Soccernomics (10 page)

Real had spent $35 million buying him from Arsenal. It then spent nothing on helping him adjust. On day 1 the shy, awkward twenty year old reported at the club, and found that there was nobody to show him around. He hadn’t even been assigned a locker in the dressing room.

Several times that first morning, he would take a locker that seemed to be unused, only for another player to walk in and claim it.

Anelka doesn’t seem to have talked about his problems to anyone at Real. Nor did anyone at the club ask him. Instead, he talked to
France
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Football
, a magazine that he treated as his newspaper of record, like a 1950s prime minister talking to
The Times
. “I am alone against the rest of the team,” he revealed midway through the season. He claimed to possess a video showing his teammates looking gloomy after he had scored his first goal for Real after six months at the club. He had tried to give this video to the coach, but the coach hadn’t wanted to see it.

Also, the other black Francophone players had told Anelka that the other players wouldn’t pass to him. Real ended up giving him a forty-five-day ban, essentially for being maladjusted.

Paranoid though Anelka may have been, he had a point. The other players really didn’t like him. And they never got to know him, because nobody at the club ever seems to have bothered to introduce him to anyone. As he said later, all Real had told him was, “Look after yourself.”

The club seems to have taken the strangely materialistic view that Anelka’s salary should determine his behavior. But even in materialistic terms, that was foolish. If you pay $35 million for an immature young employee, it is bad management to make him look after himself. Wenger at Arsenal knew that, and he had Anelka on the field scoring goals.

Even a player with a normal personality can find emigration tricky.

Tyrone Mears, an English defender who moved to Marseille, where his best relocation consultant was his teammate Zenden, says, “Sometimes it’s not a problem of the player adapting. A lot of the times it’s the family adapting.” Perhaps the player’s girlfriend is unhappy because she can’t find a job in the new town. Or perhaps she’s pregnant and doesn’t know how to negotiate the local hospital, or perhaps she can’t find Rice Krispies (“or beans on toast,” adds Zenden, when told about the Blissett drama). The club doesn’t care. It is paying her boyfriend well. He simply has to perform.

There may never have been a soccer club with an HR department.

There are a few relocation consultants in soccer, but they are never called that, and they usually aren’t hired by clubs. Instead, they work either for players’ agents or for sportswear companies. If Nike or Adidas is paying a player to wear its boots, it needs him to succeed. If the player moves to a foreign club, the sportswear company—knowing that the 62

club probably won’t bother—sometimes sends a minder to live in that town and look after him.

The minder gives the player occasional presents, acts as his secretary, friend, and shrink, and remembers his wife’s birthday. The minder of a young midfielder who was struggling in his first weeks at Milan said that his main task, when the player came home from training frustrated, lonely, and confused by Italy, was to take him out to dinner. At dinner the player would grumble and say, “Tomorrow I’m going to tell the coach what I really think of him,” and the minder would say, “That might not be such a brilliant idea. Here, have some more
linguine alle
vongole
.” To most players, this sort of thing comes as a bonus in a stressful life. To a few, it is essential.

However, these minders are clearly not enough. Too many players still flop abroad. Clubs often anticipate this by avoiding players who seem particularly ill-equipped to adjust. For instance, on average Brazilians are the world’s best players. Yet historically English clubs rarely buy them, because Brazilians don’t speak English, don’t like cold weather, and don’t tend to understand the core traditions of English soccer, like drinking twenty pints of beer in a night. Few Brazilians adjust easily to English soccer.

English clubs have traditionally bought Scandinavians instead. On average, Scandinavians are worse soccer players than Brazilians, but they are very familiar with English, cold weather, and twenty pints of beer. Scandinavians adapted to England, and so the clubs bought them.

But the clubs were missing an opportunity. Anyone who bought a great Brazilian player and hired a good relocation consultant to help him adjust would be onto a winner. Yet few clubs did. Years used to go by without any English club buying a Brazilian.

Gradually, the soccer business is becoming less stupid. A few years ago Ajax Amsterdam hired a woman to help foreign players settle in.

