skill vs luck for england

I recently read a post by TV personality Jake Humphrey who claimed, when talking about the England national football team, “the truth is that luck and chance plays a massive part in any football match”.

In a way, I agree wholeheartedly with this but there is a small part of my brain that finds it difficult to take in the context of what had happened with England during the European Championships.

Football is a game and like any game there is going to be a combination of skill and luck that plays a role in the eventual outcome. However, football is also low scoring game and has many players of the field at the same time.
Compare football to say, basketball, where there are 5 players from each team on the court at any one time and the frequency of the scoring is much higher. In basketball, the better players have more influence on the game. The role of “luck and chance” in football is inherently larger as a single goal can determine the outcome of the game, which can sometimes skew the perception of the audience post-game.

A great experiment to do would be to ask the commentators to write up the post-match analysis of the last 16 tie between England and Slovakia as the game clock hit the 89th minute. With 86 seconds to go in the game, Jude Bellingham scores an unbelievable goal to take the game to extra time, where England went on to secure victory. A totally different version of events would have been reported I am sure.

Sure there is a lot of skill involved in what Bellingham did but also a lot of luck in the fact the game was only 1 nil at the time and therefore only one goal required to take the match to extra-time and save the fixture.

So I agree with Jake. The only bit that I am struggling with is how far England actually got in the tournament. Yes, there was certainly some luck in being on the right side of the draw and avoiding Germany, France and Belgium but if we look at how England faired when it comes to the statistics of ‘Xg’ or ‘Expected goals’, they appear to have not exploiting their fortune. England had a Xg of 6.1 for the tournament which was behind Spain, Germany, Portugal, France, Netherlands, Turkey, Switzerland and Austria.

In the game against Slovakia, mentioned earlier, England returned 1.44 vs. 1.87 for Slovakia and the return against the Swiss makes for difficult reading. But we know England won both of these games so they outperformed their Xg, which in some ways exhibits skill in terms of finishing chances, decision-making in the final third and mental toughness.

I know this post is topical as Gareth Southgate announces he will no longer lead the team into the next World Cup qualifying campaign. My hope is twofold. Firstly, England look to secure a progressive manager who looks to exploit the skills of some of the finest footballers on the planet and secondly, we continue to benefit from the good fortune from Euro 2024.