Luis Suarez’s bite may seem unlikely, but as it turns out even plane crashes or a lightning strike that knocks you out of your boots is more likely to occur than many other horrific events. Oh, and the second one listed really did happen recently!
In a related report by The Inquisitr , when Luis Suarez bit an Italian defender during the 2014 World Cup the soccer player was banned for four months . The man even lost his endorsement deals , and even though his bite victim thought the punishment “excessive,” some may wonder whether his soccer career is over.
Well, wonder no more since it seems that Luis Suarez biting someone is actually not a rare event. Before the recent World Cup match, Suarez actually had received two previous suspensions for biting opponents, although technically he got away with it in the game this time because after Mexican referee Marco Rodriguez missed the call and then ignored Chiellini lifting up his shirt to show bite marks on his shoulder.
Because of the frequency of Suarez biting his opponents is so high, Ian Steadman from New Statesmen decided to calculate exactly what the odds were:
“[H]e has played in 363 club league, cup and friendly matches since breaking through into the Nacional senior team in the 2005/06 season. He’s also played 78 times for the Uruguay national team…. Suarez’s bite rate of three in 441 means we can expect him to take a bite out of someone every 147 matches, but if we assume that there are 14 players at risk of being bitten (that’s 11 starting players and assuming three substitutes come on) that means Suarez has bitten three players out of the 6,160 who have lined up against him in his professional career. We can therefore conclude that Luis Suarez has roughly a one in 2,000 chance of biting any individual opposition player.”
To give you an idea how bad this is, besides shark attacks and lightning strikes, you’re also more likely to be bit by this soccer player than being killed by a gun in the U.S. (one in 6,509) or even being hit by an asteroid (one in 700,000). Funnily enough, even gamblers have taken note how often Luis Suarez’s bite tends to occur and they’ve even assigned the odds at 175 to one. One Norwegian man even bet that Luis Suarez would bite someone during that particular World Cup game, and he won $916!