John Tierney's Soccer, A Beautiful Game Of Chance

145 Words1 Pages
John Tierney’s article, “Soccer, a Beautiful Game of Chance” (2014), questions the equality of soccer matches in terms of the vastly different resources provided to each team and in terms of measurement error- whether or not the outcome of the game is based on skill or luck. Tierney develops this question with comparisons of soccer teams’ low levels of constraint and high levels of resource variability to other sports: specifically American sports, where leagues “have evened the level of skill among teams by sharing revenue.” Tierney’s purpose is to prove that the paradox of skill- “as the overall level of skill rises and becomes more uniform, luck becomes more important”- is irrelevant in soccer, due to the unlevel playing field of ability