If I were to just type that United are playing badly some United lifelong supporter is going to barge in whose father was a United fan, whose grandfather was a United fan, whose great grandfather was a United fan and tell you that the stats show that Ten Hag has scored more points than SAF or Klopp or Mourinho or whoever. When I see such people and there are millions of them worldwide and especially in the UK I automatically wonder if you have to be low IQ to be a football fan. You don’t need stats to tell you that United are terrible. If you have eyes you can see that they are scrapping through and not heading in the right direction. On the other hand if you can understand football you could have figured out that Chelsea on the other hand for all their defeats are headed in the right direction. They might be down in the points table but there is a plan that is slowly working at Chelsea. If you just give it time they will be in the reckoning sooner or later. How is something as basic as this not evident to people.
Generation PlayStation has created an attribute/statistic-based understanding of the game, which offers a half-formed, incomplete appreciation of football.
I would argue using both is probably the best: your head and stats.
Statistics are an invaluable tool in all aspects of life, don’t get me wrong. But they are never the whole picture
Just like anything, context matters but you don’t get the whole picture without stats either. The socalled eye test is also flawed because people have biases and don’t look at games/players the same way.
Stats are a useful tool to challenge our own biases.
Statistics are like a bikini, they show a lot, but not everything.
Yeah exactly, how can Casemiro be bad if he’s 89 on Fifa?
Or, how can City be top of the league when they’re only creating 2.09 g/a % ratio £ € per minute??
I wrote a big thing saying that OP was wrong, but for the sake of balance: This is also incredibly true. I just don’t think it explains the behaviour that OP was pointing to.
PlayStation? More like Championship Manager ‘93
Memories of hours on that. Me as Portsmouth, him as Port Vale. I won the League and League Cup, he won the FA Cup. Those were the days
I have 30+ yo mates who have never been a gamer and still technically know so little about their biggest hobby (footy). Just look at channels like Sky and how the most stupid failures of managers are now pundits criticizing the very best active managers using similarly stupid superficial logic. Football is getting more complicated and many are just too damn stupid to keep up. Specially in recent years, it’s been more obvious than ever. The best keepers or strikers of an era say shit like “keepers shouldn’t play it short by feet” or “strikers shouldn’t tire themselves working too muchnfor the team”…
TLdR; In all fields whenever there is a relatively sudden evolution, there are some who can’t handle it and get stuck in the past. Football used to be an easy to grasp hobby for all ages, it’s only natural that number is quite larger here.
From the American perspective I think it’s what you mentioned paired with how the game is taught on a youth level. Teaching the game correctly is always sacrificed for short term success. Everything is so result driven at the youth level it’s no surprise that when they become adult fans a lot of nuances are missed in favor of being able to spout stats like Ten Hags point total or whatever.