Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

The pic below is a representation of how when the years in which the same team won the FIFA World Cup are added up, you get 3,964.

Coincidence... or more?

When you look at the pic above, you feel like there are too many coincidences in this phenomenon to make it just a.. well.. coincidence.

There has to be some magical, mythical and maybe supernatural force at play to ensure that such unbelievable phenomenon occurs. It is natural, something psychologists call ‘Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy’.

The theory goes that when you shoot the side of a barn (house, barn, whatever), randomly, it is probable that at one particular place, there are a lot of bullet holes. This happened completely by chance, not due to design.

But now, if I were to draw a bull’s eye over the place where the bullet holes and hide all the other bullet holes, you might think that whoever did the shooting was a pretty good shot (a sharpshooter).

What happened in truth, though, is that I have highlighted only the area which is favourable, covering up all the other area. This is called the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

In the above case, yes, all those teams won in years which added up, amount to 3,964. But what about the other years?  For example, in 1966, England won, but in 1998 (when the both are added, you get 3,964) it wasn’t England, but France.

The theory doesn’t hold for 1958 and 2006 or 1954 and 2010 either. But the person who has sought to make this incredible ‘its-meant-to-be’ scenario had cleverly covered this up.
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Simialrly, the similarities between the murders of JFK and Abraham Lincoln, the novel Futility, which 'predicted' the sinking of Titanic are also representations of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.