Xavi and the Big Data monkeys

The other day a friend told me that he and his partner had separated.

They had been looking for a child for years through cumbersome fertility processes, but it never came.

He believes that this information has nothing to do with the breakup, the problem came from afar, he promised me.

Years of arguments, friction and painful distance.

As he bolstered his argument, he had no choice but to accept that if his wife had gotten pregnant, they would still be together.

Life is that imprecise and is written from the perspective of results, he told me.

If the ball touches the net, but passes to the other side of the court, the game continues.

While he was telling me this, I thought about Xavi's Barça and what would happen if, now that the team has had a great streak, it won the League and the Champions League.

How should we judge it?

What would we do with it?

What weight would then have the robust arguments written these days to condemn him and the memes with which we laugh?

That thought, of course, I didn't tell my friend then.

The general director of Manchester City, Ferran Soriano, who was also the general director of Barça in its heyday, published a book called

The ball does not enter by chance

.

Obviously, it was a sports management manual that said that successes in this matter always have to do with what happens first in the offices.

Victory on the field requires that there are no loose ends when the opening whistle blows.

All it would take is for a CEO to say something else, of course.

And it is true that repeating his success at the helm of City after achieving it at Barça fully supports him.

But the theory reminded me of the other one according to which if one or more primates hit the keys of a typewriter infinitely, they could write the complete works of William Shakespeare.

More information

Barça, under the Naples volcano

The infinite monkey theorem

—that's what it's called—also inspired an episode of the fourth season of The Simpsons.

Homer visited the old and despotic Mr. Burns in his mansion and discovered that one of the rooms had a thousand chained apes who had already managed to combine the exact words for the beginning of

Dickens'

A Tale of Two Cities .

That episode helped a computer programmer from Montana in 2011 to design a system capable of generating random text segments until the works of the British playwright were completed.

Monkeys, even if they were virtual, typing to the sound of the algorithm.

And that could be the key, because Xavi said the other day that the Big Data that he manages told him that Barça could be the leader.

Sure, but with how many combinations?

How many hours banging on a keyboard?

Big Data is a bit of that.

He can say what you want him to say.

But the classification is very stubborn, especially in a sport that is played with the feet, a part of the body prone to inaccuracies.

Luckily for Xavi, statistics are of no use in all this.

And the ball may not come in by chance, as Soriano would say.

But it does hit the post, goes wide or falls short for that reason.

In fact, approximately 40% of the goals scored have to do with unplanned situations or the result of athletic or technical preparation.

That is, by fluke.

Like when Lukaku missed the goal in front of Ederson in the Champions League final against City last year, he could have changed the final result.

Or imagine that Messi had not sent the penalty against Chelsea against the crossbar in the 2012 semi-final, perhaps we would still be together.

Like my friend and his partner.

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