Pelé and Neymar’s goals and the principle of proportion
[ad_1]
If the ball wasn’t enough, now it’s the statistics that are causing injustices in the history of football. The latter is practiced by FIFA when attributing to Neymar the title of Brazil’s top scorer with 79 goals. According to FIFA, Pelé’s 18 goals scored in friendlies are ruled out.
FIFA’s mistake, and like all theorists who rely on statistics for their analyses, is ignoring a lesson we learned in the first lines of basic mathematics: the principle of proportionality. “A proportion is closely linked with the ratio. To check whether the quantities are proportional or not, we must make an equality of two ratios. If these ratios are equal, the values will be proportional”, was the lesson of Curitiba professor Domenico, always celebrated in university entrance exam preparatory courses.
In the dispute between Pelé and Neymar the reason is the number of matches in which the goal score of 77 goals was achieved. The principle of proportionality then applies to it. Before the Brazil 5×2 Bolivia game, Pelé had 77 goals in 92 games, and Neymar 77 goals in 125 games. This implies concluding that the reasons are unequal and transformed into numbers puts Pelé’s 20% ahead of Neymar.
But that shouldn’t even be the issue, because numbers are cold and in football they create the false idea of superiority from the smallest to the biggest, or from Neymar to Pelé. Not one goal of Neymar’s 79 goals was more important than a single goal from Pelé. As Carlos Drummond de Andrade had already transformed into a poem: “The difficult thing, the extraordinary thing, is not scoring a thousand goals, like Pelé. It is scoring a goal like Pelé. That goal that we would like so much to score, that we feel mature enough to score, but which, diabolically, cannot be done. The goal”.
All of Pelé’s brands transformed numbers into simple details. Transcending them, they will always demand an explanation of reason, proportion and the soul. That’s why FIFA should exclude Pelé’s brands as a reference for comparisons.
[ad_2]
Source link
