By Tony Attwood
It seems a supercomputer has predicted the results of some forthcoming football matches, and thus tells us which team ends up where this season.
Except it hasn’t. Just as a supercomputer hasn’t predicted the “Exact Year Life on Earth Will End” which is what an article on the Yahoo site says. That story actually says a supercomputer has determined that “survival on planet Earth will be impossible in about 1 billion years, when conditions become too extreme for life as we know it.” Unfortunately “about one billion years” is not the “exact years”.
And this is the trouble with supercomputers. Their pronouncements are re-written by journalists who need a story in two minutes to satisfy their editor’s demands. Make it up, blame it on a computer, repeat. That’s journalism.
Supercomputers are not used to predict football results, that is a fact. But since so many media outlets run that tale every month, people do start to believe it – although what the story actually tells us is that the media treat us readers with utter contempt.
For running an utterly false story once is one thing, but then even after it has been exposed as utterly false, to do it again and again is something else. And even that is not the end, for these stories predicting winners and losers in football, generally turn out to be wrong. So think of the implication of that: the computers in charge of telling our government when a foreign power is attacking us with nuclear weapons is getting things wrong, over and over again. That’s not good.
To be clear, the Atomic Weapons Establishment has two supercomputers, the 4.3 petaflop Bull Sequana X1000, and the 1.8 petaflop SGI IceX supercomputer. They run nuclear weaponry simulations, as required by the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1996 to which the UK is a signatory.
But the race among newspaper journalists to produce the most inaccurate information goes on as Fleet Street publishers fall over themselves while trying to make it back to their offices after a heavy lunch in a variety of public houses.
With English newspapers now seemingly having secured their position as the most inaccurate in the whole of Europe, with between 97% and 98% of their predictions about club transfers being utterly wrong, Fleet Street has been awarded the prestigious Innacuracy Trophy for Journalism for the 25th week running. (I just made that up – look it’s easy).
The tragedy however that some people choose to believe it. Then, in the case of transfers, when Arsenal fail to sign players who they were never thinking of signing, or who was never for sale the manager is criticised for being too slow, and his sacking is demanded. Again.
Of course not everything published is nonsense. The Telegraph in saying “The foundations have been laid. Arsenal are a top Premier League and Champions League side, agonisingly close to being successful. But the wait for a golden moment cannot go on forever. Eventually, there must be an end product,” is right.
Clubs rise and fall and the question is simply will Arsenal’s next move be a further fall from the heights of last season or a further challenge on the title?
The media’s point is summarised in that Telegraph article when they announce that “Arsenal’s problem is they are into their fifth ‘gap year’ under Arteta without a Premier League title win”.
So let’s consider how long other clubs have gone since winning the Premier League. This list contains all the clubs that have won the Premier League since it began in 1992/3 – over 30 years ago.For Liverpool, this is their first win of the title in five seasons.
- For Manchester City it is now one season since they have won the title.
- For Chelsea it is eight years since they won the title
- For Leicester City* it is nine years since they won the title.
- For Manchester United this will be 12 years since they won the title.
- For Arsenal it is 21 years since they won the title
- For Blackburn it is 30 years since they won the title
That’s it: only seven teams have won the Premier League and next season two of those seven won’t even be in the Premier League. So winning the Premier League is a rarity, and for most teams something that never happens. And we should note Arsenal have won it three times – and it was fan pressure that got rid of the manager who did that.
Now of course I wanted to see Arsenal win the league this season, just as I want to see them win it next season – and that really is my focus, because all the data available shows that although changing managers can improve a club, most of the time it makes the club worse. Sometimes far worse. Unai Emery anyone? (Villa are currently seventh).
Liverpool have won the Premier League twice and to do that they have got through nine managers, again suggesting that changing the manager doesn’t always get the title. Manchester City got through 15 managers in the Premier League before they found one who could win them the title.
But journalists need news, and when they haven’t got any they make it up. Consider this, “One of the worrying signs of a manager under pressure is when interviews become more about validating work already done.”
Why is that a worrying sign? We are not told, and when you think about it, answering questions about one’s work by talking about what one has done seems quite reasonable, especially when one can’t talk about future work, since transfer negotiations are confidential.
Thus the journalist defines talking about the past as a “worrying sign” but that’s just his definition, made because it makes Arteta look bad, which is the point of his article.
No, the worrying sign is that the journalist chooses this issue – one that is impossible for the manager to resolve – and calls the failure to answer a “worrying sign”. It means the journalist has no real evidence to support his wild claims.
It is in short a sign of an editor saying, “do me a knocking piece about Arsenal” and the journalist, jettisoning any credibility he might once have had, does it. We are in short, day after day, being conned.
Additional reporting by Sir Hardly Anyone.
