Can We 'Solve' Sports?

Welcome to The Rest of Science. I'm Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens. Michael, I want to talk to you about dirty air. Ooh, okay, this sounds good. It is. It's not about pollution, though. It's not about smog. It's not about the environment. It's about how hard it is for Formula One cars to overtake each other. Because I think this is a perfect example of what this episode is about today. Not cars, not aerodynamics, but the idea of whether engineering perfection, optimising for a team, ends up ruining the sport itself. Excellent. And this is the thing, right? We wanted to do a Rest of Science episode on the Super Bowl to sort of celebrate, to take part in this like really great moment. And we were thinking about the way the science, science and sport interact with one another. And I think that actually there is an argument to say that there's this paradox that is lurking behind almost every sport. The way that data analysis and science has done amazing things for each individual player, each individual team, but the overall has sort of changed the amount of fun that is out there. What say you, Michael? What's your what's your immediate reaction to my theory? Okay, well, first of all, I want to congratulate the Seattle Seahawks for winning the Super Bowl. Fantastic game. Great job, guys. Just to go on the record, I'm rooting for the Broncos because I live in Colorado now, and the Chiefs are not in it, so I feel fine. But if I had to guess, the Seahawks are incredible. I mean, they're playing an amazing kind of football, so it's going to be hard to beat them. I mean, sure. but you asked me about um optimization and beauty in sports yes i did all right well hannah i want to start by talking about defensive shifts this episode is brought to you by cancer research uk so when most people think of naked mole rats their unusual relationship to cancer probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind. But maybe it should be because it is incredibly rare for them to develop cancer, which could be partly down to their unique immune system, or it might be the way that their cells respond to damage. So scientists are studying their biology for its cancer fighting secrets. It's a reminder that discoveries can sometimes come from places you don't expect. Cancer Research UK is the world's largest charitable funder of cancer research. thousands of scientists of doctors and nurses work across more than 20 countries to help turn discoveries in the lab into new tests, new treatments and new innovations. And the impact is clear. 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For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, their breakthroughs and how you can support them visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash rest is science okay we're going to get really baseball-y right now i'm not sure much of a baseball viewer but i think this is a good way to start let me tell you a story it begins in the mid 90s with of all things the internet on the internet people can nerd out with abandon there are no restrictions you're not going to bore anybody they're not going to change the channel on these little usenet groups people were investigating the statistics behind baseball players and and it was noticed that there was one player in particular whose name was rob deer and he had this really weird stat which was that he achieved half of the time what they called a tto one of the three true outcomes and that's this really big pompous name for three things that can happen in a baseball game and those three things are a strikeout a walk and a home run okay look i'm i'm i'm the british voice on this podcast right so i've played rounders okay i don't know if you've played rounders that's a that's my impression i think it's like a british president british merchant baseball but essentially you're chucking a ball at somebody who's hitting a bat they've got to hit it as far as they can and run around before they get out so that that's that's essentially the rules that's essentially it the pitcher throws the ball at the batter and if it's a if it's a good pitch uh then and the batter does not hit the ball it's called a strike and you only get three strikes and you're out and you have to go and sit back in the dugout and the next batter comes up and your whole team gets one out after three outs you know the next team is up at bat anyway a walk occurs when the pitcher is throwing balls that aren't being hit and they're not considered good balls by the umpire okay there's all kind of different definitions and they change over time but that's called a ball if the pitcher throws the ball and it's just not where it should be for the batter to get a good hit on it then that's called a ball after four balls the batter gets to walk the batter gets to put down the bat and walk to first base and a home run is when the batter is able to hit the ball and go all the way around all three bases back to home plate to score a run so rob deer had this strange statistic that he would always end up with either a walk a strikeout or a home run yeah Not always, but half the time, which was really unusual because at the time, the league average was just a quarter of the time. So three quarters of the time, a player comes up to bat and they get something besides a home run, a walk or a strikeout. They would get a single play. They get on to first base, a double play. There's something would happen that was arguably more exciting and athletic to watch. but this guy was managing to do these these three true outcomes half the time and they're considered true because they're just so pure they only involve the pitcher the catcher and the batter the rest of the defensive players are just like ah he struck out ah he walked ah he hit the ball out of the park and went all the way around i didn't have to do anything how was he doing it then what was he doing that was different well one theory was that the angle at which he was hitting the ball was better. So that led to what's been called the launch angle revolution, an idea of, hey, when you hit the baseball, try hitting it a little bit lower to give it more loft. Now, yes, that might lead to more strikeouts, but it also leads to more home runs. So as you can see, there was a bigger focus on the three true outcomes, not only the athletic game, but the strategic game of sacrifice bunts and sacrifice flies and stealing bases. And let's just try to slam it out of the park. Doing this was called doing a defensive shift. Okay. You took all your defensive players who were in their traditional spots and you said, oh, oh, okay. Michael Stevens is up to bat. And according to all of our statistics, he's going to hit the ball somewhere over here. So we're going to do a shift and the players all moved and it worked. And in a lot of ways, it may have made the game quite boring. Suddenly there's no one running anywhere. exactly i want to see players being tricky i want to see bases being stolen i want to see sacrifice bunts and flies these things were like beautiful yeah that last minute slide to the base as someone comes in the drama of it that's kind of what you want exactly even if shifting the defense was optimal for like winning the