Several years ago, The Daily Telegraph made an unlikely claim about Britain’s most famous footballer. Under the headline “David Beckham a physics genius”, the paper reported a study describing the differential equations that must be solved to compute the trajectory of the ball in a famous Beckham goal.

The relationship between intention and outcome in sport had been highlighted many years earlier in a much cited joint article by the doyen of Chicago economics, Milton Friedman, and the great statistician Leonard Jimmie Savage. Friedman and Savage suggested that the shots of an expert billiard player would be those an accomplished physicist would calculate using knowledge of equations of motion. Like Beckham, the billiard player might not be capable of actually making such calculations, but the assumption

that he did would accurately describe his play.