Why Referees Like Barcelona and What Does That Tell Us About How To Live?

Note: this post is not really about football.

FC Barcelona's Stadium (Camp Nou)

FC Barcelona has been the beneficiary of controversial, if not totally wrong, refereeing decisions in key matches in the European Champions League over the past few years, including the recent match against Real Madrid which featured a red card after one of Barcelona’s players faked contact with a key Madrid defender. Although I am neither a statistician nor a psychologist, I will explain why Barcelona’s style of play attracts favourable refereeing decisions using a little bit of probability and a little bit psychology. I will then generalize and answer the latter part of the post’s title: What does that tell us about how to live?

In almost any game against any team, Barcelona will have about 70% of the ball possession over the course of the game – even in the 2009 game against Chelsea where they played a 1/3 of the game with 10 men. What this means is that most of the time a mistake made by the referee will be against the defending team (not Barcelona) since these are the mistakes we remember. We remember red cards that were given by mistake, but not those that were not given, by mistake. And since Barcelona’s opponents are defending for more than 70% of the time, they will be more prone to negative refereeing decisions. Nothing new here, you buy more lottery tickets, you increase your probability of winning.

But not only that, the referee is not a machine, he’s human, and as he sees Barcelona continually in control of the game, and the other team continually defending and tackling, he will feel compelled to punish them, or conversely, reward Barcelona. Usually this happens with a red card or a penalty kick for an undeserving tackle. It is like many wars where the relation between two nations is very tense for a long period and then a stupid incident lights an endless fire. So the lottery analogy that I previously used understates the Barça effect: as the game progresses, the referee is more likely to make mistakes!

This reminds me of a discussion in Nassim Taleb‘s blockbuster book on unlikely events and randomness, The Black Swan, where he at some point says that life in big cities with all its activities and cocktail parties leads to more opportunities due to constant exposure to many different people and things. This also reminds me of an advice that the mathematician Richard Hamming gave in his famous lecture, You and Your Research, where he advocated keeping office doors open:

“He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.”

So what does FC Barcelona’s style of play tell us about how to live? The more you expose yourself to the world, the luckier you get, the more the world rewards you. You can’t really score a goal by spending your life defending.

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