World goalkeeper of the Year – By what method?

In connection with numbers and information of all sorts you have, W. Edwards Deming has pointed to the question how these informations did come together. His quote on this topic was “By what method?”. The reason is that the method for gathering information influences in high degree the results. When you don´t consider this circumstance it can happen that for the solution of a problem not every fact is taken into account. One example is the punishment of a class because of the misconducts of some pupils. The error in reasoning lies in infering from the conduct of the few the conduct of every pupil. Everyone to e affected should be taken accout of to prevent that punishment are not aimed against prosocial people.

The reason for these remarks lies in a post by Oliver Fritsch in his soccer blog direkter-freistoss.de. In this post he wrote about the report that the German Markus Merk has received the award “World referee of the year” (as in 2004 and 2005). This award is presents by the IFFHS (International Federation of Football History & Statistics). The IFFHS also presents the award “World goalkeeper of the year”, which is won three times by Oliver Kahn. Seperate from the reports about the actual presentations in the news, in news reports about Merk or Kahn these awards are often mentioned. They must be important facts thus.

The problem is that it is not exactly clear how those awards are presented. The website of the IFFHS says that sports desks and experts form 89 countries over each continent take place at the votings. More is not known. The publicist Erik Eggers tried in vain to find out more about the IFFHS and suggested that it could be just an one-man business. The best is you take a look at the website and make your conclusions.

Finally I have to mention that the post by Oliver Fritsch is titled with “Das Statistikkabinett des Dr. Pöge” (“The Statistics Cabinet of Dr. Pöge” – Pöge is the founder and president IFFHS, thus the one man in the suspected one-man business) and the article by Erik Eggers is titled with “Statistisches Phänomen” (“Statistical Phenomenon”). The reason could be that the title of the federation contains the term “statistics”. The problem is that statistics is often only regarded as a compilation of numbers, which could be oe of the reasons that statistics is regarded a kind of lying. While this stereotype may have a reason, we should not stay there. A respectable statistical report can be checked in terms of its data and the methods applied. Once you know how the statistic came into being you come to the point where you have to decide whether the numbers do lead you to the abandonment of your previous knowledge. Or regarding the awards of the IFFHS:

• How were the rankings – which decide about the awards – made up?
• What can you conclude from the rankings resp. the awards?

Tags: Deming, IFFHS, Soccer, Statistics