The Most Exciting Sport in the World?

“The Root of All Evil?” Richard Dawkins latest foray against religion starts tonight and I’ve a few comments already on his puff-piece for the series in the Independent. While it may seem apt to ponder questions of life and death, this weekend also reminded me that there are much more important things.

Match Action. Photo by ukslim

Like the 3rd Round of the FA Cup.

This year it really ought to be getting serious scientific scrutiny because research suggests that football (played with the feet, not the wussy padded version with plenty of rest breaks played by the Americans) is the most exciting sport. You can pick up the paper proving this from arXiv: What is the most competitive sport? E. Ben-Naim, F. Vazquez, S. Redner. Naim et al have examined the results of regular season matches in the top-flight of five professional sports leagues, the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and Division One/The Premier League from England. They’ve concluded that football is the most exciting sport, followed by baseball, ice hockey, American football. Basketball is judged the least competitive.

This is where going back to the original paper is a good idea. Reading the releases from the BBC, New Scientist and Nature they all make the leap from football is the most competitive to football is the most exciting. Surely a coin-tossing event would be even more competitive, but I’m not sure that would make it exciting. While the results in basketball may be predictable I know many women who find watching young athletic men jumping around in their underwear much more thrilling than watching a load of men wrapped up in padding, running around a field and grunting. I don’t know why. I’m told it’s a girl thing.

The third round of the FA Cup would appear to be a good test of football. There’s nothing quite like it in American sports. It’s a knockout competition. I know Americans have knockout competitions, but they’re at the end of the season. The FA Cup runs in parallel to the league. The participants are also somewhat different. The American play-off teams are those who qualified by being the best in the league, for a variable definition of best. The FA Cup takes teams from anywhere.

What makes the third round special is that it’s the round that teams from the top-flight enter, so you have a weekend of matches where teams from anywhere could be playing each other. It’s quite rare for teams from the same division to play. If football is a game of upsets, then the 3rd round of the FA Cup is where you’d expect it to happen.

The Saturday games were a bit of a disappointment results-wise. I saw the Luton Town v Liverpool game, and it was interesting, but once Liverpool saw they were in trouble and stepped up a gear Luton were always going to be the likely losers. Congratulations to Liverpool for coming down from 3-1 to win 3-5, but there was a massive gulf in class between the teams.

I think that could be said to be the same for the results as a whole on Saturday. The biggest victory was the mighty Sheffield United (who? – exactly) who went down to Colchester. This is more explicable when you see that Sheffield were resting players because they’re concentrating on their League position. If they stay where they are they’ll get promoted to the Premier League at the end of the season, which will bring in far more money and prestige than any cup run. There were some heroic performances, notably a local team Nuneaton Borough who drew against Middlesbrough and Tamworth who held Stoke. It’s a huge achievement for amateurs to draw against professionals, but I don’t hold out much hope for them in the replays. I used to work in a shoe shop with someone who played for Nuneaton and I hope he gets to play in a top stadium, but now Middlebrough have had a warning I can’t see them going out. Saturday, I’d say, proved that football isn’t that competitive. The golden days of childhood with Yeovil Town beating the professionals (it always seemed to be Yeovil Town) may be over.

Sunday then proved me wrong. Orient knocked out Fulham, Burton Albion were unlucky to draw with Manchester United and Leicester, who are doing terribly in the Championship, came back from two goals down to knock out Spurs who were looking pretty good beforehand.

I think the FA Cup does show a flaw in the comparison. The paper notes that in recent years the Premier League has become less competitive. In the past the FA Cup was a distraction. It wasn’t unusual to rest players in league matches to leave them fresh for the Cup. Nowadays it’s the reverse. For the 2001 final Liverpool were far more interested in finishing fourth in the Premier League (and so qualifying for the European Cup) than they were in winning the final. The decline in competitiveness in the Premier League might not indicate a decline in football, but a change in priorities. The Manchester United team that drew against Burton was hugely expensive, the cost of any one Manchester player would have bought the entire Burton squad, but even so it was a weakened Manchester team.

Also the teams at the top in England five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago even twenty years ago are the teams that by and large are at the top today. Leeds and Blackburn both briefly made it to the top, but if you were going to bet who’d win the league in 2016 then you’d probably be safe with placing a bet on it being Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool or Manchester United. I don’t know if you can make that sort of prediction about American sports even five years from now because of the draft system. Americans get excited when a team wins three championships in a row. North of the Border, Celtic and Rangers have both had runs of nine.

The paper’s interesting because it shows you can apply maths to analyse everyday events. But it also shows that there’s a leap between what the statistics tell you and what conclusions you draw from them. Really, you have to be suspicious of any formula that tells you baseball is more exciting than ice hockey. —–