Professional sport is a lot like life, you put your best effort in preparation expecting a successful outcome. You expect success outcomes majority of the time, especially if you have sufficiently prepared for such. If your talent, skills and desire is better than average and with a bit of luck, you may even outperform your expected target over long periods.
However, you know that you cannot have good outcomes hundred percent of the time, there will always be the odd bad outcome. It is inevitable. You do not plan for it, you do not know when it will come, but it does, no matter how much you try. Sometimes, it comes when you least expect it, at the worst possible time.
This is due to a phenomenon branded ‘the gambler’s fallacy’, ‘the Monte Carlo fallacy’ or ‘the fallacy of the maturity of chances’ that suggests that given enough observations, it is expected that events will regress towards the mean. You cannot outperform or underperform the mean indefinitely, at some point, outcomes will tend to inverse such that overall, the cumulative outcome is close to the average. As a result of this phenomenon, humans tend to expect something bad to happen when ‘too many’ good things seem to have occurred over a recent period. It happens, it will happen, we do not control its occurrence, it is just the way life is.
It is not impossible to cumulatively outperform the mean over time. That is the very definition of elitism. Elite sporting teams, elite students, elite companies, elite members of society, what we have come to tag the top one percent. In the same token, it is similarly possible to underperform the mean.
When you support a football team that has the history of Manchester United, a long rich history of success, consistent trophies, defying the odds and simply elite, you tend to expect that it will continue forever. Even after a bad patch of rather mediocre years, years that have been really average by all standards, you tend to expect, with any amount of consistent success, that ‘Manchester United are back’. And why not? The ‘mean’ you know about Manchester United is being successful, outperforming competitors, being better than the rest.
The problem with long term success is that periods of moderate success appear like failure. Outcomes that majority of peers will be excited to have depress you, because you have built such a high standard against which everything is compared. The high standard is your benchmark, your ‘average’. Manchester United are expected to win, that is what they have always done. It does not matter that the opponents are now of better quality, have better quality managers and have also had recent successes that elevated their own expectations and senses of ‘average’.
You are ‘Manchester United’, you are expected to overcome the odds and beat the opponent. This is a phenomenon that the legendary and ultra-successful football manager, Jose Mourinho once tagged “football heritage.” As he explained it, people seem to base their expectations against the football club, the establishment and institution even when the team, the sporting personnel, do not match up to the heritage of the institution. Yet they are expected to achieve similar results.
It may be time to ‘rebase’ Manchester United’s expectations, to expect the team to perform as an ‘average’ Premier League team, or perhaps slightly better than average. But certainly not significantly outperform the average over long periods. Maybe, just maybe, that is what is required to reduce the negative surprises and heartbreak that fans are having to endure.
