Fulham v Arsenal, the Untold predicitons and line up
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I regret that Untold Arsenal continues to be suffering technical problems, and so here is the article we intended to publish at this time on that site.
By Tony Attwood
There is a headline above an article published by the British Psychological Society which reads: Lack of information doesn’t discourage confident decisions
Now if ever there was an area of our life that was full of confident decisions based on a lack of information, surely the transfer market and team tactics in the Premier League is one such. Twice a year massive numbers of players are tipped to be coming to or leaving Arsenal, and yet only 3% (at most) of these turn out to be true. Every week players and managers who work in the game are criticised endlessly by journalists and bloggers who don’t.
Worse, of those transfers which are noted by the media as happening, only a fraction turn out to be worthwhile. What that fraction is, is harder to measure, for one would also have to work out how long to give a new player to fit into his new team, and how long to give the team to adjust to the new arrival. But when we have measure actual transfers against rumoured transfers, the accuracy rate of predictions is under three percent.
Likewise, I guess we would have to take into account injuries caused by overzealous defenders from the opposition, injuries caused by pure chance, and the vagaries of decision-making by referees, some of whom, despite their errors get to referee Premier League games over and over and over again…
But even all that might not explain the sudden demise of Manchester City this season. Yet despite the obvious fact that most managers get it wrong most of the time, and the second obvious fact that as the report says, it is “near impossible to have every piece of information about a given situation, whether that’s something that’s going on at work, a news event, or a relationship,” managers are indeed hired, and then sacked.
It seems it is a perfect example, as Socrates said, of the fact that we’re not always great at acknowledging “what we don’t know.”
Certainly in English football, this has got to a childish level of utter stupidity, where commentators, be they fans or journalists, put forward the view that they know exactly what their team needs while the manager doesn’t. This calls to mind the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which as Psychology Today puts it, suggests that “people with particularly limited knowledge of a subject are likely to vastly overestimate their abilities.”
And that surely is a definition of journalists – not to mention quite a few bloggers: people with particularly limited knowledge of a subject who vastly overestimate their abilities.
But this is only part of the issue, for there is also the question of “what happens when we believe we have adequate information when making a decision.”
Here the research suggests that what they find is that “people rarely pause to consider what information they might be missing”.
Now we can all see this is patently obvious in relation to journalists, but it is interesting to consider it in relation to managers as well. For if that is right what that situation does is make the poor manager feel that he is just as competent as anyone else to make thoughtful, sensible decisions. that surely anyone would agree with…
Except that it is patently obvious that most people don’t agree with something like 80% of the managers in each league – which covers all the clubs outside the top four. And in fact some of those can be pretty heavily criticised too.
One interesting explanation for all the negativity that we see in football comes from the fact that it is obviously a winter game. Now we know that lots of people take Vitamin D supplements outside of the summer months in the belief that this helps maintain the immune system in winter. Some clubs regularly give these supplements to their players too.
Certainly a lack of vitamin D can be a problem – (it can among other things lead to depression) but there’s not much research done on the effect of vitamin D supplements.
But Psychology Today now presents details of a series of medical studies into the use of these supplements. What in fact they found was that the levels of anxiety and depression reduced in both the individuals who were taking the vitamin D pills and those who were taking a placebo (the individuals of course didn’t know that some of them were getting a placebo). So the taking of the pill, even the pill with nothing in it, helped everyone.
But those taking the actual vitamin D were found to have had a reduced chance of inflammation in the brain itself, and a growth of new brain cells. A lack of vitamin D is often seen to be linked to depression.
This was a preliminary study and so the results are not definitive but players do seem to be getting a benefit from perfectly legal vitamin D supplements. So maybe now is the time to start promoting the use of Vitamin D supplements among football journalists and bloggers too, so they could finally realise that a) no matter what, one club is going to win the league and the others won’t, and b) they really don’t know as much as they think they know.
Fulham v Arsenal, the Untold predicitons and line up
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