Sometimes the ball hits a dude in the face

On Arsenal’s victory against Manchester City, luck in soccer, and watching sports without becoming an insane person.

Here are two facts about soccer.

First: Modern soccer is an incredibly professionalized, complex, and regimented sport, in which players are paid millions upon millions of dollars to reach impossible levels of physical fitness and execute on intricate patterns of play with the ball and disciplined defensive structures without it, and all of these things are done under the direction of maniacally intense tactical geniuses who are themselves paid millions to mastermind plans to guide their teams to victory.

Second: The whole thing is kind of just dumb luck? 

That’s an overstatement, but only a little bit. Weird stuff happens when you can’t use your hands, and as a result soccer has comparatively few scoring events,¹These are called “goals,” I believe. which means that a fluke goal is way more likely to swing a soccer game than, like, someone accidentally chucking a basketball into the net from half court. 

The friction between these two contradictory facts is where the magic happens. The aforementioned manically intense tactical geniuses devote their lives to devising plans that constrain some of the chaos. And sometimes this works!²It especially works out in the aggregate over the course of a long league season, and most often works out in the aggregate over the course of a long league season for teams that spend lots and lots of money to make sure that the players trying to execute on these plans also happen to be significantly better than the players trying to stop them. “Having better players” is often the best form of tactics.  

But Fact Number Two is always out there, and sometimes you miss a couple of scoring chances and then there’s a weird bounce on a free kick and all of sudden you lose. Oh well!

That brings us to the recent match between Arsenal and Manchester City, two teams coached by absolutely certified maniacal tactical geniuses, Mikel Arteta and Pep Guardiola. Arteta also used to be Guardiola’s assistant, so a lot of the narrative heading into it was about whether or not the pupil could outmaneuver the master. The question was: Could either of these masterminds figure out a plan to stump the other?

The answer was: Sort of! But also: Not really!

Here’s a video in which two guys from Tifo Football, who are probably the smartest people on the internet at breaking down what is going on tactically in a soccer game, explain the very sophisticated defensive schemes both teams employed.

The short version is that Mikel Arteta took a bunch of information from previous, unsuccessful games against Manchester City and came up with a modified version of his usual defensive setup to disrupt City in possession without giving up a ton of space in the midfield. 

That’s cool, but winning a soccer game also requires scoring more goals than the other team, and this game plan didn’t actually lead to Arsenal having a ton of good chances to score. In fact, neither team really generated many chances to put the ball in the goal at all. 

Arteta’s substitutions kind of won the game, in that four of them combined to make the winning goal happen, and in that there seemed to be a specific plan to kick the ball really high towards Takehiro Tomiyasu, who is tall and fast and can win headers. 

But ultimately what happened is that Gabriel Martinelli kicked the ball really hard into Nathan Aké’s face and it went into the goal.  

It’s a perfect illustration of the two fundamental facts about soccer: Arsenal’s victory was both a carefully choreographed plan and random chance. It’s chess, if chess was partially determined by a slot machine. 

It’s not like the game played out as a disaster for City tactically, either. As indicated in the Tifo video, they set out to do the same thing as Arsenal and more or less succeeded. A 0-0 draw would have been fine for them, because they tend to win every game³See the earlier footnote about spending lots of money on the best players for more information. and Arsenal tend to merely win most games. In the long run simply not losing would have been okay for their title chances. From this perspective, they played a decent chess match and then their opponent pulled straight sevens. 

All that to say that this is a weird sport, and if you watch it purely as tactics and skill without the element of chance thrown in, it’s enough to drive you a little bit insane.⁴Spend any time reading Tweets about soccer for more about this.  So let this latest Arsenal-City matchup serve as a reminder that sometimes soccer games are won by devilishly clever tactical inventions, and sometimes the ball just happens to hit a guy in the face.