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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.
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.
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.
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