Posts Tagged ‘soccer’
“Oops, I did it again”*…
(Roughly) Daily has contemplated game theory a number of times (e.g., here). The Generalist Academy offers a particularly poignant example…
Football [or, as it’s called in the U.S., soccer] has a lot of strange rules – like Ted Lasso, I still don’t understand exactly how the offside rule works. But the basic game is pretty simple: get the ball into your opponent’s goal, and prevent them from getting the ball into your goal. Scoring a goal against your own side is a rare and accidental embarrassment. Usually.
The qualification round for the 1994 Caribbean Cup had some unusual rules. No match could end in a draw; if the teams were tied at the end of regular time, they would go into sudden death extra time. But! Any goal scored in extra time would count as two goals. This was presumably done because this tournament, like many, used goal difference to break ties in the qualifying groups. (Goal difference = total number of goals they’ve scored minus the number of goals they’ve conceded.) So that extra time “golden goal” would give a team an edge in the overall competition. Little did the organisers know that it would also lead to one of the strangest football games ever seen…
A truly remarkable match: “Own-Goal Football,” from @GeneralistAcad.
* Britney Spears (Songwriters: Martin Max / Rami Yacoub)
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As we work backwards, we might send carefully-calculated birthday greetings to Félix Édouard Justin Émile Borel; he was born on this date in 1871. A mathematician (and politician, who served as French Minister of the Navy), he is remembered for his foundational work in measure theory and probability. He published a number of research papers on game theory and was the first to define games of strategy.
But Borel may be best remembered for a thought experiment he introduced in one of his books, proposing that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard will – with absolute certainty – eventually type every book in France’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This is now popularly known as the infinite monkey theorem.
Batter Up!…
Walt Whitman once said: “Baseball is our game — the American game: I connect it with our national character.” Still, as Foreign Policy observes…
As baseball has skyrocketed to popularity in other countries, particularly Japan and Latin American nations, the days of the United States claiming it exclusively are long over. The sport’s premier international tournament, the World Baseball Classic, featured 12 teams from across the globe this year, with the Dominican Republic coasting undefeated all the way to a championship. The tournament set ratings records in Japan, where it was the most-watched sporting event of the year and even out-performed the 2012 Olympics. In Taiwan, the WBC was the highest-rated cable program in the country’s history.
So, as one settles in for Game Three of this year’s Fall Classic– The Battle of the Beards— one might pause to consider Baseball’s place in the world…
A pick-up game in Havana, 2006
[More photos– from South Africa to Iraq to China– at FP]
Baseball has an estimated 500 million fans around the world… which ranks it seventh overall. To put that in context, the number one sport, football (or “soccer” as Americans are wont to call it), has 3.5 billion fans; the number two pastime, Cricket, 2.5 billion.
Plus– in this anniversary month of the first box score, a new site called Statlas, updates scoring, turning box scores into infographics.
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As we step up to the plate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1863, at The Freemasons’ Tavern on Great Queen Street in London, that the Football Association (or simply, the FA) was established; after centuries of football rules that varied from pitch to pitch, the FA established a single set of rules that has governed the game in England ever since. And given that it is the oldest such association in the world, its rules and procedures have shaped the game all over the world.
GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!…
Your correspondent is among the estimated 5.9 Billion people around the globe (roughly 80% of the world’s population) watching at least part of the World Cup. He has wondered, as he knows that readers have, what all of this time spent goggling goals has done to productivity in the global economy. Well, thanks to Mashable, the results are in:
Click the image above– or here— to see the full infographic. Spoiler alert: as readers will see, like some of more melodramatic players on the pitch, sales and productivity have taken a dive (e.g., 26% of workers surveyed recently reported taking time off work to watch…).
(TotH to Presurfer)
As we struggle to quell our emotions in the wake of the epic injustice to Ghana, we might recall that it was on this date in 1957 that Althea Gibson became the first African-American to win at Wimbledon. The finest female tennis player of her time, she won six Grand Slam singles titles and six more Doubles titles between 1956 and 1958.
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