Euro Football Championship, 2004

I received a note from Panos Axiomakaros, suggesting an exploration of the effect on the EGG network of the exciting and surprising European Master Football Championship, EURO2004. He says,

"Yesterday (Sunday 21:45') started the final play in Porto-Portugal, between Greece (the outsider) and Portugal (national teams).

The first part started at 21:45' and ended 22:30' (Greek time). Then as usual a 15 minutes break followed. The second part of the game started at 22:45' and ended at 23:35'.

The national team of Greece scored at about 22:56'/22:57' the only one goal of the game and is thereafter named the European Footballmaster EURO2004.

This final result (and the others until the final game) was the reason of an extremly high emotional energy release - nearly unknown and unexpected - through ALL Greek population in Greece and other countries (15.000 Greeks have traveled to see the Game in Portugal).

I do think that the above is a significant case to see the reports of the EGG, and therefore I am kindly asking you to research it."

The result is very interesting, as is shown in the graph. Most of the day shows a random walk in the data, with no persistent trend, but during the match, there is a strong, consistent drop that would happen by chance only a few times in 1000. The second graph shows just this segment of the data.

Euro Football 2004

When we look at the time of the game itself, there is a strong trend. Of course, this is not an analysis reflecting a formal prediction, so it cannot be interpreted in a statistically rigorous way. Moreover, the trend is opposite to what we generally predict in our formal analyses, further complicating any clear interpretation. Nevertheless it is a sufficiently strong trend to encourage other efforts to see what happens to the egg data corresponding to major sporting events.

Euro Football 2004

A natural question arises about the relative locality of any effects on the eggs. We have two eggs in Greece and we can ask how their data look in the same time period. Here the intuitions and "natural" expectations that most of us have are countered by the data. Apparently neither of the two Greek eggs has individually much of a reaction to the event. They, like all the eggs in the network, contribute statistically, but their behavior does not reflect the "global event" more strongly as a function of being proximate to lots of excited football fans.

Euro Football 2004


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