The Triumph of the Collective

Leicester Cityweren’t Supposed to win the Premier League Last Season, but their Tight-knit Squad outperformed the Richer Sides. Can they do it again?

- Simon Barnes

That Makes it all the more glorious that they did—but it also makes the chances of them, or anyone like them, doing it again vanishingly small. Don’t bother searching the relegation fodder for the 2017 champions—all you’ll find are candidates for the drop.

Toss a coin. It lands heads. So what? Anyone can do that. Throw three heads in a row, then. Less likely, but still not significant in statistical terms. It’s only over a long series of coin tosses that you smooth out chance and find the numbers settling into a nearly even split of heads and tails.

In other words, if you want to eliminate luck, you need a long series. And if you want to eliminate luck from football you need a full league season. That’s what leagues are for.

Upsets are ten a penny in football. That’s one of the game’s eternal charms. On any given day, any team can beat any other team. Of course, the teams need to be within a few leagues of each other: The team I used to play for would never beat Brazil in a billion fixtures. But when two teams are on different levels without being light years apart, an upset is at least possible every time they play.

That’s not the case in most sports, and there are two reasons. The first is the uniquely high value of football’s currency. A goal in football is the most valuable thing in sport; games are frequently decided by a single one. A goal in football is more valuable than one in hockey, more valuable than a run in baseball, a touchdown, a basket, a try in rugby. Test cricket regularly brings us matches with more than 1,000 runs. It follows that a day of defiant defending for footballing underdogs can sometimes be accompanied by a breakaway goal: 20 chances for one team and no goal; one goal headed in from a corner for the other. There’s your upset.