Egypt scored on Argentina last week. A real, stadium-shaking goal. Then a man in a booth took it away for a foul that happened 100 yards up the pitch and about 15 seconds earlier.
A match later, Croatia lost a goal because a ball sensor flagged a graze off somebody’s hairline. Fans instantly christened the call the “Hair of God.”
The Journal’s Jason Gay has had enough of the replay booth, and honestly, so have I. His rule is a good one. When the explanation of a call makes everyone in the room scrunch their face, the technology has stopped serving the game.
Messi vs. Kane
Buried in the same coverage is a stat I would frame on every investor’s wall. Lionel Messi — the greatest player alive, three goals in thirteen minutes against Egypt — converts penalties at 77%. That is 114 of 148. Dead league average.
Harry Kane, mortal and wonderful, hits 89%.
Think about that. The best penalty taker in this story is not the best player. He is the most repetitive one.
The gap is not talent. It is method. Messi reinvents every kick from scratch. Kane grooves the same boring run-up every single time, and the boring routine wins by twelve points.
The booth at home
Behavioral finance has a name for what the replay booth does to your money: myopic loss aversion — the closer you watch, the more losses you notice, and the worse you decide.
Zoom in on a portfolio frame by frame and you will always find a foul. A red Tuesday. An ugly week. A quarter that scrunches your face.
Here is the mechanism. We feel a loss roughly twice as hard as we enjoy the matching gain. So the more often you check, the more pain piles up. And the more pain piles up, the more tempted you are to overrule a perfectly good goal out of pure anxiety.
The prediction markets, for what it is worth, give France a 37% shot at the title. Watching that number wiggle every hour will not change it. Your account balance works the same way.
Groove the run-up
The fix is Kane’s, not Messi’s. Automatic contributions. Scheduled rebalancing — resetting your mix back to plan on a calendar, not on a mood. A written plan you review quarterly, on a date you picked when you were calm.
Nobody cheers the ninth identical run-up. That is rather the point. The routine is not the boring part of the plan — it is the plan.
Notice what the routine removes. No hourly judgment calls. No overruling yourself at midnight. The decisions got made once, in daylight, and the calendar does the rest.
So yell at the VAR screen through the semifinals; it is genuinely good for you. Just do not bring the replay booth home to your brokerage account.
A review runs about fifteen minutes. Bring your latest statement, we will groove the run-up, and then you can go back to ignoring the account like a professional.