game or controlling the outcome it wasn't beautiful to watch and it felt less like a competition of athleticism. Ultimately, not everyone felt bad about this, but it is a deep question. What's more interesting, a problem or a solution? Regardless of how you feel about it, defensive shifts powered by the statistical data coaches had was a game changer. So look at these stats. In 2010, the number of times coaches had their players shift because they knew what to expect from the batter statistically that happened 3,323 times in the 2010 season but by 2017 it happened 33,218 times wow factor of 10 amazing factor of 10 we're talking orders of math an order of magnitude change and this freaked people out because baseball tickets, sales and viewership were dropping. I guess the part of it was that you stop looking at what's going on on the pitch and you start looking at the numbers themselves and look for the patterns that appear in the spreadsheets rather than in what you're seeing and watching. I saw Michael Lewis, who wrote the book Moneyball. I saw him at an event last year and he was talking about how there was one day he ended up at a team where they had really tried to optimize for these particular outcomes and uh in the changing room you know doing his research and as all of the team came out of the shower he was shocked at how fat they all were basically how out of shape how like squidgy around the edges he was like these guys do not look i mean they look like normal people they do not look like professional athletes and he was really shocked at this but it was the kind of the the end logical point of the thing that you're saying if you are not caring about athleticism if you don't care how fast somebody one runs you just care how well they can sort of whack it out of the stadium how well they can they can tune the angle that they're hitting the ball at well then it doesn't really matter if they're a bit squidgy around the edges here's something i've been thinking about a lot. I'm not a basketball watcher and I'm definitely not a basketball player, believe it or not. But in basketball, being really tall can give players pretty big advantages, right? Like Michael Jordan, extremely talented athlete, but even he can't dunk against a brick wall that's 20 feet tall. So can we optimize just the bodies that we hire to make basketball something that's like solved. Pablo Torre wrote this article in 2011 for Sports Illustrated, where he pointed out that if you are an American male between 20 and 40 and you're seven foot tall or higher, there's a 17% chance that you're in the NBA. What? How many people in the United States are between the ages of 20 and 40 and are over seven foot tall? And he's like, there's only like 70 people seven zero people who fit that description but there are 13 players over seven foot in the nba that's how he calculated this number incredible and it it led to some questions that like oh shoot maybe basketball is going to reach a limit where coaches realize just get the tallest people regardless of their even interest from around the world and that's all you need to stop the really fun amazing air jordan techniques as it turns out i don't think we're seeing that although it's true that you know finding the like super tall guy from china and bringing him to america to play on your team can help it's still the case that the players in the middle in terms of height have the most ball time and just breaking sprinting or long distance running where it's like we've done it like any further and it's not even a human anymore like we've reached the ends of human optimization and that's kind of the end of the sport like no more records can really be broken well you sort of get that in a natural way with swimming right michael phelps um who's who has this extraordinary body in the sense that he he has quite short legs in comparison to his torso and that's sort of what you want right that's what you need for for swimming you need extremely strong muscular upper body your legs doesn't really matter so much he's also his his wingspan as it were he won the genetic lottery in the sense of having a body that is so perfectly tuned for optimizing his his swimming effectiveness i've really noticed this in the olympics for example because you have the different different types of competitions have very very very different types of competitors. You know, you take somebody, a sprinter, and compare it to a long distance runner, and their frames are totally different. It's not just a fluke that the sprinters are much chunkier, have much greater cross section of their muscle mass, and that the long distance runners are much leaner, much skinnier. Actually, if you work out the optimal shape for those different activities, that's where you end up getting right you you end up sort of doing running the maths through of like energy consumption and weight to strength ratios all of that stuff and you end up basically describing the people who end up being the perfect competitors for that particular environment yeah they wound up being the typical competitor shape but then we can use math to be like oh wait we get the same answer so let's push this further and let's find the exact absolute shape. Olympic records are being set at a slower and slower pace. There's this great paper, it's a fantastic read, that has estimated humanity's physiological frontier. And the authors make a pretty good case for the fact that world records are pretty much at 99% of their potential. and so all that's left all that we can really expect is people who tune into the olympics to history being made is yeah records being set history being made but we're talking about like improvements in records by about 0.05 percent and and you can see this in any olympic sport look at look at the marathon okay in 1908 the world record for running a marathon was two hours 55 minutes in 18 seconds. And then over the next 50 years, that record was beaten 22 times and people got 40 minutes faster over the next 50 years. It only dropped by 10 minutes and since then by less than four. And so we're getting down from like, whoa, you blew it out of the water to, oh my gosh, The gravity caused by the granite under that stadium gave you a microsecond advantage. And that's how a new record was set. The way the wind was blowing, the humidity of the air on that day, the air pressure on that day, because we've reached the limits of what human bones and muscles can do. I remember reading something about how the depth of the Olympic swimming pool ends up making a difference because of the the rebound of the waves of the swimmers I mean when you down to that level it is exactly as you say so subtle The marginal gains are practically non-existent. That's right. But 100 years ago, there were still so many things we had to learn about nutrition and biomechanics and sports medicine that there were huge leaps and bounds to be made. And now we're getting down to what kind of swimsuit am I allowed to wear? Because that's going to mean the difference between setting a world record or not. And so, so much of it now comes down to the rules and how we define the game really precisely. That's what determines the limits, the records and what to expect next. Tell you what I also