You’re all narrative merchants who want to attribute essentially random events to something more solid, as you think the sport you love is somehow devalued if you admit it wasn’t all destiny and that if the ball had bounced 10cm in the other direction one time, a team in blue would be lifting a trophy instead of a team in red.
So even when team A batters team B, hits the post eight times and then concedes a last minute deflected winner, they weren’t unlucky, but Team B had a better mentality, or Team A’s manager always bottles things in Europe so this was inevitable, or it was actually the genius of dropping player X into a false 9 rather than playing a traditional striker that made the difference.
The fact the best team doesn’t always win is what makes football interesting. Winning any big cup competition requires being both really good and really lucky. People should embrace that.
Its not luck (though luck can be a factor, as it can feature in everything) but football is based on so many variables that the result under a microscope is always different and no match plays the same.
Players who had a bad nights sleep the day before can perform worse. Can carry small underlying injuries. Can have some bad news on their mind. They are all human and it creates variables which shift and change a person and performance. Its why clubs try to mitigate it with sleep therapists, excessive medical assessments and even family therapies.
Luck in football is a tiny factor, and normally one based on human performance. But the real reason a team will batter another, hit the post eight times while the other team grab a late winner is more so down to these microscopic differences rather than luck. Something that most football fans of many years appreciate and why managers and clubs these days go above and beyond to the tiniest detail.