About evaluating results in sports and what can you learn from this

This blog post is on two sports: chess and football. More specific, it’s on how does an outside observer (typically) analyzes a game of chess or a game of football.

I’ll start with the following example: We have a chess match between A (a grandmaster) and B (a weaker player, but still a professional player). At some point there is this sequence of moves:
- A does a rather poor move, but a very creative and atypical on (everyone’s surprised);
- B doesn’t speculate the wrong move, and moves even poorer (but in a straightforward way; he doesn’t get creative);
- A goes on to win the match, even if he moved poorly at one time.
Now chess commentators come and see the sequence of moves. “Oh, what a great move by A player! So intriguingly well played. I didn’t see that coming. Such a lovely idea! Beautiful execution. I love it”. No commentator would dare to say “Even though we must admit that A won the match, he done a poor move at that moment. B should have speculated the mistake, because this is what the move was: a mistake.” So, I’d say that one chess player can win a game, and all his surprising moves (even though some might be actually wrong), will be glorified. Whoops, not-so-great thinking.

Now let’s go to another sport: football. Let’s have these situations:
- Player A is an forward; He scores 3 goals (he does a hat-trick);
- Player B makes 6 great passes to A, another 5 passes to other players, which directly result in 5 goals (his passes are transformed into goals);
- Player C is the goal keeper and catches 3 close-to-being a goal.

Now it’s the end of the match. Commentators praise A for scoring, C for keeping others from scoring, while B gets just a grade – 9 out of 10 (good grade, but still he gets no comments, no appraisal). Everyone else in the team gets one grade, B is one out of many. But no commentator would say “Hmmm, that was a good sequence of passes from B.”

Why is that? (now we’re getting somewhere) The goals given by the forward can be evaluated. The goals received (or not) by the goal-keeper can, with a small margin of error, still be evaluated. But the pass itself is mostly evaluated by the outcome. If I put a good pass, and no goal follows, then – “Hmmm, not that good play for B”. If I put a good pass, and a goal follows, then the result is “Hmmm, that was a good pass, but have you seen the goal of A? A was extraordinary!” You can’t easily say – “It was a good pass, no matter what the outcome was. Great passing by itself!”

What can you take home?
a. People in general (not only critics) tend to evaluate based on end result; While seeing a patient die shouldn’t make a surgical operation successful, you should take into account that the operation itself can be independent from the end-result (you can have a great surgical procedure, even if the end result is not great);
b. Sometimes, the most glamorous character in an event is not the star in the spotlight, it may well be a rather obscure character;
c. If football is a game played in teams, football evaluation usually takes place in the easy-to-spot results of individuals (goals given by the forwards or balls caught by the goal-keeper);
d. Most results are from a play of team, not the final executor.

I hope I did provide you with some insights too.