The Science of Luck and Skill

Every four years the world gathers to remind Americans that soccer is boring. The World Cup arrives, a billion people weep with joy, and everyone who wasn’t indoctrinated before the age of six sits there waiting for something…anything to happen. Then suddenly it almost does. Then just as quickly it doesn’t. Then it almost does again. This is the rhythm of the world’s most boring game.

It’s “the beautiful game,” and for most of my adult life I’ve been patiently informed, usually by someone who calls it fútbol, that I simply lack the sophistication to appreciate it. But they’re wrong. Soccer isn’t beautiful. It’s boring, and it has nothing to do with sophistication.

The Better Team Loses Almost Half the Time

One of the best ways to determine how much luck is involved in a sport is to measure how often the worse team beats the better one. If the favourite wins 80 per cent of the time, that’s a high-skill sport: the better side reliably prevails, and the remaining 20 per cent is luck. If the favourite wins 55 per cent of the time, you’re watching something closer to a coin flip.

By this measure soccer is the most random major sport there is. The favourite fails to win 45 per cent of the time. That’s higher than baseball (44.1 per cent), hockey (41.4 per cent), basketball (36.5 per cent), and football (36.4 per cent). Compare that to tennis, where over five sets the favourite loses only about 21 per cent of the time. In other words, play long enough and skill wins out. In an average ninety-minute soccer match, the better team is only slightly more likely to win than the better player is in a single hand of poker. Both are basically coin flips.

The main thing that drives the randomness is low event count. A basketball game, for example, has around a hundred possessions per team. A tennis match has hundreds of points. But a soccer match can turn on a single shot hitting the crossbar, one bad call, or a ball bouncing off someone’s shin. There’s simply not enough scoring for skill to drown out luck.