• Soccer is becoming more predictable, according to new research in the field of network science, which studies the connections in a complex network.
• The analysis covers over 87,000 games spanning the course of 26 years in European soccer leagues between 1993 and 2019.
• There’s a clear difference between the predictability of games played ten years ago and matches played today.

If Ted Lasso taught Americans anything, it’s that love for soccer—or “football” to virtually everyone else—is a way of life for many avid fans in the United Kingdom.

While Americans might tune in every four years to watch the World Cup, soccer fanatics across the U.K. and Europe watch weekly as clubs shoulder for the top rank in their league’s table, or teeter on the edge of relegation to a lower division. Mere minutes of game play can mean the difference between a victorious win, boosting the team up the table, or an agonizing loss that puts them at risk of tumbling out of the league entirely. At least, this is the kind of excitement that has historically made soccer a nail-biting sport to watch.

However, a paper published at the end of 2021 suggests that this kind of excitement is becoming a thing of the past. The results, published in Royal Society Open Science, used a network science approach to study 26 years of soccer scores to determine whether or not soccer is actually becoming boring—or, at least much more predictable.

“I started my career as a network scientist,” Taha Yasseri, a lead author on the study and associate professor of sociology at University College Dublin, tells Popular Mechanics. “[But] as a person, I’m a big fan and follower of soccer. I felt maybe I could use some of the methods from network science to make predictions about the outcome of soccer matches.”

Network science, as its name suggests, is the study of complex networks like computer networks, social…