Ergodicity of Football

Ergodicity is the idea that, given enough time, a system will go through all the possible states. I used to wonder why football fans drop out after a certain amount of time. That's because football is ergodic: given enough time, a lot of improbable things will take place. Some of the most exciting results in football are in the rare events that pop up every now and then, although when you've followed football for long enough, you start to realise that rare events aren't really that rare, and in fact pop up pretty often. And maybe realising that was the key to me getting less interested in football as time went on. I could say that the peak of my interest in football was during my early working life, but as time goes on, it becomes a little dreary. 

Here are some epochal changes in the state of football over the years

1. Manchester City has won the Champions League. That was the holy grail, and Pep Guardiola has messed up in the Champions League so many times after winning it twice in his first 3 full seasons as a fully fledged manager - never winning it at Bayern, and messing it up in his first 5 or so seasons in Man City. 

2. There have been trebles in 2009, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2020 and 2023. 6 of them in the last 15 years, which is totally amazing because there's never been another time when so much power has been concentrated at the top. The most powerful clubs in the world dominate in terms of fandom, scouting systems, marketing, TV money and business, so that all the stuff on the pitch, like playing well on match day sounds like an afterthought. 

3. Chelsea has finished at the bottom half of the table. This season has been a shitshow, the first truly post-Abramovich season. The distasteful association with Putin aside, you can appreciate his era as one where 

4. Newcastle are back in the champion's league. This is the first time it's happened in more than 10 years, during which time their fandom has suffered. Now this is due to their unsavoury association with the Saudis, but it happened without obscene amounts of money being spent and that should be heartening.

5. Leeds United returning to the English Premier League. Now, they've been relegated again, but let's hope that their stay from English football is a brief one. Luton Town, 

6. Liverpool winning the league. I never understood how momentous it was for Man United to win the league for the first time in 26 years, until I saw Liverpool win it in 2020, at a time when Man City was going through a transition. 

7. Leicester City winning the league. This was the biggest of all the black swans. 

8. Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa, Hamburg, Porto, PSV Eindhoven, Steaua Bucharest, Red Star Belgrade and Olympique Marseilles winning the European Cup. No doubt this was during the dull dreary days of European football, where everybody played defensive, attacking players were not protected, football was of a dreadful quality, and stadiums were dilapidated. Still, it's nice to see the underdogs triumphing so often that the traditional powers had to come up with the champion's league format just to make sure that the biggest clubs had their chance. 

9. England reaching a major tournament final. It would have been nice to see them win something, but I guess part of the branding was that they always managed to come up short. Reaching the semis in 2018 and reaching the final in "Euro 2020" which was actually in 2021

10. Leo Messi wins a national cup final. After being runners up in the World Cup in 2014 and the Copa America in 2007, 2015 and 2016, Lionel Messi finally wins both trophies for Argentina.

11. Chelsea wins a champions league. They reached the semi-final or final in 04, 05, 07, 08 and 09 and it was almost heartening to see them win it in 2012. Quite a few big clubs win the champions league after many tries. Man City winning it was seen as breaking the duck after 5 years of failure. Man United won it after years of failing at the group stage. Liverpool winning it in 2005 was a little flukey.

12. The big four was broken up. The quartet of Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and Man U dominated the EPL in the 2000s. Then there were other clubs that tried to break up this stranglehold. But the one that really succeeded was Man City. Tottenham managed a few runners up spots under Pochettino but fizzled out soon after. 

13. Man City winning the premier league under those incredible circumstances. And that was the shift of the balance of power: Man United's imperial era, which coincided with the beginning of the premier league, was over. 

14. A period when the Bundesliga wasn't dominated by Bayern Munich. They were called "Hollywood FC" because they were always messing up. Kaiserslautern, Dortmund, Wolfsburg, Stuttgart and Bremen managed to win the Bundesliga during a period when the championship was in flux, but this year, in spite of a strong challenge by Dortmund, Bayern have it sewn up.

15. Napoli wins Serie A. But this is also an era where Juventus dominance is over. Also, there were dark horse victories during my lifetime, with Hellas Verona, AS Roma, Lazio and Sampdoria. 

16. Barcelona and Real Madrid have won La Liga most of the time, but I've also lived through Real Sociedad, Athletic Bilbao, Deportivo, Atletico Madrid and Valencia win La Liga. 

17. Erling Haaland scoring a ridiculous number of goals.

18. Spain wins the Euros, their first one for 44 years. Then they go on to win the World Cup and then a second Euro. It's also the first time an international side wins when Guardiola is managing in their country. (As an aside: Spain wins the World Cup and the 2008 and 2012 Euros when Guardiola is managing Barcelona. Then Germany wins the World Cup in 2014 when Guardiola is managing Bayern Munich. Then England reaches the finals of Euro 2020 (actually 2021). )

19. Man United win a treble. There was a lot of discussion about which treble was "better". Manchester United's treble came at a time when a treble was only won once every 10 years. It was when financial doping wasn't taken to a ridiculous level, and before analytics had given a few football clubs a ridiculous advantage. Man United had been slightly better than the competition in the FA cup and the league. Whether they were better than the Inter, Juventus and Bayern Munich teams they faced in the UEFA champions' league is open to debate. Man City, on the other hand, were a juggernaut who simply swatted their competition aside. 

