The World Cup is a random number generator
And at the end legends will be minted.
a story coming down from the past
especially: one popularly regarded as historical although not verifiable
a person or thing that inspires legends
You’re a results guy. You play to win every time you go out there, and wonder why anybody ever accepted Trust The Process as a hashtag in good standing. You certainly don’t stand for any excuses from losers.
Then you rock up to the biggest game of your life, the moment that could live in the minds of millions and your own as validation of everything you ever sacrificed, everything you ever achieved, everything you ever believed. You rack up 2.6 non-penalty expected goals while conceding only 0.7, which is to say you absolutely crush according to any reasonable standard, no notes.
And then you lose. You’re unfortunate to be in the position to lose a penalty shootout to begin with because of, among other things, the vagaries of what Kylian Mbappe had for his breakfast, the vagaries of what counts as a foul in the penalty area in the mind of that referee that day (and what he’d had for his brunch), and the vagaries of what counts as a handball in the penalty area in the mind of that referee that day (and what he’d had for his late lunch). And in the end you lose the shootout itself because more of your guys guessed wrong in the great dice-guessing game that decides who’s a legend for all times and who’s a loser making excuses.
This is what happened in the last World Cup final, a truly deranged game starring two transcendent talismans somehow living up to the Fight of the Century billing while everybody else tried and failed not to get too much in the way. And it only becomes an alternate history in the last line. Lionel Messi, who, despite being shockingly-close-to-undisputedly-the greatest individual player of all time, had consistently failed to lead Argentina-the-team (and thereby Argentina-the-country-and-its-people) to the promised land, was a dice roll away from failing again.
I’m writing this before we know who this happens to this time around because that’s the point: it’ll happen to somebody, and none of you, me or my editor can predict who. The universe will decide, and it will decide randomly.
It will surely be different in the particulars, but to whomever it happens, however and in whichever rounds it happens, it won’t be because of their training or their tactics or the content of their character.1 It won’t even be because of what their all-world sports nutritionist had them honing themselves on in the minutes, hours or days before the game. It’ll be because the world is fundamentally a chaotic mess not even the most capable and committed of us can come close to controlling, and there is no finer encapsulation of that than the unadulterated dumb luck of knockout football.
If you aren’t in either Category A) a veteran of the analytics wars that have played out on the Internet and in sporting front offices for the last several decades, or Category B) a relative newbie who already read Mike Goodman’s first-in-class World Cup nerd-primer, I highly recommend you go read Mike’s primer for an explanation of why statistically modelling the quality of chances a team creates and concedes based on the likelihood of similar chances being scored historically and expressing that as expected goals tells you more than looking at the final score about which team Deserved To Win, probably.2
For our purpose here today, though, deserve’s got much less to do with it than you might think. We’re all tempted sometimes to be results guys, and we’re all tempted to make excuses. No good, no need. The best we ever can do is identify the process which maximises our chances, then combine trusting that process, hoping the universe smiles on us when it counts, and accepting it might not.
Argentina’s performance as a team (let alone La Pulga’s performance as an individual) was only one of the inputs into the variancemaxxing function that spat out a World Cup winner and minted a legend.
Results guy falls down not only when there are two titans with the same indivisible trophy as their goal, making a mockery of the idea that everybody can succeed if they’d just buck their ideas up. Or when the so-called advanced analytics we fought so hard to validate are still much too crude to capture every player’s every action and calculate its infinitesimal net impact on scoring and conceding, leaving room for skills completely invisible or uncreditable to us, and often to the players themselves.
Results guy would fall down even if we knew all the skills and who had them and how well they had deployed them, because there would still be so much irreducible randomness left over. Even somebody as skilled as Messi cannot defy gravity. Even while consistently creating more expected goals for himself and others than anybody else, while converting expected goals into actual goals at a freakishly high rate, he still misses five of every six shots he takes, and he doesn’t control, cannot control, which ones are the misses.
Results guy ultimately falls down because even when, in the biggest game of his life, he does do his part well, better than well, scores twice, creates another, his reward is still a big old game of dice to decide his fate.
Training data
📺The Wire (2002-2008). My US politics tutor, a legend, once assigned this in lieu of a reading list, on the grounds it covered everything we needed to know and we were much more likely to enjoy it. If you haven’t watched it, I don’t know why you’re spending your time reading me.
🎵Under Control (2003). “I don’t wanna waste your time / I just wanna say, I’ve got to say / We worked hard darling / We don’t have no control.”3
📝The American sports nerd’s advanced guide to understanding soccer ahead of the FIFA 2026 World Cup (2026). As discussed.
Writing is thinking, doing is learning
Here I was thinking Pope John Paul II was the patron saint of being right sometimes. Turns out they’re all at it.
It’s already happened in the group stages, just without the all-or-nothing consequences. Spain, for example, brought the tournament to life by putting up more than 2.5 xG against the legends from Cabo Verde without having ball go goal.
Mikes Goodman and Caley (whose xG chart is shown above) are the two halves of the Double Pivot, the world’s most agreeable soccer analytics podcast, which I cannot recommend highly enough.
“...I don’t wanna change the world / I just wanna watch it go by.”