One cannot solely rely on chance for success. It is laughable to do so, and unprofessional as well, especially when you are in a competitive, elite discipline. Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO of Starbucks explained, “no great achievement happens by luck.”
Football is one sport where one cannot rely on luck all the time. Some players obviously have better technical ability than others, some perform consistently better than others, some work harder than the average footballer. Even for the coaches and managers, it is obvious that there are levels to the competence of the technical team. In addition, the teams with better resources seem to always attract the best managers who in turn always seem to identify and attract better players, whilst making the players in their teams better than they previously were.
As a result, more often than not, the better team, with the better technical players and management team, almost always seem to get the better results. Indeed, if you predict that the better team will win, you will be right a lot more often than you will be wrong. However, every once in a while, despite the best efforts and resources of the teams with the better manager, the less technical team come out on top.
When these rather anomalous events happen, analysts are always on hand to proffer tons of reasons why it happened, as if it should have been obvious to everyone beforehand. Whole disciplines have been developed for these, with detailed technical tools to analyze micro moments that happened just before significant occurrences, as if every time such events occur, the resulting outcome can always be expected. I always find it fascinating to have analysts try to explain things like these in hindsight. But this is part of why football, the beautiful game, is entertaining and absorbing.
Manchester United is a club with a storied history and rich heritage. The football club is affectionately dubbed ‘the biggest club in the world’ by faithfuls. But in recent past, the team has underperformed. It is however important to note that ‘underperformance’ by Manchester United is relative. In the ten-year period when they have ‘underperformed’, they won four trophies and twice runners up and second runners up each in the league and also been runners up in a European cup competition. However, comparison is made to the rich trophy laden history of the club when analysing contemporary performances. Which is fair, as my secondary school principal, Dr Idienumah always reminded his students, “to whom much is given, much is expected.”
Following the decade of indifference and mediocrity, Manchester United seem to be on the ascendancy. The uptick commenced with the appointment of the new manager, Erik Ten Hag, together with a few new players. The team has already won a trophy this season, advanced deep into two other tournaments and is currently third in the league. This is better than fans, analysts and pundits expected at the start of the season.
But when I look at the team’s success, I cannot but see how luck has played a significant part. Given the one-leg knockout format of some of the competitions, the quality of the opponents, venue, availability of players for both the team and the opponents can be significant. And Manchester United has had more favourable fixtures, many of them at home in these cup competitions. Of course the team still needed to be prepared, show up and get the job done, but the element of luck cannot be denied. As Robert Earl Wilson, the American professional baseball pitcher, once said, “success is simply a matter of luck. Ask any failure.” The team obviously need to scale one hurdle to get to the other in their journey to success. As Jim Kwik remarked, “hard work puts you where the luck will find you.”
But one cannot coast through life hoping for underserved success, because “luck has a way of evaporating when you lean on it”, as Brandon Mull admonished.
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