When the Game Does Not End at the Final Whistle
But that is not the only development that has challenged the incontrovertibility of the result. It is hard to criticize soccer’s embrace of data. Its benefits, without question, outweigh its drawbacks: It has served to make both fans and those who work in the game smarter, more self-aware and, possibly most significant, more open.
Soccer was, for a long time, deeply resistant to outsiders. Data has helped to break down that self-imposed and self-limiting barrier: Players, clubs and leagues now employ countless people who have come to the game from academia, from science, from all manner of nontraditional, nonsporting backgrounds.
At the same time, though, it has — unintentionally and, it has to be stressed, without a hint of malice — helped to foster the idea that the score line is not the only authentic way of gauging a game’s outcome.
Soccer is now so awash in data that it is possible to cherry-pick it to prove almost anything: that the player who seemed to be little more than a passenger was, in fact, crucial to proceedings; that the team that was heavily beaten had, despite appearances, played extremely well; and, through expected goals, the metric that has seeped the furthest into the mainstream, that the final score did not, in many ways, reflect the truth of the game.
There is nothing wrong with this, of course. It is not doing any particular harm, not even when it is deployed by those sections of both the legacy media and its somewhat more raucous offspring, social media, solely in the interests of confecting controversy. Quite the opposite, in fact: Despite the miasma of hot takes and clickbait that fans must now wade through, they are, without question, better informed about the sport they love than at any point in the past.
#Game #Final #Whistle