Originally Posted by Alrightmate:
“Why not? They're the competitions which matter the most.
You could liken it to athletes who may do well at the smaller competition meetings but fail to deliver at the Olympics.
It's those big competitions which are the benchmark because they're the ones where teams try to do their utmost best to win. So you've got a much higher chance of all teams putting out what they believe their best possible sides are.
As in national football, some managers don't invest as much effort into the smaller cup competitions and focus more on the FA or European cup. You could win lots of friendly matches but if your opponents aren't treating it as seriously as you are then it's perhaps not always a true reflection of who the better team is when at their strongest.”
“Why not? They're the competitions which matter the most.
You could liken it to athletes who may do well at the smaller competition meetings but fail to deliver at the Olympics.
It's those big competitions which are the benchmark because they're the ones where teams try to do their utmost best to win. So you've got a much higher chance of all teams putting out what they believe their best possible sides are.
As in national football, some managers don't invest as much effort into the smaller cup competitions and focus more on the FA or European cup. You could win lots of friendly matches but if your opponents aren't treating it as seriously as you are then it's perhaps not always a true reflection of who the better team is when at their strongest.”
They are the competitions which matter most, but the number of games played isn't high enough to form a good sample size. The World Cup deliberately forsakes robustness for the sake of brevity. You bring up the European Cup, so let me ask you this - when Liverpool won the Champions League in 2005, but finished 5th in the Premier League the same season, would you say they were the best team in Europe? Most people would say they weren't. Because no matter how high the stakes in the Champions League, no matter how much money is at stake, how much prestige is involved, there aren't enough games played for it to be a better test of quality than winning the league is. More than almost any other major team sport, football is driven by luck. When the most common margin of victory is a single goal, and when there's often only one goal in a game, a little bit of luck can decide a game. Over the course of a 38 game season, that luck balances out, but over the course of three games in the group stages, or even the seven games it takes to win the tournament, there isn't time for luck not to play a major role.