like about that, though, is that it's noticeable in the way that you describe it. really in terms of like publicly coming together to view sports this is actually quite a modern human invention and maybe partly it's about the advent of television the the ability for us to be able to broadcast it to wide audiences because certainly of course humans have always been interested in games but but exactly as you say this like focus on sports and being able to optimize it to get better and better and better. That is a really recent thing, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It is. We're all able to share data and collect data and analyze data so well nowadays that we can actually feel threatened by data ruining a sport. We've been so anti-doping, understandably, anti-steroids, etc. But there is a little bit of me that's like, maybe we should just create a sort of super Olympics where it's like anything is allowed right you are allowed i think you're allowed designer human babies i'm joking by the way but even so you're allowed to like genetically engineer your babies you can give them any steroids any growth hormones you want let's just see let's just see how far you can go yeah i don't actually think that by the way you don't think that we should do you think that we will though do you think we'll reach a point where we're like i want to see more records broken let's go ahead and allow more drugs let's allow more genetic engineering because i want to see people high jump higher i want to see people run faster i think it's not going to be as cool as it sounds hang on a second uh lauren our producer has just sent a message in the chat people have come up with exactly this idea it's called the enhanced games controversial understandably uh they're going to be in may 2026 in vegas of course it's going to be in vegas and they are going to allow performance enhancing drugs okay so you're still not allowed to have cocaine right you're still not allowed to have heroin so still some limits also any drug that you take has to be fta approved but beyond that knock yourself out off you go i mean obviously it sounds like there could be some pretty unsafe things where people feel like they're now required to use drugs and techniques that have been banned for maybe rightful suspicion of danger. But it'll be interesting to see what they're able to accomplish. What they're going to run against is a problem where some of the more talented athletes don't want to put themselves through that and they're happy to not be enhanced so you get more of like mid-tier athletes who actually do the enhanced games and but the enhancements don't get them up to the level of the naturally talented athletes so you don't actually see the best of what's possible for a human i think it taps into something else which is a sort of central idea of this episode which is the idea that when you have competing incentives for the individuals who are taking part, they're going to have to balance the incentive of winning with the incentive of their own health, perhaps in certain circumstances. And I think that, you know, for the games overall, it's like the incentives of creating something fun versus the incentives of winning as a team or as a group or an individual. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how it turns out. I strongly suspect they may not last that long. That's exactly how I feel. I think it's not going to be as cool as it sounds. I think that ultimately we're going to run against what Bernard Suits described as the definition of games. I love this quote. He said, a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. And when you start removing the unnecessary obstacles and you say there's no obstacles it's less fun at the end of the day a game is about unnecessary obstacles like that sentence was for you for that brief second yes yes yes yeah even this podcast is a game i've got obstacles here like you have to speak in a normal way and if i if i take a pause because i forgot the word then i'm losing the game right but that is what makes all this stuff fun I am going to give you a point score at the end, Michael. That's important for you to know that. And again, we're not there yet, but there are concerns that if we're not careful, we can figure out strategies that are so optimal that there's no reason a team wouldn't choose them. And we're going to have to change the rules to not allow the thing that helps you win, but is boring. And that's actually, I mean, that is precisely what happened in Formula One, right? With the introduction of air. Yeah, why is it called dirty air? Let's revisit dirty air okay so in the 1990s this this this massive revolution i worked as an aerodynamicist by the way in formula one this is like my sort of specialist subjects this is all very close to my heart uh this guy adrian newey he came in he designed this car it was phenomenal i mean it just blew everybody away because he had worked out that if you want the car to take corners at incredible high speeds you need to stick it down to the road as much as you possibly can and you can do that by essentially turning the car into an upside down airplane wing. The problem is that when you do that if you are if you are driving through clean air right nice and still no one's gone before you you get what's called laminar flow you get this incredibly neat slick streamlines that flow off your car and then behind you it's just a junky old mess it's like this low pressure area it's just turbulence all over the place which means that as a car comes behind you as a car tries to overtake you in particular the moment when you should really be at the for the spectator anyway this is like the most critical moment the moment of an overtake where you have a faster car following a slower one and they you know you want them to be able to take them particularly on a corner you want them to be able to have more grip more more ability to take them on a corner but because these cars over from the 90s onwards were so perfectly optimized for aerodynamic performance it meant that when you're following in this this turbulent air you can't get the same performance right you can't get the same slick laminar streamlined flow over your car and there are some analysis that show that these modern modern formula one cars their downforce drops somewhere between 20 and 60 percent depending on the track in the corner when they're following a car in front of them oh wow okay so dirty air refers not to pollution in the air but the turbulence of it and turbulence of it we're now building formula one cars that just can't achieve the potential that they're built for if the air is dirty but the air is only dirty because the ones in front of them are also optimized and this is it's the opposite of mario kart you know mario kart when you're behind you get an advantage that's the thing that makes it exciting that's the thing that makes it just fun to play fun to watch fun to be around but in formula one for many years it was the opposite where actually if you were ahead you had the advantage what they have tried to do over the years is uh they've tried to sort of shake things up over and over again so the regulators will uh bring in a whole new redesign of the car they'll