And in English soccer, in the last 21 years, only four teams with big budgets and reputations — Chelsea, Manchester City, Manchester United and Arsenal — had won. But before that, there are examples of teams emerging to challenge the elite, like the 1995 champion Blackburn Rovers.

Knowing history in other words — and not just recent history — can help a person avoid assuming that the way it has been recently is the way it always is.

A related lesson is to be aware of just how small the sample is when looking to the past for guidance. American presidential elections take place every four years, and English soccer championships once a year. A basic lesson of sampling is that one should have less confidence in the results the smaller the sample is, which in turn implies great modesty about what might happen in the future.

But it’s not just that the sample is small. It’s also that in these games — running a presidential campaign or managing a soccer team — the rules are always changing. This is a version of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” called the “ludic fallacy.” (It’s derived from Latin for “game.”) The idea is that it is a mistake to apply the kind of simplified statistical model of a game to the circumstances of real life.

In a game, the rules are fixed. If you spin a roulette wheel, or even send a baseball team out on the field to face an opponent, there are a set range of things that can happen, and it’s relatively straightforward to figure out the probability of each.

But in politics, external events, media coverage, public opinion and the strategies of opponents — even the number of opponents — are constantly in flux in unpredictable ways. That means something that happened in a past year may or may not be good evidence for what will happen this year.