Soccernomics

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SOCCERNOMICS

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ALSO BY SIMON KUPER

Ajax, the Dutch, the War: Football in Europe

During the Second World War
(Orion, 2003)

Football Against the Enemy
(Orion, 1994)

Retourtjes Nederland
(Atlas, 2006)

ALSO BY STEFAN SZYMANSKI

Fans of the World, Unite! A Capitalist Manifesto for Sports Consumers
(with Stephen F. Ross; Stanford University Press, 2008)

Il business del calcio

(with Umberto Lago and Alessandro Baroncelli; Egea, 2004)

National Pastime: How Americans Play Baseball and

the Rest of the World Plays Soccer

(with Andrew Zimbalist; Brookings Institution, 2005)

Playbooks and Checkbooks:

An Introduction to the Economics of Modern Sports

(Princeton University Press, 2009)

Winners and Losers: The Business Strategy of Football

(with Tim Kuypers; Viking Books, 1999; Penguin Books, 2000) Books Edited:

Handbook on the Economics of Sport

(with Wladimir Andreff; Edward Elgar, 2006)

Transatlantic Sports:

The Comparative Economics of North American and European Sports
(with Carlos Barros and Murad Ibrahim; Edward Elgar, 2002) 1568584256-Kuper_Design 9/2/09 1:18 PM Page iii

SOCCERNOMICS

Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win,

and Why the US, Japan, Australia, Turkey—

and Even Iraq—Are Destined to Become

the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport

Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

New York

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Copyright © 2009 by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski

Published by Nation Books,

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Nation Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, NY

10016-8810.

Books published by Nation Books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the United States by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, or call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail [email protected].

Designed by Brent Wilcox

The Library of Congress has catalogued this book as follows: Kuper, Simon.

Soccernomics : why England loses, why Germany and Brazil win, and why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey and Even Iraq are destined to become the kings of the world’s most popular sport / by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-56858-425-6 (alk. paper)

1. Soccer—Social aspects. I. Szymanski, Stefan. II. Title.

GV943.9.S64K88 2009

796.334—dc22

2009023502

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From Simon:

To Pamela

(who doesn’t know about football,

but knows about writing) for her astonishing tolerance.

And to Leila, Leo, and Joey, for all the smiles.

From Stefan:

To my father

We never saw eye to eye,

but he taught me to question everything.

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CONTENTS

1

Driving with a Dashboard: In Search of New Truths

About Soccer

2

Why England Loses and Others Win

PA RT I The Clubs

Racism, Stupidity, Bad Transfers, Capital Cities,

the Mirage of the NFL, and What Actually Happened in

That Penalty Shoot-Out in Moscow

3

Gentlemen Prefer Blonds: How to Avoid

Silly Mistakes in the Transfer Market

47

4

The Worst Business in the World: Why Soccer Clubs

Don’t (and Shouldn’t) Make Money

75

5

Need Not Apply: Does English Soccer Discriminate

Against Black People?

97

6

The Economist’s Fear of the Penalty Kick: Are Penalties

Cosmically Unfair, or Only If You Are Nicolas Anelka?

113

7

The Suburban Newsagents: City Sizes and Soccer Prizes

133

8

Football Versus Football

157

vii

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viii

C O N T E N T S

PA RT I I The Fans

Loyalty, Suicides, Happiness, and

the Country with the Best Supporters

9

The Country That Loves Soccer Most

181

10

Are Soccer Fans Polygamists?

A Critique of the Nick Hornby Model of Fandom

203

11

A Fan’s Suicide Notes: Do People Jump Off Buildings

When Their Teams Lose?

221

12

Happiness: Why Hosting a World Cup Is

Good for You

235

PA RT I I I Countries

Rich and Poor, Tom Thumb, Guus Ghiddink, Saddam,

and the Champions of the Future

13

The Curse of Poverty: Why Poor Countries

Are Poor at Sports

255

14

Tom Thumb: The Best Little Soccer

Country on Earth

275

15

Core to Periphery: The Future Map of Global Soccer

291

Acknowledgments

307

Select Bibliography

309

Index

313

DRIVING WITH A DASHBOARD

In Search of New Truths About Soccer

This book began in the Hilton in Istanbul. From the outside it’s a squat and brutalist place, but once the security men have checked your car for bombs and waved you through, the hotel is so soothing you never want to go home again. Having escaped the 13-million-person city, the only stress is over what to do next: a Turkish bath, a game of tennis, or yet more overeating while the sun sets over the Bosporus? For aficionados, there’s also a perfect view of the Besiktas soccer stadium right next door. And the staff are so friendly they are even friendlier than ordinary Turkish people.

The two authors of this book, Stefan Szymanski (a sports economist) and Simon Kuper (a journalist), met here. Fenerbahce soccer club was marking its centenary by staging the “100th Year Sports and Science Congress,” and had flown them both in to give talks.

