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The study of behavioral economics and finance has opened our eyes to how flawed our decision making can be in a financial setting. Unfortunately, a lot of these flaws, common in the financial world, also tend to showcase themselves while watching football.
We look at three common biases that audiences may fall for while watching football.
1. Survivorship bias
Every year, during the transfer season, we are excited about a player our favorite football team signs. We head over to YouTube and watch videos of the goals, assists, and other skills that the player brings to a football field. After watching the video, we conclude that the player we signed is amazing. This is a classic example of survivorship bias in football.
Survivorship bias is a common logical error that occurs because we assume that success tells us the entire story of the subject. We fail to account for failures, often due to their lack of visibility. We use the success stories as an example of 'all the stories' and come to the wrong conclusions about football players.
In this case, YouTube videos are meant to show the best highlights of the player. Football highlight videos do not account for all the failures of the player. After all, who wants to watch a seven-minute video of a player losing the ball or failing to complete a pass?
For instance, here is a video of Kaka's skills and goals at Real Madrid. Kaka, of course, did not have a great time at Madrid. However, if you go by this video, you may be fooled into thinking Kaka played some of his best football at the club. Survivorship bias at its finest.
2. Sunk cost fallacy
Your favorite club just spent an absurd amount of money to sign a striker. Unfortunately for the club, the striker plays five games and has no goals to show for it. On top of this, his performances as a whole have been abysmal.
The substitute striker is clearly in better form and has scored three goals from the bench. Despite this, the star forward keeps starting games ahead of the substitute. The manager is probably falling for the sunk cost fallacy in this situation.
The sunk cost fallacy occurs when one is unable to cut losses due to the money or time spent on an activity in the past. Instead of cutting losses, more time/money is poured into that activity to attempt to make up for the initial time/money spent.
This often leads to irrational decisions as the money or time spent initially is not going to come back regardless of decisions in the future.
While the sunk cost fallacy is quite common, it is refreshing to see that Chelsea Football Club did not fall into that trap. They benched Kepa when his form was in questioned despite paying an absurd amount of money for the player.
3. Confirmation bias
A defender who you do not like has started the game for your favorite football team. In the 34th minute of the game, your team concedes a corner, and the opposition team scores. When you watch the replay of the goal, you see that the defender who you do not like was ball-watching and failed to track the player who went on to score.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for evidence that supports our beliefs and ignore non-supportive information. In the case of the corner, maybe the team was using zonal marking. Maybe the defender on the front post missed his header.
The reason could be something else, but if you had a preset belief about the defender, you look for evidence that supports that belief.
Being a Chelsea fan, I was not happy when Chelsea lost by two goals to Liverpool at Stamford Bridge in 2020. I am not the biggest Andreas Christensen fan and so when he brought Mane down and got a red card, I was annoyed, to say the least.
However as I had preconceived notions about Christensen, I failed to notice the mistake Kurt Zouma made that led to Sadio Mane running free. It was only until a fellow fan pointed out the mistake, did I realize I may have fallen for confirmation bias.
As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the author of Sherlock Holmes) wrote:
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
