Following a miserable performance at Genoa on Saturday, a lot of the talk about Fiorentina has been along the lines of, “Why is this club always so bad coming out of the international break?” The Viola precarity over the past year and a half certainly colors my perception of that but I’m as prone to cognitive bias as anyone and didn’t trust it. I decided, then, to go back over the past 10 complete seasons to determine whether or not the international break is indeed a harbinger of disappointment.
For this exercise, I only looked at Serie A fixtures even though Fiorentina’s first game back was occasionally in a cup. I also ignored the holiday break because I’m a pedant. I waffled with how to do this but eventually decided the most legible output was comparing Fiorentina’s average points per game in a season with its points per game directly after the break.
Fiorentina’s underperformed after international breaks in 5 of 10 complete seasons. The short answer to the question, “Do the Viola always screw up coming out of a break?” is thus a definitive, “No.” Yeah, they lose sometimes, but they also lose in games not directly following a break. From a year-over-year perspective, they cleave to the mean. As far as I can tell, there’s not even any correlation between post-break and overall performance.
There’s plenty of room for further exploration here. I didn’t map the Serie A average because it would mirror points per season (it’s a zero sum game) but I’d be interested to weight post-break results by team according to how many international players traveled per break to see if there’s a correlation between having some portion of the roster missing for a couple weeks and the subsequent match. I’d also like to see how these results map for teams in Europe compared to teams not in Europe; I think that could be an interesting proxy for squad depth since teams competing on three fronts need more players and could thus better weather some absences.
There were a couple of things I’d have done with a lot more time. The first was to split home and away results. That might also shrink this already-small sample, though, so I skipped that step. The bigger thing I would’ve liked to do was control for quality of opponent, especially because the narrative is always that Fiorentina slips up against minnows in its first game back. I couldn’t figure out a good way to map that, though, without doing a lot of extra work (e.g. create an algorithm to determine a team’s overall talent at any point in the season). So I didn’t.
For now, though, I’m pretty happy with this. My impression of Fiorentina always looking awful coming out of a break is definitely some type of bias. My guess is that following two weeks of anticipation, a defeat hurts more than a win feels good and thus lodges itself more soundly in the ol’ memory bank. That’s pretty much the definition of negativity bias. Waking up at 5 AM to publish a match thread and then watch the Viola crumple up against a terrible Genoa conforms to that theory.