She found that some of their problems were absurdly easy to solve.

When Steven Pienaar and another young South African player joined Ajax, they were teenagers, had never lived on their own before, and suddenly found themselves sharing an apartment in a cold country at the G E N T L E M E N P R E F E R B L O N D S

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other end of the earth. Inevitably, they put their music speakers on the bare floor and turned the music on. Inevitably, the neighbors complained. The South Africans had a miserable time in their building, until the woman from Ajax came around to see what was wrong and suggested they put their speakers on a table instead. They did. The noise diminished, their lives got easier, and that might just have helped their soccer. Ajax has since appointed a full-time employee to help with relocation. Zenden says of clubs in general: “For any foreign player, or even a player who comes in new, they could get one man who’s actually there to take care of everything. But then again, sometimes players are a bit—I don’t want to say abusive, but they might take profit of the situation. They might call in the middle of the night, just to say there’s no milk in the fridge. You know how they are sometimes.”

Most clubs still don’t believe in relocation. Didier Drogba in his autobiography recounts joining Chelsea from Olympique Marseille in 2004 for $44 million. He writes, “I plunged into problems linked to my situation as an expatriate. Chelsea didn’t necessarily help me.” Nobody at the club could help him find a school for his children. All Chelsea did to get him a house was put him in touch with a real estate agent who tried to sell him one for $18 million. For “weeks of irritation” the Drogba family lived in a hotel while Drogba, who at that point barely spoke English, went house hunting after practice.

All Chelsea’s expensive foreign signings had much the same experience, Drogba writes. “We often laughed about it with Gallas, Makelele, Kez-man, Geremi. ‘You too, you’re still living in a hotel?’ After all these worries, I didn’t feel like integrating [at Chelsea] or multiplying my efforts.”

At a recent conference in Rome, relocation consultants literally lined up to tell their horror stories about soccer. Almost all of them had tried to get into the sport and been rebuffed. A Danish relocator had been told by FC Copenhagen that her services weren’t required because the players’ wives always helped each other settle. Many clubs had never even heard of relocation. Moreover, they had never hired relocation consultants before, so given the logic of soccer, not hiring relocation consultants must be the right thing to do. One Swedish 64

relocator surmised, “I guess it comes down to the fact that they see the players as merchandise.”

The only relocation consultants who had penetrated soccer happened to have a friend inside a club, or, in the case of one Greek woman, had married a club owner. She had told her husband, “All these guys would be happier if you find out what their needs are, and address their needs.”

Another relocator had entered a German club as a language teacher and worked her way up. She said, “I was their mother, their nurse, their real estate agent, their cleaning lady, their everything. They didn’t have a car; they didn’t speak the language.” Did her work help the players play better? “Absolutely.” The club was happy for her to work as an amateur, but as soon as she founded a relocation company, it didn’t want her anymore. She had become threatening.

THE NICEST TOWN IN EUROPE:

HOW TO BUY AND SELL LIKE OLYMPIQUE LYON

If you had to locate the middle-class European dream anywhere, it would be in Lyon. It’s a town the size of Oakland, about two-thirds of the way down France, nestled between rivers just west of the Alps. On a warm January afternoon, drinking coffee outside in the eighteenth-century Place Bellecour where the buildings are as pretty as the women, you think: nice. Here’s a wealthy town where you can have a good job, nice weather, and a big house near the mountains.

Lyon also has some of the best restaurants in Europe, known locally as
bouchons,
or “corks.” Even at the town’s soccer stadium you can have a wonderful three-course pregame meal consisting largely of intestines or head cheese, unless you prefer to eat at local boy Paul Bocuse’s brasserie across the road and totter into the grounds just before kickoff.

And then you can watch some of the best soccer in Europe, too.