say okay get rid of all of the aerodynamic devices that you've previously had you need to redesign brand new ones they need to fit into this shape they need to have these dimensions off you go and then it becomes basically a race off the track an aerodynamics race of who can optimize their aerodynamics the quickest there was a big thing about a double diffuser where you hide an aerodynamic device under the car um to sort of stick it to the road and get around the regulations ross brawn did that and had a real era of dominance as a result of it um but again and again and again you could you know there's only so many times that you can do this so in 2022 they were like this is we've got to we've got to do something here so they had a massive overhaul they redesigned the car so that it was the the underneath the car where the main aerodynamic devices would be to try and mitigate this problem of of dirty air they added these deflectors on the wheels that would allow the air to not go back to the car behind them but to go up in the air sort of like a rooster tail and it made a bit of a difference it did make a bit of a difference but you know it's like it's the incentives are wrong the incentives for the for the regulators is to make racing more exciting the incentives for the individual team is to make it so the guy behind can't get anywhere near you so you know you constantly have this like this battle between the two so this year 2026 this is the first year where they have they've effectively put in a boost button the fans are um i don't know divided shall we say about this where uh when you are following someone on a straight the output of the electric engine is artificially limited for the leader and if you are within one second uh within one second of the car in front you basically have literally a boost button where you get an extra in order to try and flip this dynamic upside down wow that's a that's a bold change isn't it isn't it yeah we're good to see how it plays out they've tried things like this before they they have um drs which is basically a little flap on the on the um on the tail of the car that would flip up and reduce the drag drag reduction system it's uh i mean it's sort of like a mushroom boost in in mario kart right so they they have had those before using aerodynamic devices that still remains actually the aerodynamics devices that they have on the cars now are not sort of static um across the entire course of the track they they can change depending on when you're straight in a corner etc it is this this constant battleground and you know i said right at the very beginning that formula one it used to have wait tell me your definition of games again it was a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles yeah and i think that that you know there are there is a certain group of people who who follow racing and love it very dearly who look back at the old days when you had so many more unnecessary obstacles you know you had like refueling you had um there was one point where the drivers were using like a an h pattern gearbox you know the engines would blow up it was just like so many more things that would be thrown into the mix and i think when you combine all of those things together of course it's brilliant for the team especially the ones who come up with this in the first place and and race ahead of everybody else they find this little tweak of an advantage but there does come a point where the entire field is doing it and all of a sudden it's like it's just a just kind of maybe takes away something of what made the sport fun in the first place yeah so we have to bring in new rules like the leader is limited and it seems unfair at first until you look back at the definition of a game and you say we need unnecessary obstacles and so you you're right it's a bummer it's unnecessary and yet we need those kinds of obstacles to keep it fun we're going to limit the defensive shift in baseball because it just gave too much of an advantage to the defense and it meant that we were getting too many of these three kind of boring outcomes we want to see more small ball we want to incentivize people doing the fun things that are exciting and thrilling to watch so yeah it's happened in formula one um it's happening in baseball a lot happening in basketball in a in a slightly different way after the break i uh i think we should talk about the beautiful game the uh the game that thought that it was immune from being moneyballed football and maybe you a few other examples of uh of places where people have used science to their advantage to um to to maybe make the game better maybe make the game worse let's do it this episode is brought to you by cancer research uk radiotherapy is over a century old, but it is still changing. Cancer Research UK helped lay the foundations of radiotherapy in the early 20th century and has driven progress ever since. Radiotherapy remains one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment today. Every year, millions of people worldwide benefit from Cancer Research UK's work to make it more precise. Scientists are still refining how radiotherapy is delivered. And one example is an experimental treatment called flash radiotherapy, which delivers radiation in fractions of a second, up to a thousand times faster than standard radiotherapy. And early studies suggest that speed could make a real difference. Flash radiotherapy may cause up to 50% less damage to healthy cells. But scientists don't yet know why healthy cells seem to be spared. So Cancer Research UK are working to answer that. Understanding it could be key to reducing side effects in the future. For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs, and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org forward slash the rest is science. This episode is brought to you by Thriver. Most of us tend to think of blood as something slightly clinical, linked to illness or bad news. But in reality, it has been quietly keeping a record of what's going on inside our bodies, almost like a biological diary. It holds clues about how everyday choices shape our health, sleep, stress, food, movement. And without access to that information, staying healthy can feel more complicated than it needs to be. Thriver is a proactive health platform that lets you check in from home using regular at-home blood testing with clear guidance to help you understand what your body is telling you. That sense of clarity changes how health feels. Instead of juggling advice, rules, and trends, you get a simpler sense of direction. What looks consistent, what's shifted a little, and what's actually worth paying attention to It just makes health feel calmer and simpler to think about day to day Head to Thriva to get started That T dot C And use code T-R-I-S for 20% off your first test. Okay, we're back from the break and we are asking whether every sport is immune from this idea of mathematical and scientific optimization. Will anything escape, Michael? Yeah, I think some sports are more at risk of the predator of data. And I'm not alone in thinking this. Baseball is in a precarious position because in some ways it's a more simple game. When you talk about the three true outcomes, you're talking about three