Milan and Cardiff will be different places today.
Why do some teams succeed? Why does sport especially football play such a big part in these Cities and to the lives of the fans?
Cardiff lost to Blackpool in what was known as the the most profitable soccer match worth £1 million pounds a minute and Inter Milan beat Bayern Munich in the Champions League Cup Final to win the most prestigious competition in Europe.
The unfortunate fact for Bayern Munich and Cardiff was that the teams they faced were on a streak of success. Blackpool had each time come back from being behind in their games at the end of the season and psychologically they were tuned into that. Inter Milan psychologically knew that they needed to defend all night and score on the bounce. Two moments of brilliance from Cardiff disturbed but failed ultimately to unsettle matters. Bayern found that a brick wall had been put up between the posts. Throw in some luck like JayBothroyd and Franck Bilal Ribéry not playing and you get an answer.
In sport performance is easy to to define and measure and fans will look for those to blame.
Tversky published “The Hot Hand in Basketball: Misconception of Random sequences” (Cognitive Psychology).He found that success following success was just as likely as success following failure. Nobel Prize winning physicist E.M .Purcell claimed bad players and teams have longer and more frequent streaks of failure than great teams and great players, and great players and teams have longer and more frequent success than lesser players and teams. That is too easy and obvious. It is a law of averages. Sport and performance is in the mind. It is on the day that counts.
For the fans happiness in football we turn to Aristotle who wrote of eudaimonia translated as happiness or more often human flourishing.
Eudaimonia is a high level of happiness, measure of quality of life, of fulfilling one’s potential. Yesterday I had a sense that football was not at its basic sense of happiness –a momentary feeling that makes us happy. It meant more to Cardiff .It was more complex.
Cardiff will one day grace the Premier League and flourish bringing eudaimonia to those who want it but perseverance, flexibility and a sense of “it will happen” - need to continue to pervade. Let Cardiff not give up when they have achieved so much.
