The key to winning is not losing

I have been re-reading a book I bought in 2020 by author Stephen Duneier called Alphabrain, which is a book about decision making. Duneier was a fund manager for many years and part of the book is geared towards decision making as it applies to finance. However, I want to highlight a specific section around error avoidance.

He uses the German football team Bayern Munich as an example. They were very successful a number of years ago because they focused on ball possession.

You see, the team that is in possession of the ball has a higher likelyhood of scoring a point than the opponent and is less likely to incur a goal against itself (duh!).

This means that simply possessing the ball creates a competitive advantage.

This also means that the ball should only be relinquished when attempting a high probability shot on goal.

By pushing time of possession to extreme levels, opponents tend to get more frustrated and emotional, leading to more mistakes. Those mistakes generate penalty kicks and opportunities, which both lead to more high probability shots on goal.

This is all pretty obvious stuff and does not necessarily make for spectacular games, which leads into another point, which is that of cognitive bias and incentives.