Simon’s talk was first. He said he had good news for Turkish soccer: as the country’s population mushroomed, and its economy grew, the national team was likely to keep getting better. Then it was Stefan’s turn. He too had good news for Turkey: as the country’s population mushroomed, and its economy grew, the national team was likely to keep getting better. All of this may, incidentally, have been lost on the not-very-Anglophone audience.

The two of us had never met before Istanbul, but over beers in the Hilton bar we confirmed that we did indeed think much the same way about soccer. Stefan as an economist is trained to torture the data until they confess, while Simon as a reporter tends to go around interviewing people, but those are just surface differences. We both think that much in soccer can be explained, even predicted, by studying data—especially data found outside soccer.

For a very long time soccer escaped the Enlightenment. Soccer clubs are still mostly run by people who do what they do because they have always done it that way. These people used to “know” that black players

“lacked bottle,” and they therefore overpaid mediocre white players. Today they discriminate against black managers, buy the wrong players, and then let those players take penalties the wrong way. (We can, by the way, explain why Manchester United won the penalty shoot-out in the Champions League final in Moscow. It’s a story involving a secret note, a Basque economist, and Edwin van der Sar’s powers of detection.)

Entrepreneurs who dip into soccer also keep making the same mistakes. They buy clubs promising to run them “like a business,” and disappear a few seasons later amid the same public derision as the previous owners. Fans and journalists aren’t blameless, either. Many newspaper headlines rest on false premises: “Newcastle Lands World Cup Star” or

“World Cup Will Be Economic Bonanza.” The game is full of unex-amined clichés: “Soccer is becoming boring because the big clubs always win,” “Soccer is big business,” and, perhaps the greatest myth in the English game, “The England team should do better.” None of these shibboleths has been tested against the data.

Most male team sports are pervaded by the same overreliance on traditional beliefs. Baseball, too, was until very recently an old game stuffed with old lore. Since time immemorial, players had stolen bases, hit sacrifice bunts, and been judged on their batting averages. Everyone in baseball just
knew
that all this was right.

D R I V I N G W I T H A D A S H B O A R D 3

But that was before Bill James. Like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
, James came from rural Kansas. He hadn’t done much in life beyond keeping the stats in the local Little League and watching the furnaces in a pork-and-beans factory. However, in his spare time he had begun to study baseball statistics with a fresh eye and discovered that “a great portion of the sport’s traditional knowledge is ridiculous hokum.”

James wrote that he wanted to approach the subject of baseball “with the same kind of intellectual rigor and discipline that is routinely applied, by scientists great and poor, to trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, of society, of the human mind, or of the price of burlap in Des Moines.”

In self-published mimeographs masquerading as books, the first of which sold seventy-five copies, James began demolishing the game’s myths. He found, for instance, that the most important statistic in batting was the rarely mentioned “on-base percentage”—how often a player manages to get on base. James and his followers (statisticians of baseball who came to be known as sabermetricians) showed that good old sacrifice bunts and base stealing were terrible strategies.

His annual
Baseball Abstracts
turned into real books; eventually they reached the best-seller lists. One year, the cover picture showed an ape, posed as Rodin’s
Thinker
, studying a baseball. As James wrote in one
Abstract
, “This is
outside
baseball. This is a book about what baseball looks like if you step back from it and study it intensely and minutely, but from a distance.”

Some Jamesians started to penetrate professional baseball. One of them, Billy Beane, the bafflingly successful general manager of the little Oakland A’s, is the hero of Michael Lewis’s earthmoving book
Moneyball
. (We’ll say more later about Beane’s brilliant gaming of the transfer market and its lessons for soccer.)

Eventually, even the people inside baseball began to get curious about James. In 2002 the Boston Red Sox appointed him “senior baseball operations adviser.” That same year, the Red Sox hired one of James’s followers, the twenty-eight-year-old Theo Epstein, as the youngest general manager in the history of the major leagues. The “cursed” club quickly won two World Series.

Now soccer is due its own Jamesian revolution.

A NUMBERS GAME

It’s strange that soccer has been so averse to studying data, because one thing that attracts many fans to the game is precisely a love of numbers.

The man to ask about that is Alex Bellos. He wrote the magnificent
Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life
, but he also has a math degree, and his book on math for laypeople is expected out in 2010. “Numbers are incredibly satisfying,” Bellos tells us. “The world has no order, and math is a way of seeing it in an order. League tables have an order. And the calculations you need to do for them are so simple: it’s nothing more than your three-times table.”

Though most fans would probably deny it, a love of soccer is often intertwined with a love of numbers. There are the match results, the famous dates, and the special joy of sitting in a pub with the newspaper on a Sunday morning “reading” the league table. Fantasy soccer leagues are, at bottom, numbers games.

In this book we want to introduce new numbers and new ideas to soccer: numbers on suicides, on wage spending, on countries’ populations, on anything that helps to reveal new truths about the game.

Though Stefan is a sports economist, this is not a book about money.

The point of soccer clubs is not to turn a profit (which is fortunate, as almost none of them do), nor are we particularly interested in any profits they happen to make. Rather, we want to use an economist’s skills (plus a little geography, psychology, and sociology) to understand the game on the field, and the fans off it.