Another romance about this is the English side winning the competition for the first time since the 5 year Europe ban which led to a lot of dark horses winning it (from Romania, Portugal, Holland and Yugoslavia). Eventually, there would be a period between 2004 and 2012 when an English side would reach the final almost every year. 

20. Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Greece and Portugal winning the Euros. For whatever reason, the Euros seems to be a competition where the dark horses triumph a little more often. The World Cup rarely produces shock winners. 

I've always wondered if I will live long enough to see Arsenal win another Premier League. Maybe when Guardiola's gone it might be possible. 

Rat Race

 Do you remember a time when Singapore was considered a cheap and casual place compared to the US and the West? It seems that things have changed so much.

There are a lot of things that you can no longer have in a shopping mall. Bookstores are out. The only place to browse books is the library and a lot of libraries are being downsized.

I don't know if you're still able to get a copy of Douglas Rushkoff's “Life Inc”, but that was a book – probably just one of many books that drew the connection between the rat race and modern capitalism, and put it all under the same branch of “corporatism”. But we were selling out to the values of corporatism and letting those values dictate our lives.

Corporatism dictates the composition of our shopping malls. Probably in the nattier neighbourhoods, it's still possible to have cheap furniture, hardware, a lot of econ minimarts. But in the major shopping malls, rent is so expensive that you can only really afford these few things:

1. Spas

2. Eating places

3. High velocity discount goods

4. Tuition centres

It's the last one that makes me gag. We no longer have free range childhoods. Children no longer will have the freedom to roam around as they were. The tuition industrial complex has triumphed. When we were kids, our lives revolved around a set of values. It was about proving how smart you were, how much better than the other guy you were.

I sometimes still wonder how much this great game had on our psyches. I saw an advertisement about a new fangled thing, a collaboration between Ecole 42 and SUTD. And one of the features, they said was that the Ecole 42 system is a gamification of programming education. Then it occurred to me: the education system itself is a gamification of life. You make a lot of activities, make it look like some competitive game, in order to get the kids to do what you want them to do. It's always better when you play to win, rather than if you were to regard it as a chore.

And in many ways it was good. But from the outside, it looks very sinister, especially if you as an adult understand that there are alternatives in life, but the kids don't. The first goal in life is to “do well”. That means grades, or ECAs. Or “enrichment”, which means that you are a genius but you actually get to show that you are a genius. Or you get waved on to some entitled station in life, like entry into a competitive university.

So at the age of 18, you don't understand life in general. You don't understand the principles of life. I may not even understand executive functioning. But I understand that there is a game out there, and that I play to win.

The kids are going out to cram school and helicopter parenting. They've only known being cocooned, and being in a hypercompetitive environment. If you have a generation of kids who believe that their only exercise of power is snitching, then you will have a lot of weirdo behaviours. People whose only recourse is to believe that everything in this system is tilted against them, and their only recourse is to appeal to some kind of indignation against injustice. You will have people who don't actually do more than petition for some kind of army of people out there to help them fight a fight.

And so it was, when I discovered that there was the 4^th floor of Harbourfront (the shopping mall formerly known as World Trade Centre) and it used to house a food court, but – I think a lot of high floored food courts are a thing of a past, especially in the CBD – it's now some kind of experential learning centre for kids.

Today's kids go through an experiential learning centre which is partly cram school, partly entertainment, and partly a cult-like est / landmark forum motivational thing. And they're in some artificial environment that can only exist because their parents paid top dollar for it, and it can only exist in expensive real estate because of that. No more hanging out in bookstores after school. No more wandering around record shops, trying to piece together the mysteries of life in solitude.

Machine learning distinguishes itself between supervised learning and unsupervised learning. What we have is the advent of supervised learning. You can't afford to wander all out on your own. You shouldn't be trusted to figure out the big questions. Your job is to hit all the marks, to master reams and reams of context-free and unrelated knowledge which may (but probably will not) serve you well later in life.

And what makes it even worse for kids these days is that .... for me, I knew that I should do well, and that building up a good ECA record is a good thing. But these kids have it all spelt out to them – aim for the Ivy League. At least, give your parents something interesting to talk about. No more kampong football for you. No more Fandi Ahmad and his merry gang of grinning mats lifting the Piala Malaysia for the final time. If you want to play football, you need multi-million dollar facilities and expensive summer camps and you have to play in specially designed cages.

The uses of real estate are a good illustration of the priorities of society.