Game is far simpler than tactical analysts claim

Science isn’t irrelevant in sport, but intellectuals are overcomplicating what many have discovered naturally and organically.

Everton striker Wayne Rooney celebrates his famous goal from his own half against West Ham. Picture: AFP.

Conventional wisdom says that the industrial revolution was a triumph of intellectuals. The theoretical breakthroughs of Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle inspired the creation of the steam engine and the like. Indeed, technology is often defined as “the application of scientific knowledge to practical projects”.

This would have come as some surprise to Thomas Newcomen, however. Biographies of the inventor of the steam engine reveal that he was a semi-literate lay preacher who knew nothing of Hooke or Boyle. Instead, he patiently tweaked his machine, increasing its effectiveness and, therefore, profitability. His machines were not created by theory, but through trial and error.

The great iconoclast Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this the “scientism fallacy": the tendency to over-intellectualise the expertise of craftsmen. This has become rife in sport, too, with a classic case involving Richard Dawkins.

The zoologist offers this as an explanation for how a baseball player catches a ball: “He behaves as if he had solved a set of differential equations in predicting the trajectory ... At some subconscious level, something functionally equivalent to the mathematical calculations is going on.”

This explanation would surprise a baseball player, however. Gerd Gigerenzer, an academic who, rather unusually, studies humans in natural settings rather than labs, has found that players typically rely not on equations but heuristics (rules of thumb). “The gaze heuristic is the simplest one and works if the ball is already high in the air,” he writes. “Fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so the angle of gaze remains constant.”

We see the scientism fallacy in certain types of football analysis, too. After matches, a small army of boffins seek to explain what has happened using jargon and maths. The following example from a tactics website tells its own story: “The first overload in the ball-near space is created from the right centre back pushing up as he is completely free, forming a 4v3 superiority down the flank. This is primarily resulting from the lack of shifting by the team (especially in the two strikers), resulting in poor horizontal compactness.” But you will not be surprised to hear that these explanations come as a shock to the managers who are being analysed, as Marina Hyde of The Guardian has noted. Borussia Monchengladbach coach Dieter Hecking said: “Today there are even websites, presenting alleged thoughts of us coaches after the game. I have read them once after a Wolfsburg game. I was wondering, ‘Am I supposed to have come up with these highly complex things?’ ”

Dieter Hecking. Picture: AFP.

The German FA’s head of coaching education, Frank Wormuth, made a similar point, talking of theorists “seized by a canvas with colour patches, wondering what the painter wanted to tell them, and afterwards pay a lot of money for it. What did the painter want to tell us? Nothing. Perhaps he had just had a bad day.” In other words, intellectuals are overcomplicating — and often misconceiving — what practical people have discovered naturally and organically.

This is not to say that science is irrelevant in sport. There is much to learn in (relatively) simple domains such as physiology, nutrition, medicine, etc. Science can also highlight biases or oversights in the conventional wisdom in areas such as recruitment and tactics, as the book Moneyball has revealed in baseball. The work of academics such as Chris Anderson and Stefan Szymanski has revealed interesting patterns in football, too, which managers would do well to understand.

The problem is the tendency to prioritise intellectualism over practical experience. To return to technology for a moment, James Dyson trialled 5,126 prototypes to create his revolutionary vacuum cleaner, yet had little need for theories of airflow dynamics. Indeed, these theories were later reformed to accommodate what Dyson had learnt. The same happened in the industrial revolution, where Nicolas Leonard Sadi Carnot, a French physicist, created his laws of thermodynamics after examining machines such as the steam engine. This was a seminal event but note the direction of causality. Theory had not driven practice, but the other way around.

This may seem curious. How can technologies emerge without a guiding theory? For much the same reason that football tactics advance without managers having an intimate understanding of, say, statistical regression: namely, the power of evolution. The process of clashing with rival teams highlights weaknesses, forcing a constant process of re-evaluation and reform. This is not just a battle of ideas, but of survival. If a manager keeps losing, he is sacked.

Football is a domain, then, where protagonists have what Taleb calls “skin in the game”. It is not just managers who disappear when they fail to perform, but players, too. Wayne Rooney learnt to play on the street, hour after hour, building up practical expertise. As Taleb puts it: “The [sportsman] has no clue about the exact heuristic, but he goes with it — otherwise he would lose the game to another, non-intellectualising competitor.”

Imagine lecturing Rooney on theoretical biomechanics to help him to kick the ball more accurately. It would be like trying to assist Newcomen by furnishing him with a textbook on thermodynamics.

Coaches (and scientists) can give practical guidance, of course. Marcel Desailly, for example, improved his speed by resisting the tendency to lean back. But these are mere nudges to a process thoroughly grounded in organic experience. The perspective of Dawkins — that Rooney is using differential equations subconsciously — is a category mistake.

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola. Picture: AP.

My guess is that most managerial knowledge is also theoretical rather than contextual — encoded in heuristics and passed down through apprenticeship and experience of playing or watching. Pep Guardiola, for example, did not use equations to drive his tactical revolution but had a hunch derived from his education under Johan Cruyff, along with periods in Italy and Mexico, tested it, discovered its strength and weaknesses, and then slowly perfected it.

Of course, science sometimes leads directly to practical applications. The atom bomb emerging from relativity is a case in point. In general, innovation is a complex interplay between theory and practice, with the latter the principal driver.

Taleb offers a classic story from antiquity where an old wagon in the Phrygian city of Gordium had its yoke tied with a multitude of knots. These were so tightly entangled that it was difficult to figure out how to unravel them, and an oracle declared that the person who could do so would rule all Asia. Intellectuals pondered it, theorised about it, and sought complex solutions. Alexander the Great, a more practical chap, drew his sword and with a single stroke, cut the knot in half.

“People who have always operated without skin in the game seek the complicated ... and avoid the simple like the plague,” Taleb writes. “Practitioners, on the other hand, have the opposite instincts, looking for the simple ... and the effective.”

The Times