Until about 2000 Lyon was known as the birthplace of cinema and nouvelle cuisine, but not as a soccer town. It was just too bourgeois. If for some reason you wanted soccer, you drove thirty-five miles down the G E N T L E M E N P R E F E R B L O N D S

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highway to gritty proletarian Saint-Étienne. In 1987, Olympique Lyon, or “OL,” or
“les Gones”
(the Kids), was playing in France’s second division on an annual budget of about $3 million. It was any old backwater provincial club in Europe. Today it rules French soccer, and proclaims that it is only a matter of time before it wins the Champions League. Its ascent is in large part a story of the international transfer market. Better than any other club in Europe today, Lyon has worked out how to play the market.

In 1987 Jean-Michel Aulas, a local software entrepreneur with the stark, grooved features of a Roman emperor, became club president.

Aulas had played fairly good handball as a young man and had a season ticket at OL.

“I didn’t know the world of soccer well,” he admits over a bottle of

“OL” mineral water in his office beside the stadium (which he aims to tear down and replace with a bigger one). Had he expected the transformation that he wrought? “No.”

Aulas set out to improve the club step by step. “We tried to abstract the factor ‘time,’” he explains. “Each year we fix as an aim to have sporting progress, and progress of our financial resources. It’s like a cyclist riding: you can overtake the people in front of you.” Others in France prefer to liken Aulas to “
un bulldozer
.”

In 1987 even the local
Lyonnais
didn’t care much about
les Gones
.

You could live in Lyon without knowing that soccer existed. The club barely had a personality, whereas Saint-Étienne were the “miners’ club”

that had suffered tragic defeats on great European nights in the 1970s.

Saint-Étienne’s president at the time said that when it came to soccer, Lyon was a suburb of Saint-Étienne, a remark that still rankles. At one derby after Lyon’s domination began,
les Gones’
fans unfurled a banner that told the Saint-Étienne supporters: “We invented cinema when your fathers were dying in the mines.”

Aulas appointed local boy Raymond Domenech as his first coach. In Domenech’s first season, OL finished top of the second division without losing a game. Right after that it qualified for Europe. Aulas says,

“At a stroke the credibility was total. The project was en route.”

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It turned out that the second city in France, even if it was a bit bourgeois, was just hungry enough for a decent soccer club. The
Lyonnais
were willing to buy match tickets if things went well, but if things went badly, they weren’t immediately waving white handkerchiefs in the stands and demanding that the president or manager or half the team be gotten rid of. Nor did the French press track the club’s doings hour by hour. It’s much easier to build for the long term in a place like that than in a “soccer city” like Marseille or Newcastle. Moreover, players were happy to move to a town that is hardly a hardship posting. Almost nothing they get into in Lyon makes it into the gossip press. Another of Lyon’s advantages: the locals have money. “It allowed us to have not just a ‘popular clientele,’ but also a ‘business clientele,’” says Aulas.

Talking about money is something of a taboo in France. It is considered a grubby and private topic. Socially, you’re never supposed to ask anyone a question that might reveal how much somebody has. Soccer, to most French fans, is not supposed to be about money. They find the notion of a well-run soccer club humorless, practically American.

It therefore irritates them that Aulas talks about it so unabashedly.

He might have invented the word
moneyball
. Aulas’s theme is that over time, the more money a club makes, the more matches it will win, and the more matches it wins, the more money it will make. In the short term you can lose a match, but in the long term there is a rationality even to soccer. (And to baseball. As
Moneyball
describes it, Beane believes that winning “is simply a matter of figuring out the odds, and exploiting the laws of probability. . . . To get worked up over plays, or even games, is as unproductive as a casino manager worrying over the outcomes of individual pulls of the slot machines.”)

Aulas thinks that rationality in soccer works more or less like this: If you buy good players for less than they are worth, you will win more games. You will then have more money to buy better players for less than they are worth. The better players will win you more matches, and that will attract more fans (and thus more money), because Aulas spotted early that most soccer fans everywhere are much more like shoppers than like religious believers: if they can get a better experience some-G E N T L E M E N P R E F E R B L O N D S

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where new, they will go there. He told us, “We sold 110,000 replica shirts last season. This season we are already at 200,000. I think Olympique Lyon has become by far the most beloved club in France.”