people, a pitcher, a batter and a catcher. And when you think about baseball, there are only like 24 four states. Who's on what base and how many outs are there? And that's it. But in a game like American football, you've got billions of data points to build up all the possible states. Where is the ball? What down is it? What distance is required to get a new set of downs? You've got all these variables and you've not got a pitcher, a catcher and a batter. You've got 11 people on each team and you don't even know what play one person is going to be secretly doing so it's a lot harder to just be like oh a plus b equals c do c with baseball it's like okay we've got 18 billion variables what does that even equal and then what is the other team secretly deciding they're going to be doing at the same time though i mean people certainly have tried to uh to mathematize nfl there's a group called zebra technologies or probably zebra i imagine they're american so let's let's call them zebra um and what they what they do is they use player tracking data so uh when players are in practice they'll have little rfid tags on their shirts but you can also do this where you have like a top-down shot of a of a field in play and then get people to go manually say okay this player moved from square a21 to b22 or whatever it might be incredibly boring work but what you can do when you have all of that data and i'm talking you know you're sampling this sort of 10 times a second right over the course of not just a game but a player's entire career you can essentially get an an ai model to learn the the unique data footprint of a particular player the way that they move how fast they can run how much you know force and energy they can put into to the particular play that they're making but then what you can do is basically run many, many, many millions of simulations of what might happen in the game. So this is essentially what they do. They sort of like create this kind of fantasy version of the game that may be coming up and simulate it 50 million times, try every possible combination of strategic choices, every different, you know, attack and so on, and come up with a probability map of what they expect to happen in the game and i think this is the this is sort of taking the whole idea one step further i mean money ball originally was about finding undervalued players based on past performance but this playbook simulation is about predicting the future performance of the future calls the different way that you're going to play the game going forwards i don't know like you're a big nfl fan right do you does that ruin the joy for you or does it does add to it the idea is really exciting but of course you can imagine an end result where the coaches have this ai on a tablet and they're able to use quantum computing to go through so many options that they know exactly what play to run and all of us at home have the same app on our phones and we go oh it's going to be a screen pass to the left you know and we all just know and we start to just know so well it just feels so automatic that we just don't really even need to have the games anymore we can just have a computer simulate the whole season and we can go oh cool and then people might still want to put bets on them and suddenly american football becomes a slot machine right now we're not at that stage but i think we won't get to that stage though because we will just keep changing the obstacles and adding new ones so that it doesn't become automatic and that might mean that we'd make some decisions that seem kind of like fuddy-duddy and boring like No, you just you cannot use quantum computers to calculate your next play. All right. Like we could even Amish the whole thing and say no electricity is allowed. All right. No microphones, no RFDI chips. Like you've got it. You've got to stitch those players shirts. Exactly. You've got to weave the cloth. Yeah. I think that would be a very fun game to watch. I'm not against the optimization because I think that we always need our games to be subjected to the efforts to solve them. But at the same time, we want to watch problems, not solutions. You know, I thought it was interesting how you said that the idea itself is intriguing, right? The idea of like, can you do it? Is it possible? Is the scientific challenge of it? And I sort of feel the same way. There's been a lot of work of analyzing football. soccer i'm talking about here right the real the one true football um although i have to tell you actually my ex-husband who's still very good friend of mine was a sports writer and we had a rule while we were together that um he was only allowed to watch a maximum of eight hours of sports in a day right when he wasn't working this was this is uh this is in his free time and he would regularly break that rule so since since when it seems to be separated i've gone on a on a on a football hiatus. I haven't watched even a single minute of football since then. So I'm slightly out the loop, right? So all of you listeners who are experts in football can write in and tell me all of the things I'm about to get wrong. Don't know anything about soccer. Do know a lot about maths though. And there's quite a lot of maths now going on in football. This really started with Ian Graham, who is this theoretical physicist, Cambridge theoretical physicist, who in 2012 joined Liverpool and set up this basically data analysis team where they were initially trying to moneyball football, right? Try and find players who were undervalued. But what they did that was extremely clever was there was this idea floating around about looking at expected goals, calculating your probability of scoring a goal from a particular position on a pitch. And what that does is it separates out the actual result from the process itself it kind of gives you more of a sense of how well the player is doing because whether you you know score or hit the post or the goal again is to get to it is it often comes down to luck but getting yourself into a position from which you can have an attempt on goal that is something that's much more about skill this idea of like mapping out from many, many thousands of games where goals are scored from and from which positions on the field you should try and take shots at goal. But he took it further, right? So what he was doing actually is not completely dissimilar to what has been done in NFL since. A full data picture of where every player is across the pitch and the way that they're moving and sampling this many times a second and then calculates the probability of a goal being scored in the next 15 seconds okay but then crucially looks at the next decision that the player chooses to make whether the player then chooses to pass the ball move into a particular area and whether or not that increases or decreases the probability of a goal being scored in the next 15 seconds okay So it's all about like looking forwards. And suddenly when you do that, you have access to this whole new level of analysis for what makes a player good. You're no longer just looking at the number of goals they scored, the number of passes they completed. You care much more about what decisions did this player make that added value to the game rather than just what