| Popis: |
Individual sports competitions provide a natural setting for examining the relative importance of talent and luck in achieving success. The belief that success is primarily due to individual abilities and hard work rather than external factors is especially strong in this context. Thus, individual talent is regarded as the most important – if not the only – component in ensuring a successful career for players. In this study, we test this belief through detailed data analysis and comparison with an agent-based model, using tennis as a case study due to its popularity and competition structure in direct-elimination tournaments. Our dataset covers the last decade (2010-2019) of main international events in the ATP circuit and consists of tourney results and annual rankings for professional male players. We show that our agent-based model, calibrated on the dataset, can reproduce the main stylized facts observed in real data, including the results of single tournaments and the development of players’ careers in the ATP community. The strength of our approach lies in its simplicity: it requires only one free parameter a to determine the importance of talent in scoring every single point: a = 1 indicates the ideal scenario in which only talent matters, whereas a = 0 represents the opposite limit case, in which the outcome of each point is entirely due to chance. We find a good agreement with data when talent weights substantially less than luck, i.e. when a is around 0.20. A posteriori, we notice that this surprisingly important role of chance in tennis tournaments is not an exception. On the contrary, it can be explained by a more general paradoxical effect that characterizes highly competitive environments, particularly in individual sports. In other words, when the difference in talent between top players is minimal, chance becomes determinant. Our findings highlight the impact of the – too often underestimated – external factors on athletes’ performance in individual tournaments and their careers. Our work points out the unfairness of the “winner-takes-all” reward system that enhances the disparities between the first classified players and the others in major competitions. |
