningly wealth ceo submits fraudulent expense reports trying to get in the pants of one of his employees (who doesn't seem to have been much besides eye candy), demonstrating at bare minimum incredibly poor judgement along with the possibility of sexual harassment, he's given dynastic levels of wealth ($40m) and merely made to resign. [2] In short, there's no performance requirement. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/14/technology/yahoo-ceo-no-severance/ http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/14/technology/yahoo-ceo-no-seve... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/backlash-against-hewlett-packard-grows-it-seems-mark-hurd-fired-because-company-scared-of-bad-pr-over-bogus-sexual-harassment-allegation-2010-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/backlash-against-hewlett-pack...

te_platt 12y ago

I've always wondered about what it is that kicks someone up from great to "how is that even possible?". For example Mozart being asked to remove a ring because his playing was so good an audience thought the ring was a talisman. It's one thing to be so good people think you cheat. It's another level when people think you are magic. Clearly opportunity, talent, and work play their parts, but there have been many people that have all three and don't turn out a Gauss, or a Newton, or a Pele.

a8da6b0c91d 12y ago
If you look into that wave of great central european composers most of them were third generation successful musicians/composers from big families. Natural selection in action. I'm sure genes played into it.
te_platt 12y ago
Actually, thinking about it a bit more I think there is a natural explanation. If measured ability follows a normal distribution then the farther out you go the more spread out (on average) individuals become. For example, draw a billion samples from the right half of a normal distribution with mean 0 and stddev 1. There will be more drawn between 4 and 5 than between 5 and 6. The extreme outliers will be in some sense more lonely. Edit: here are the most extreme values from a run of a billion draw with the distance to the next smallest value. 5.967211966 0.056293894 5.910918072 0.043174783 5.867743289 0.081026984 5.786716305 0.043416671 5.743299634 0.094533593 5.648766041 0.000088773 5.648737164 0.005932669 5.642804495 0.011669773 5.631134722 0.003206244 5.627928478 0.004643796 5.623284683 0.013723654 5.609561028 0.014653298 5.59490773 0.018714748 5.576192982 0.001690759 5.574502223 0.031026791 5.543475432 0.002331827 5.541143605 0.022237834 5.51890577 0.004242771 5.514662999 0.009347961 5.505315038 0.004298492 5.501016547 0.02271157
- philwelch 12y ago
  "Ability" isn't a single variable either. There's a combination between natural talent and hard, determined work. For instance, many people thought Ricardo Quaresma and Cristiano Ronaldo had similar amounts of natural talent as young players, but Quaresma wasn't as determined as Ronaldo to become the greatest player in the world. Conversely, Michael Jordan's contemporary Charles Barkley didn't really have Jordan's natural talent, but made up for it by working exceptionally hard. So you have at least two (and possibly more) variables, all of which have to reach extreme outliers together, to produce an athlete like Messi, Jordan, or Gretzky.

bglazer 12y ago

Usain Bolt is an example of this. I remember being totally shocked when he ran the 100m in 9.59 [1]. Check out this awesome graph from the "Men's 100 m progression" wikipedia page. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nbjhpcZ9_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nbjhpcZ9_g [2]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/World_record_progression_100m_men.svg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/World_rec...

caligulatte 12y ago

Here's a thorough analysis that argues that Dennis Rodman was not just the best rebounder of all time, but that he dominated his position more than any other basketball player dominated theirs. http://skepticalsports.com/?p=112 http://skepticalsports.com/?p=112

lloeki 12y ago

Another outlier: Sébastien Loeb (paired with Daniel Elena) has been in a league above every one in rally. His abilities extend way beyond rally: you could throw him anything with four wheels and he'll pull something great out of it (see his team's 2nd place at Le Mans in 2006) The unfathomable thing is that in France, basically no one cares about his (and others) success, while everyone raves about the national men's† football team. † women's team apparently performs significantly better on the same period but it's a blackout too. I know why I'm not into football, the whole thing is pervasively biased in so many ways...

MisterBastahrd 12y ago
Not sure why that's unfathomable. Canada is nuts about hockey. Americans as a whole are indifferent at best, yet we share a border. Mexicans are crazy for soccer. If the US had the world's greatest soccer player, the majority of the country wouldn't care. Soccer is a sport that is played by about 30 million Americans a year, but it's a blip on the map at the collegiate and pro level here. People simply enjoy different sports, and the local culture reinforces it. Jim Brown was probably the greatest lacrosse player who ever lived, but his career was a footnote because the sport he played professionally was football, and he was an outlier at it.
peroo 12y ago
I watched rally for a few years, but lost interest after Loeb won his third straight WC. There was absolutely no suspense, everyone knew Loeb would win most of the rallies barring the winter courses. As for Women's football, there's a reason it's not really appreciated and that is the fact that the skill level is significantly lower. Far fewer women play, which results in less competition and less highly talented individuals. Another problem is that the goals are sized for men, while the women keepers statistically speaking are smaller and can cover a smaller area, which means it's far easier to score with cheap shots. It all makes for rather dull spectating, sadly.
epsylon 12y ago
Not true that no one cares about the success, but football is just much more popular than rally. Motor sports are incredibly expensive to practice and you can't expect them to have the popularity of cheap "universal" sports like football.

MisterBastahrd 12y ago

The most amazing part about them is their ability to adapt with age. The Michael Jordan of his first 3 years in the NBA was about attacking the basket with an insanely fast first step. The Michael Jordan of his second trio of championships didn't have that level of quickness or burst anymore, but he developed a post game along with a fadeaway jump shot that was virtually impossible to guard. The man had a 20+ point per game average after returning from retirement for the second time at age 40. I don't think the average person understands how quick and athletic NBA players are. A 40 year old man being able to play that game at that high a level with a terrible team around him for 82 games a season is insane.