were the end kind of outcomes. when he started doing this he says in in his book he says that he realized that the scouts the football scouts were like getting loads of stuff wrong they were way too obsessed with the aesthetics of play they they cared a lot about people who looked really good who looked kind of comfortable when they were handling the ball who were like very athletic and moved really beautifully and they didn't care scouts didn't care about people who were totally effective but looked really awkward yeah um joel matip is an example this this guy was like he was a free transfer so he didn't even need to pay for him and he looked clumsy as hell but the data demonstrated that he actually advanced the ball more effectively than almost any defender in europe so kind of liverpool like went and swept him up so so at this point you know this is like sort of 20 2014 or so maybe a little bit further on, Liverpool has this like secret source. They've got this mathematical model of a way that a game unfolds that allows them to analyse players. They take themselves from this sort of, I don't know, maybe this is a little bit harsh. I'm sorry, Liverpool fans, but like this team of faded glory to right at the very top of the league. It has definitely changed the game. Now other teams have caught up, Brighton in particular, doing some amazing stuff at the moment with finding, you know, really incredible players that they pick up for absolutely nothing and then selling them on for they've made genuinely millions and millions millions maybe even hundreds of millions by doing it the thing is is that that this has definitely changed the game so the first thing is that people don't take wild punts anymore you used to get people from the halfway line and be like oh sod it just whack it like boot it down the pitch may as well see if you can get a just doesn't happen anymore you also don't really get mavericks anymore you know you used to have people who would just be who'd play in this very sort of unhinged way right unpredictable um just kind of very bullish you don't really get those as much anymore there's still a few of them around there's cole palmer at chelsea um who's still a bit of a little bit of a maverick everyone could disagree with me i don't i mean i'm frankly i wouldn't recognize him if i met him in the street but my sports writer ex-husband told me that Cole Palmer was a current maverick that still exists. It has shown that there is this optimal way to play, right? So you don't get this same diversity in play that you perhaps had before. On the flip side, you know, it saved us from this monopoly. It means that it's not just like the rich teams buy the expensive players and that's it and they're up there and it's the end of it actually you know brighton being an example of a team that can get really good players for nothing anymore and i think you could also say that the standard of players has increased as well right you know you they're making fewer mistakes the defenders are moving much smarter but maybe maybe that's part of the problem because maybe the mistakes are the things that makes it fun to watch in the first place yeah i think they are i'm so i think the the data analysis can make something so automatic it's not fun but they also keep things really fresh they like you said they help the smaller teams and they also give us new challenges to overcome maybe we just need different leagues right maybe we just have these are the leagues that are doing it as we have at the moment and then you have the enhanced performance league and then you have the Amish League. I think at a certain point, you can only optimize humans so much, especially in certain sports. Like you can tell a player, hey, this is what you should do in this circumstance. And they might still not do it because they'd rather do something fun and be a hero. And this isn't even by choice, right? There's this well-known phenomenon known as action bias, where humans are psychologically biased to do something as opposed to do nothing. So when it comes to goalkeepers in football, right, when a penalty shot is taken, they've got to make a decision about what they're going to do because the ball comes so fast. What is it like 11 or 12 meters away? That's it. It's kicked like super fast. They cannot wait and watch where it's going. So they need to decide, OK, am I going to stay right where I am in the middle? Am I going to dive left or dive right? And so in 2007, a group of psychologists analyzed what happened in hundreds of penalty kicks. They found that standing still allowed the goalkeeper to stop the ball about a third of the time. But if they decided to dive left or right, like before they even really knew what was going on, that dropped their chances to just 13%. Despite those statistics, goalkeepers still dive 94% of the time. oh because to not move looks like you're a lazy bones yeah you've got you've got how many thousands of people in the crowd shouting your name with probably swear words that's right and so if we come up with optimization strategies that look boring or lazy or disinterested even if they are optimal and are better that doesn't mean it's going to make for the story of a hero yeah because that is it right ultimately we are talking about stories that involve people and mapping the kind of coldness of statistics onto it might give you some advantages but there's a limit really there is a limit because you're still talking about you know like genuine people in all of this that's right in fact i thought about this a lot watching football lately i think that there are some teams especially the the chiefs a few years ago who succeeded because they played really smartly but it wasn't necessarily a jump up and scream and shout and have a lot of fun game. They would do things where I'm like, whoa, that was definitely the optimal nerdy choice. Get out of bounds or, you know, don't score that point. You need to run the clock down. It was just smart. And they won and they won a lot of games by like a point. But there weren't the big, deep, risky passes. there wasn't the what happens when humans test the limits of their skill it was instead what if we do exactly what mathematically gives us the most optimal chance of winning the game and i appreciated that but a lot of people didn't there is something interesting in that though this idea of like testing the limits of what humans are able to do which i think is the reason why most people are drawn to sports i think there are other ways that you test the limits of what humans are able to do though there are sort of like optimization strategies but just maybe not mathematical ones so there's this story about um this is cricket story that i really love about reverse swing i don't know if you've ever come across this how do you know the rules of cricket no i don i mean it it correct answer no one does there far too many dna is like baseball you got a cricket bat what a reverse swing does that mean like No no no the swing is all about the ball itself okay so it is it is it is i think the grandest of sports actually i not really a sport fan but i do love going to test cricket it's really really wonderful there's something so like gloriously slow about it yeah i've