The role of luck in sport is significantly undervalued. Fundamental to the appeal of sport is its perceived fairness - the belief in the idea that the best team will win. The possibility that luck, as random as the flip of a coin or the roll of a dice, can influence and sometimes even determine results corrupts the meritocracy of sport that makes it so appealing in the first place.
MORE THE MERRIER?
Why T20 leagues need to be longer
The magic number of games to be played by each team for IPL to mitigate the influence of luck is 56! © BCCI
Fascinatingly, psychologists believe that the human brain understates the influence of luck on events. This can be explained by the theory of hindsight bias - or creeping determinism - in which, once something has happened, our brains naturally create a narrative to explain it. Since the brain is seeking to ascribe causality - cause and effect - it undervalues the abstract role of luck and instead ascribes disproportionate value to actual events.
The presence of this phenomenon can be more discernible among those who have a vested interest in the outcome or the drama of the narrative. This is why sports fans of teams who have won are less likely to claim their team was "lucky" than fans of teams who have lost are to claim their team was "unlucky" - likewise the backpages of newspapers will rarely cite the role of luck in a result - if skill doesn't matter then why read the analysis?
Yet, as unnatural and unpalatable as it may be to accept, luck plays a significant role in most major sports. Luck is the product of randomness - the more opportunities a game has for random events, the more a game is determined by luck. Hence, chess is a game of pure skill while roulette is a game of pure luck; sports exist somewhere between these two extremes.
The influence of luck on a sport is determined by structural variables such as the number of players, their respective ability to influence the game, the opportunities to score and the way the game is scored and by random variables such as the weather and pitch conditions.
Modern T20s showcase phenomenal skill under intense pressure but in their current form they are sadly little more than exhibition games ©
The way sports can manage the influence of luck across a season is through the number of matches played. It is a basic rule of probability that smaller sample sizes have greater variance than larger sample sizes of the same system. The larger the sample size, the more information there is, and so uncertainty reduces. The more matches there are, the narrower the margin of error between the actual results and the true variance of the teams, and the fairer the league becomes.
Using a brilliant