Luck is the unreliable strike partner we never asked for but can’t drop. From philosophers to psychologists, everyone’s been trying to explain why some people seem to ride its wave while others get flattened by it.
There’s a moment every football fan recognises. You’re in the away end, rain slicing sideways, the pitch looking like it’s been rolled by a tractor with a hangover, and you watch a centre half – a man whose last goal predates the Nokia 3310 – slice a clearance that somehow floats, drifts, and nestles into your net like it’s been guided by a mischievous deity. You don’t rage. You don’t negotiate. You simply look skyward and mutter the only prayer you genuinely believe in: “For fuck’s sake.”
That, dear reader, is luck. Football’s most capricious divine intervention. Life’s most unreliable strike partner. And, as it turns out, a serious academic topic.
Let’s take a brisk wander through what philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists think luck is and why it seems to follow some people like a loyal labrador while treating others like a traffic cone in a hurricane.
What even is luck?
Philosophers have spent decades trying to define the thing we blame every Saturday at 4:55pm. The consensus is that luck involves three ingredients:
• Significance – the event matters.
• Lack of control – you can’t directly cause or prevent it.
• Modal fragility – it could easily have gone differently.
Duncan Pritchard, one of the leading voices on the subject, argues that luck is about outcomes that are uncertain relative to your abilities – things that could have turned out otherwise, even if you did everything right. In football terms: dominating possession, hitting the bar twice, and losing to a 93rd minute deflection off someone’s backside.
Luck is the philosophical equivalent of a bobble on a cold Tuesday night in Barrow-in-Furnace.
The psychology: why some people feel lucky and others feel cursed
Psychologist Richard Wiseman spent a decade studying people who describe themselves as “lucky” or “unlucky”. His findings are maddeningly simple:
• Lucky people notice more opportunities.
• Lucky people stay open to the unexpected.
• Lucky people reframe setbacks as near misses, not cosmic vendettas.
In one famous experiment, participants were asked to count photos in a newspaper. “Lucky” people spotted a giant message on page two saying STOP COUNTING — THERE ARE 43 PHOTOS. “Unlucky” people, tense and task fixated, missed it completely.
Same paper. Same print. Different mindset. It’s a bit like life: some people see an open door; others see a draft.
Moral luck: the philosophers’ favourite migraine
Now we get to the chewy bit: moral luck – the idea that we judge people based on outcomes they didn’t fully control.
Two drivers behave identically. One hits a pedestrian; the other doesn’t. Morally and legally, we treat them differently – but the difference is down to luck, not character.
Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams famously argued that this undermines our cherished belief in moral responsibility. If outcomes depend partly on luck, then how much credit or blame do we really deserve?
It’s the intellectual equivalent of watching a striker balloon a penalty into orbit and still being told he “showed great character”.
A sociology of luck: meritocracy’s awkward opponent
Sociology largely ignored luck for decades – perhaps because it’s messy, unmeasurable, and threatens tidy narratives about structure and agency – Michael Sauder’s recent work argues that luck is essential for understanding inequality. Luck shapes:
• Careers – who you meet, when redundancies hit, whether your industry booms or collapses.
• Life chances – health, geography, timing, the lottery of birth.
• Cultural narratives – who’s allowed to admit they were lucky, and who must insist they “earned every penny”.
Luck in this sense isn’t superstition. It’s a political force. A quiet saboteur of the meritocratic fairy tale.
It’s the difference between being scouted at 14 and being overlooked because the coach had flu that week.
So… is luck real? Or just a story?
Here’s the twist: luck is both real and narrative.
• Real because the world is full of genuine randomness — weather, illness, timing, economic shocks, the ball hitting the stanchion and bouncing out.
• Narrative because we choose which events to label as luck and which to fold into stories of skill, effort, or destiny.
Two people can experience the same event – a promotion, a breakup, a missed penalty – and tell completely different stories about what it means. Luck is the quiver that ripples through the world. The bit that refuses to be tamed. The part of life that reminds us we’re not fully in control, no matter how many spreadsheets, training sessions, or self help books we consume.
Playing the game knowing the pitch is uneven
So, what do we do with all this?
• Control what you can – your preparation, your graft, your attitude.
• Accept what you can’t – timing, randomness, the cosmic referee.
• Stay open – talk to strangers, take the detour, send the email.
• Drop the myth of total self authorship – we’re all beneficiaries and victims of luck.
• Keep your humour – because if you can’t laugh at the absurdity, you’ll cry into your half-time Bovril.
Luck isn’t a plan. It isn’t an excuse. It’s the unpredictable bounce that keeps life interesting, infuriating, and occasionally glorious.
And if you ever doubt its existence, just remember: somewhere out there, right now, a centre half is winding up for a clearance that will change someone’s season, someone’s mood, and someone’s belief in the cosmic order.
It won’t be you scoring it.
But it might – just might – be you benefiting from it next time.
© Ian Kirke 2026
@ iankirke.bsky.social
Photograph by Michelle Baker on Unsplash