Keen On

“Soccer matches are poorly designed experiments — you don’t necessarily find out which team was better. But any soccer fan will tell you that. Oftentimes, the better team does not win.” — Nick Greene, via a NASA scientist On June 11, the World Cup comes to North America. Fifty-six years ago, I watched the searing injustice of Johann Cruyff’s Holland getting robbed in the 1974 final by Germany. Today I talk with someone who explains how this kind of injustice is built into the game’s DNA. Nick Greene — long-suffering Newcastle United fan and author of How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius — has a new book, How to Watch Soccer Like a Genius, which tells us what architects, stuntwomen, paleoanthropologists and computer scientists tell us about the beautiful game. What they tell us is that the game isn’t fair. One NASA scientist tells Greene that soccer is a “poorly designed experiment” because the low-scoring nature of the game means results don’t reliably identify the better team. Thus the dark fate of the free