ok here is david runciman on some fellow named mourinho in the lrb, arguin that the concept of management skeez is a bit of a myth — so far so good, it is “auteur theory” mystification of an inherently collective phenom — but in doin so apparently attemptin to reduce all sport to the play of statistical means
now despite my immense maffs brane i am as diffident abt statistics as i am abt foopball, but i don’t see how “statistical mean” is (as he’s usin it) any more of a “non-mythical” concept than the various things he claims he’s exposing
viz what does he mean by a team’s “statistical mean”, other than an after-the-fact summary of results to date — if a teams “gets better”, its “statistical mean” will rise, and in the process of “getting better”, the reversion to the mean that is a “bad luck streak” may not be a reversion to the old (worse) mean, but reversion to a new and improved mean
shorter mark s: you’re only as good as yr stats, except when you get better, so do they
anyway plz jump in actual real football experts and/or statisticians, cz i can’t work out what runciman is actually proving here