No Such Thing as Form?

Northern Ireland 1 - 0 England

Form Does NOT exist.


I am occasionally aware that my attitudes to life are not the same as everyone else's. The time I supported the siting of a McDonalds in a middle-class area, for instance. Or the time I asked Frank McAvennie for his autograph. (Does it make it better or worse that I was 14 years old?) Yet there are few things that leave me as isolated as my view about form in football. Form, you see, is the staple of football commentary. They discuss team form and player form all day on talkSPORT. It features in every match report in every paper. Punters in every part of the country are, as you read this piece, drawing circles around ties where the odds look good, because the punter, you see, knows a thing or two about the form of the full back.

... And here's my view, the Fink Tank view, form does not exist!. There have been various studies in America about the so-called "hot hand" in competitive sport. It's a phrase that is used to describe basketball players who are doing well in a game. The fans plead for the ball to be passed to a player who is scoring points, the man with the hot hand. The academics say hot hand is a figment of the imagination.

The only US sport where there appears to be any evidence for any sort of "hot hand" is ten-pin bowling. Here, players can very, very briefly be on a roll. So what about football? Fink Tank has been conducting one of its periodic investigations into the question of form, using different methods to previous occasions. Dr Matthew Atkinson and Dr Henry Stott began by dividing every Premiership result for the past six years into hits and misses. Hits are games where a side wins and misses are those where they draw or lose. Every team can now be ascribed an average hit rate for the past six years. Chelsea's is the best with a 66.9 per cent hit rate they edge out Arsenal, on 62.3 per cent, and Manchester United, on 61.15 per cent. Sunderlands 9.68 per cent rate is comfortably the worst. These hit rates tell you how likely it is that a given streak of hits will occur. The higher the hit rate the longer the streaks you might expect to see in the normal course of things. A team who win 50 per cent of the time are quite likely to win in clumps of, say, three, but if they start winning eight on the trot it is time to sit up and take notice.

We then started looking for streaks of hits and misses to see whether any were sufficiently long that, using the strictest possible statistical test, we would judge remarkable. And heres the thing; we did find some. Thirteen in all, including two streaks of Liverpool hits and one streak of misses making them the streakiest side. So have we been wrong? Is this evidence that form exists after all? We worked up a new test. We divided each teams results into four categories: prior win and current win; prior win and current non-win; prior non-win and current win; prior non-win and current non-win. Then we applied something called the Chi Square analysis. Not a single team won a significantly greater proportion of games after wins than after non-wins. There is no hot-hand effect at all. Winning one or more games does not change your chance of winning the next one. So how to explain those few surprising streaks over the past six years? Not by form, but by lumpiness of easy and difficult fixtures. Form does not exist. It just doesn't. Now off you go to the pub and try telling them that before the match. I wish you luck.