never been to a cricket match but i used to live by oval and i kept saying i want to do this i want to i hear it's so chill oh the oval can be not chill the oval can get pretty spicy um as far as cricket goes um yeah but it's an enormous enormous fun what happens when you are throwing a cricket ball the cricket ball itself you have the seam that's running down the middle i'm doing the american version for you okay so you have these two sides it's very very hard this ball and the amazing bowlers can do lots of very clever things with the ball in the way that they have they hold it in their hands the way that they spin it and in particular the way that they get it to bounce on the seam or otherwise and the fact that you have a bounce before the batter hits it adds this whole layer of complication to cricket that you do not get in baseball because when it bounces how predictable is its trajectory from that moment now the thing is is that um also because of this seam you can create this swing on the ball where it ends up sort of bending around you're basically using aerodynamics to your advantage you're it's like curling a ball right in football you are um creating areas of laminar and turbulent flow on the ball that change its trajectory from being a straight line uh you're also with the spin Now, reverse swing is something that the Pakistani cricketers worked out in the 1970s. It's sort of credited to this one particular cricketer called Sarfaz Nawaz. And he realized that if you have your cricket ball and you absolutely brutalize one half of the ball, right, you smash it a bit. OK, you like mess it up until it is so rough. How do you mess it up? Do you get to do this? Great question. Before the game or just while you play? No, no, no, because you're given the game. while you play okay so you could do it during the game if you just like deliberately hit right hit it against that side every single time when you're bowling there are cheekier ways to do it too and people have been accused of using all sorts of tactics to to mess this up as as time has gone on the key point about this though is that if you do this where one side is roughed up to hell and the other side is slick as anything yeah you get something called reverse swing which is where after the ball bounces it bends in the opposite direction huh and now when that happens it is it's like what the hell just happened to that ball right it's an aerodynamic trick and it is it's one that was found through trial and error and that actually the mathematicians and aerodynamicists have spent many many many many days weeks months writing academic papers trying to work out how the hell this is even possible but it's like you're making the ball do something that seems like it shouldn't work and people get out the batters get out like like that when it happens okay so for 20 years right the pakistan you go and play pakistan and they would do this and it'd be like what the hell is going on they could not figure it out eventually they they worked out that what they were doing was roughing up one side of the ball and this is the english and the australian cricketers they started accusing the pakistaners of cheating they accused them of like using um bottle tops to scruff up the side they accused them of like using their teeth to bite it there's actually some footage of one one cricketer um in 2010 literally biting the ball right like it was an apple trying to rough it up the thing is the british and the australian teams they they by this point they knew that it was something to do with roughing up the ball on one side and keeping it smooth on the other they knew that that was what was going on but they couldn't replicate it as hard as they tried they could not make the ball do this thing that the pakistanis had worked out and so instead they just frequently accused the pakistanis of cheating sure this is like over and over again they just couldn't do it um they they even tried illicit tampering they even tried to like do really tricky things to the ball to try and get it to do it they just couldn't do it but then what happened is they finally worked out they finally worked out how to do it and they had to do by cheating um they worked out that um they could get this reverse swing to work if they ate murray mints right like literally sweets and then shined the ball using saliva and the stickiness from this murray mint okay so this is like proper ball tampering right but this is like the biggest scandal you can imagine because it's like the sugar in this mint is acting as this binding agent It's keeping the saliva on the side. It's allowing the kind of artificial weight imbalance. That's what makes the ball kind of hoop around corners. And at that point, then that was like that was genuine cheating. At that point, this starts to become banned. OK, because there was an existing rule against tampering with the ball in that way. You cannot tamper with the ball. Yeah, you can't. You can't be tampering with the ball. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Murray mints, that is that is it's clever. What is a Murray mint? Is that a kind of candy? yes a kind of candy exactly okay exactly it is um is as they say not cricket sticky spit on the ball sweet sticky spit exactly exactly so sweet sticky spit is out spit was still okay for a long time right it's still you can still spit on the ball disgusting but it did work to allow you to do reduce to do reverse swing until covid happened and then now spit was not allowed oh yeah okay but here's the thing okay um basically you can't really do reverse swing unless you get to mess with the ball this is you you can't really do you can't really naturally get this this this imbalance this asymmetry in the two sides and actually you know what reverse swing's quite fun it is that example of where humans have pushed things to the absolute limit sure it's like in an intellectual way it's in a sort of like harnessing the laws of physics to your advantage way rather than athleticism or just you know you're like amazing tactical decisions on the on the field but i sort of think there is something quite sports like about it at the same time yeah right i should say that um the ipl which is this version of cricket where you can they can make any rules they like they've now unbanned saliva so i think they agree but actually spit is good so it's so much of it comes down to what is the spirit of the game right like do we want the cricket ball to be really unpredictable or not and so much of it comes down to whether it feels fair like whether it feels automatic right if you're able to rough up the ball to the point where the batters just never have a chance then the game stops being fun and that's how i first felt about the tush push in american football go on what's this this was pioneered by the philadelphia eagles who figured out you know when you find yourself in a position where you only need to move the ball like a foot or or just like one yard forward to get a whole new set of downs what if we just got really really heavy guys and we put some in front and some behind so when the quarterback gets the ball we all just push forward we fall forward guys in the back push and because we're the offense and we know the call we