Five German under-21 footballers, including Liverpool midfielder Emre Çan, went out for pizza before their U-21 European Championship semifinal against Portugal, in which they got walloped 5-0.
https://instagram.com/p/4XTrUxHcHy/embed/captioned/?v=4
Following the wallop, these players have been pilloried for going out before an important knockout game, for not having taken it seriously enough.
To understand whether people are right or not in pillorying these players, and whether the players were wrong in going out for pizza before a game, we need to test the counterfactual (we had done this here once before with Moeen Ali’s wristbands).
What if Germany had won the game against Portugal? Had they won it, would people have still noticed that these players were out on the eve of the game (it was public information. One of them posted it to Instagram) ? Would players have still been accused of not taking the game seriously enough?
Note that I’m not defending the German players here. I’m only questioning the timing of the attack – on the back of defeat, which to me seems to be a case of correlation (players go out for pizza; lose game) being mistaken for causation (pizza caused loss, approximately).