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.
I think the statistics tell that story as well, you just have to dive deeper. I think that nowadays most people have a functional illiteracy to math and statistics : they know the words but misunderstand the meaning. A lot of people know how points ranking is or xG, but they can’t tell you what the story behind it is.
Generation PlayStation has created an attribute/statistic-based understanding of the game, which offers a half-formed, incomplete appreciation of football.
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.
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??
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 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
Statistics are like a bikini, they show a lot, but not everything.
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.
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.
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.
United are mint, Chelsea are scrap.
People will watch Barca and defend Xavi saying he won the league. Fact is there are very few people who truly understand football.
Some statistics are useful, some aren’t, and some are selective - to push certain arguments.
I think it’s good the game has got more statistical, but now we have all this data, the art is in selecting and identifying which stats are meaningful. It’s a lot less precise than just plucking something arbitrary out of the air that people then use for their own agendas.
Take a club like Wolves. After reading about their financial troubles and from the early results I was convinced that they are going down. I don’t even know who their manager is atm. I doubt they are even getting paid in full. Look at the fight they are putting up. They are definitely staying up. You don’t see any such fight in United. Same goes for Everton. Everyone has written them off and they are really giving it all. That’s what sports is all about. You don’t need stats to judge Wolves or Everton. Just watch them play.
Alot of people never played the game outside of school breaks if that.
I do know any United fans who would claim we are anything other than terrible atm, but i know some who will try to use statistics to dissuade others from hopping on another “sack the manager” bandwagon and starting the process again from square one.
People love to misuse statistics and then blame analysts for them. Like the xG charts that had Chelsea around fourth and commentators would see it and mock chelsea fans for clinging to some belief that we were the fourth best team in England which nobody said.
One stat isn’t the whole conservation. It’s a point of evidence in an argument and gives you a basis to look deeper. Underperforming your xG once is “shit happens”, but as a trend, means you look deeper into why you aren’t capitalizing on general play
I’m going to answer you with statistics:
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The average Premier league stadium capacity is 37,000.
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Premier league is broadcast to 643 million homes.
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There are 3.5 billion fans football fans worldwide.
So three things:
- From a raw numbers perspective there will be shit loads of idiots who follow the Premier League who don’t understand nuance.
- The percentage of people who like football who have actually been to a Premier league match is infintesimal so they have limited feel for the actual real life game.
- Everyone watches it on telly and all telly does is ram stats down your throat.
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You start with how is it that people have so little understanding of football and proceed to slander Ten Hag and his style of football without looking at the current situation he’s in? He is not the best, he make questionable subs sometimes and can’t manage to hold a lead. He also hasn’t recruited well. But… You haven’t factored in the major injury crisis ongoing at the club since the start of the season and the problems with players and the SJR changes. No club as big as Man United should give the manager complete power on signing players. He’s not an expert in scouting, recruitment or statistics. Just because the owners make big money signings doesn’t mean they are the right signings. Plus EtH wanted De Jong, Antony, Kane, Kim Min Jae, Frimpong, Gakpo, Mount and Rabiot. He only got two of them and they were arguably the least important ones on the list.
United haven’t played the same squad two gameweeks in a row for more than a year. We have had major injuries to Shaw, Malacia, Varane, Lisandro, Mainoo, Amad, Wan Bissaka, Mount, Casemiro and several other players like Evans, Maguire, Hojlund, Eriksen, Amrabaat.
He also has had to deal with CR7, Antony, Sancho and Greenwood situations.
Add all that to the media pressure and the overall pressure that comes from being Man United boss, every little detail is scrutinised and covered.
Pochettino didn’t have to deal with all this. He has stable and supportive owners who have signed a shitload of talented young players and he has time. If Chelsea placed 17th he wouldn’t be sacked.
Most of the Man United fans including me will back EtH till the end especially after he led us to a trophy and 3rd on the back of one of our worst seasons in PL era.
You talk about IQs and then proceed to make a biased and absolute dogshit take on Man United. How is something as basic as this not evident to you? Maybe it’s your IQ.
United has had awful injuries and had quite a lot of awful VAR decisions. The only one that has gone our way has been the wolves one. We have been unlucky both on the field and off the field (not unlucky but there’s been a lot of distractions from football thanks to behaviour of the players: sancho, Anthony, greenwood, rashford brother, on-going sale process, etc).
Football is mostly subjective. You’re entitled to your opinion, I’m entitled to mine.
Cr7 fans
Isn’t that more a case of people not understanding how to interpret statistics properly?
You don’t have to be observant and attentive to follow stats. Most of these people who have watched football their whole lives still have no qualitative idea of what is going on, so they use the scoreline and other numbers as a cheat sheet.
That’s how you get lazy takes like “X Manager outclassed Y Manager” after every surprise or result, or “X Player played well” because he scored or assisted.