In our paper, Alex Frankel, Emir Kamenica and I argue that soccer is among the most suspenseful sports according to our theoretical measure. Now, via Matt Dickenson, comes an empirical validation of this finding using German cardiac arrest data:
The red line shows the spike in heart attacks on the dates of 2006 World Cup matches involving the German national team. Note that point 7 is the third place match against Portugal after Germany had been eliminated in their semi-final match against Italy (point 6.)
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April 5, 2013 at 8:50 am
Mike
right, but is the size of the spike predicted by how “suspenseful” the game was (according to your measure)?
April 5, 2013 at 9:09 am
jeff
Its Friday, I am not to be taken too seriously.
April 5, 2013 at 9:28 am
José Antonio Espín Sánchez
If point 7 is the last game Germany played in the world cup… what is point 8?
April 5, 2013 at 9:32 am
jeff
The final between Italy and France, went to penalties. Presumably some weak-hearted Alsatians.
April 5, 2013 at 9:51 am
Suraj Shekhar
Maybe you would like to control for alcohol consumption
April 5, 2013 at 10:03 am
Bruno Salcedo
Being able to write this kind of papers (and get paid for it) is probably one of the strongest incentives to try to get tenured!
Consider this. The Italian football (soccer) league has a reputation for corruption. If we think that games are rigged, they are probably rigged more often in Italy than in other countries. Hence, Italian soccer matches should be closer to the suspense-optimal mechanism. Indeed, my eye-test supports the null hypothesis that Italian games are usually resolved in suspenseful endings with lots of goals during the last few cardiac minutes. Perhaps a most accepted test should be conducted before drawing conclusions.
April 5, 2013 at 10:04 am
jeff
🙂 nice.
April 5, 2013 at 3:15 pm
Luca Rigotti
Bruno, your eye-test contrast with what I know. A while back (before getting tenure!) we wrote a paper using soccer data from Italy, England, and Spain. One of the surprises (for us) was that there were almost no country difference in scoring patterns (a few more goals in Spain, I believe). That data is now old, and things could have changed, but if anything I would guess corruption has gone down over the years.
April 5, 2013 at 10:14 am
emir
@Suraj: Long-term alcohol use is certainly implicated in heart-disease (non-monotonically), but alcohol is not a hugely important trigger of heart attacks. Driving in traffic (which presumably can induce arousal and frustration, much like a soccer game) and physical exertion are more common triggers, with factors like alcohol and coffee playing a role less often. (At least according to a popular press summary of a Lancet study — I didn’t read the study itself.) In any case, my bet would be you wouldn’t see the same type of spikes in October, which would settle the matter more concisely.
November 2, 2014 at 5:06 pm
Jim Rose
Reblogged this on Utopia – you are standing in it! and commented:
Sporting suspense as measured by the number of heart attacks during world cup finals.