A scoreboard gives the crowd a simpler story than the players experienced.

Numbers compress everything into a result. Two goals to one says nothing about the twenty minutes someone played with a hamstring going, the substitution that changed the shape, the pass that should have been a third goal. Spectators get a clean narrative, participants keep a messy one, and the clean version is the one that gets repeated afterwards.

When you look at any summary of someone’s effort, a score, a grade, a quarterly figure, remember it is a compression rather than the event. Ask the person what actually happened. You will usually get a better story and a fairer judgement.