know when the the ball's going to get hyped what we have it we'll have a split second advantage we'll get momentum first and the defense won't be able to stop us and they weren't and this strategy was so effective that as not an Eagles fan I hated it because it felt like it could not be beaten which meant it was automatic if the eagles were in a fourth and one situation they weren't they were going to get a first down and it was just like watching a big scrum of people slurp forward and that was the end of it it worked every time and so a lot of people said we need to ban this move because it's just not fun it there's no competitive gamified element it's automatic what happens every time and i think one of the eagles coaches or someone even joked about how for for a team that can do this tush push there's no first in 10 it's first in nine you only have to go nine yards that last yard you just do the push that no one can beat lately though i've kind of changed my mind because other teams have tried it and they haven't been able to do it in the same way. Maybe because their players aren't heavy enough. Maybe because there are ways to beat it. I think there was a moment where a player stayed outside of the scrum and like grabbed the ball from the outside. I think someone tried to just like lay down to stop it. And I think if there are ways around it, then what we're really looking at is a really creative challenge. And I can't wait to see the future of the move. But right, if it's just going to always be automatic, then it's not a game anymore. I may as well watch people drop bricks off of buildings. Oh, look, it hit the ground again. It hit the ground again. Like, who cares? I think this is it, right? It's like you have different layers of competition. You have what's actually going on on the field. And then there's sort of like a meta competition. And then maybe even another layer above that of like the regulators and the entire teams together. And I think that, I mean, what we've been talking about here is like people coming up with ideas, people coming up with ingenious inventions that allow them to circumvent what is at the base level and sort of compete one level above and I don't know like I'm not a sports fan right like I'm not somebody who follows sports religiously there's something I quite like about the idea of coming up with an idea of a tush push or a reverse swing or like a really insanely complicated mathematical model that allows you to simulate these things and get an advantage but I appreciate that it doesn't make what you're watching on the field as interesting perhaps yeah yeah i think it's like a it's like a game of whack-a-mole that must occur like we should be encouraging people to figure out analytically and strategically things that will be almost unbeatable but then maybe we do need to change the rules so that it continues to be competitive so when it comes to olympic records like let's talk about the 100 meter dash all right um here's another study that showed that The fastest possible 100 meter dash speed was estimated to be 9.44 seconds. Now, that's only 0.14 seconds faster than Usain Bolt's current world record. But this is the estimated limit for human running speed. So what happens next? And I think that there's a fun option here. And it's that we should start allowing people to run on all fours. Hey, look, it's a different optimizer. Is it definitely not in the rules? It probably is against the rules. But even if it isn't, at the current moment, no one can run on all fours faster than Usain Bolt. There's a theory that with proper training, four-legged running could very quickly become faster. Because biomechanically, it should. There are other animals that run faster than humans, okay? Like the cheetah, all right? Now, the cheetah does it by being, there's a lot of reasons the cheetah is fast. But look at this statistic. When a cheetah runs at top speed, it spins 70% of its time with at least one leg on the ground. And a leg on the ground means you're accelerating, you're pushing, you're applying force to your body against the earth. Usain Bolt when he set the world record he had a foot on the ground not 70 percent of the time but 43 percent of the time so most of the time both of his feet were off the ground he was flying which looks cool and sounds cool but when you're flying you are decelerating you are losing speed but once you get more legs and xkcd did a great comic about like here's here's how you can go faster, the only winning option is to have more legs because then you get to have more force constantly being applied. You can always have a leg that's on the ground while the others are resetting. This is a person like crawling like an animal on the ground. We are in early days here. And look, here's a paper that is estimated that by the 2048 Olympics, if we dedicate ourselves to learning how to four leggedly run, it will become equally fast to run on two legs versus four as a top athlete and every olympics after that all runners will run on four legs crawling around like an animal it's the new tush push it's the new tush push it's the new tush push it's the new reverse swing by the way i've just i've just checked while you were while you were talking i've got up the world athletics book um there is no specific rule that says you you've got to run on two legs there's i mean there's lane infringement you've got to be careful about not infringing in your lane which is only 1.22 meters wide and you only finish when your torso crosses the line although i mean you sort of have an advantage if you've been you're towards the head yeah exactly see like the path has already been cleared for this future and i think that's what we need to embrace not the tradition of the game's rules or what's usually done but instead the tradition of just the spirit of the competition i'm going to put that one in my uh predictions for the future 2048 tush pushing athletics i'm okay with this i'm okay with this or who needs who needs normal sports we've got um we've got meta sports we've got we've got amish football we've got we've got monkey running and we've got you know enhanced drugged up people in las vegas some it's way more fun than the normal stuff i know and i'm glad i think we're going to be on the right side of history here i think in the future all running events will be done on four lens and it'll be this huge sensation everyone's like this is so weird i can't believe it like what an invention and people will show clips and they'll say 20 years ago michael and hannah predicted this yeah and i mean we didn't predict it other researchers said this first but i believe them and i think that it is the point of sport is for us to do things like this and always be changing too right too right well that is a wrap for this episode make sure that you are you are following the rest of science wherever you get your podcast also on youtube where you can you know you can clip this to to play it back to yourself in in 25 years time when we end up being proved to be right um as ever if you want to ask us a question or send us anything you could do that we might just answer it on on thursday's episode of feel notes um send that into the rest of science at goalhanger.com see you next time