Pender Podcast - World Cup Series - The Tournament Problem: Luck, Skill & Process

Welcome, Felix.

Great, thanks.

So going back to the World Cup and what we've seen so far, we see a team like Ecuador take the pitch against Germany.

They're not expected to win.

Or as we brought up earlier, my personal favorite, Cabo Verde.

When they took the pitch against Spain, no one would have anticipated a tie other than me, obviously.

But my question to you is, why do underdogs so often seem to outperform, especially when up against these big favorites?

Yeah, that's, I think, a great question.

And certainly every World Cup seems to have some Cinderella story.

And the favorites, for sure, they play under enormous pressure.

Their whole countries are expecting them to win.

There's really no excuse not to win or go deep, essentially.

So when you're playing with that kind of pressure, you just kind of be a little bit tighter.

You play a bit more, maybe defensively, because you don't want to make a mistake and look foolish.

Meanwhile, the underdogs are the complete opposite of that.

They really have nothing to lose.

They're just... happy to be there and certainly the cape verde story is probably even bigger in many respects than the great tournament messi's having so far right that's these are the stories that people love everybody loves a good underdog story and the fact that they this tiny nation got to the knockout stages i think the smallest nation ever to get to this stage it's just like people just love these stories right and again they didn't actually win anything but yet they just essentially had these great draws being like defensively brilliant but again that was enough to get them to knock out and again people just love the story so

Yeah, no, that's what kind of caught my attention.

Watching them is just the almost joy of being there.

And just you see some of these other teams come out and it's the weight of the world is on their shoulder and they know their entire country is banking on their success.

And to see this island nation of half a million people just be almost that childlike enthusiasm.