Soccernomics (15 page)

Yet the notion of discrimination against blacks clashes with something we think we know about soccer: that on the field at least, the game is ruthlessly fair. In soccer good players of whatever color perform better than bad ones. People in the game may walk around with Noadesesque fantasies in their heads, but when a black player plays well, everyone can see it. Nick Hornby writes in
Fever Pitch
: “One of the great things about sport is its cruel clarity; there is no such thing, for example, as a bad one-hundred-metre runner, or a hopeless center-half who got lucky; in sport, you get found out. Nor is there such a thing as an unknown genius striker starving in a garret somewhere.”

In short, it would seem that in soccer there is no room for ideologies.

You have to be right, and results on the field will tell you very quickly if you are. So would clubs really discriminate against blacks at the cost of winning matches? After all, even Ron Noades employed black players.

(He knew something about soccer, too: after leaving Palace he bought Brentford, appointed himself manager, won promotion, and was voted manager of the year in Division 2.) In fact, the very success of blacks on the field might be taken as evidence that the opportunities were there.

It’s also often hard to prove objectively that discrimination exists.

How can you show that you failed to get the job because of prejudice rather than just because you weren’t good enough? Liverpool and Everton might argue that they employed white players in the 1980s simply because the whites were better.

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Luckily, there is no need to get into a “he said, she said” argument.

We have data to prove that English soccer discriminated against black players. We can show when this particular kind of discrimination ended. And we can predict that the new forms of discrimination that pervade English soccer today will be harder to shift.

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The first black person to set foot in the British Isles was probably a soldier in Julius Caesar’s invading army, in 55 BC. The “indigenous” En -

glish themselves only arrived about four hundred years later, during the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Much later, under Victoria, Britain’s own empire ruled a large share of the world’s black people. A few of the better-educated or entrepre-neurial ones made their way from the Raj, the Caribbean, or Africa to Britain. Arthur Wharton, born in 1865 in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), became the world’s first black professional soccer player. As well as keeping goal for Preston, he set the world record of ten seconds for the one-hundred-yard sprint.

But until the 1950s most Britons had probably never seen a black person. Unlike Americans, they never developed any kind of relationship with blacks, whether positive or negative. Then, after the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of colonial immigrants began arriving. The influx was small enough—less than 5 percent of Britain’s total population, spread over a quarter of a century—to pose little threat to the concepts of Englishness, Scottishness, or Welshness.

Nonetheless, the signs went up in the windows of apartment houses:

“No Coloureds.”

One of the authors of this book, Stefan Szymanski, is the son of an immigrant from Poland who had escaped to London in 1940 and joined the British army to fight the Nazis. Stefan remembers his father telling him about looking for lodging in London in the early 1950s, and finding signs in the windows saying, “Rooms to let—no Poles, no Hun-garians.” Not only was this kind of discrimination legal, but Stefan’s father accepted it. In his mind, he was the immigrant, and it was his job 100

to fit in. Luckily for him (and for Stefan), he was an educated man, able to find a reasonable job and make a reasonable living. He was also a racist.

This might sound harsh, the British equivalent of Archie Bunker, but by today’s standards most British adults seemed to be racist in the 1970s, when Stefan was growing up. In the popular comedy series of the time,

’Till Death Us Do Part
, the hero, Alf Garnett, was a ludicrously prejudiced Londoner who favored labels like “Coon,” “Nig-nog,” “Darky,” “Paki,”

and “the Jews up at Spurs” (Garnett supported West Ham). Not only were these words used on the BBC, but they were accompanied by canned laughter. Admittedly, the joke of the series was ultimately on Garnett, who was regularly exposed to the falsity of his own prejudices. But Stefan used to argue that these labels were offensive. His father took this as evidence of a lack of a sense of humor.

It was against this 1970s background of instinctive racism that black players began arriving in English soccer. Most were the British-born children of immigrants. That didn’t stop them from being treated to monkey noises and bananas. (As Hornby notes in
Fever Pitch
, “There may well be attractive, articulate and elegant racists, but they certainly never come to soccer matches.”) For a while, neo-Nazi parties even imagined that they could lead a revolution from the soccer terraces.

Given the abuse the early black players received, it would have been easy for them to give up on soccer. It was thinkable that they would be driven out of the game. Instead, they stayed, played, and triumphed. In 1978, Viv Anderson became the first black player to play for England.

Still, even after the black winger John Barnes scored his solo goal to beat Brazil in Rio in 1984, the Football Association’s chairman was harangued by England fans on the flight back home: “You fucking wanker, you prefer sambos to us.”

As late as 1993 you could still witness the following scene: A crowd of people in a pub in the City of London is watching England-Holland on TV. Every time Barnes gets the ball, one man—in shirtsleeves and a tie, just out of his City office—makes monkey noises. Every time, his coworkers laugh. If anyone had complained, let alone gone off to find a policeman and asked him to arrest the man, the response would have N E E D N O T A P P LY

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been: “Where’s your sense of humor?” (Hornby’s line on this sort of problem: “I wish I were enormous and of a violent disposition, so that I could deal with any problem that arises near me in a fashion commen-surate with the anger I feel.”)

Whenever people reminisce about the good old days, when ordinary working people could afford to go to soccer matches, it’s worth scanning the photographs of the cloth-capped masses standing on the terraces for the faces you
don’t
see: blacks, Asians, women. It’s true that today’s all-seaters in the Premier League exclude poor people. However, the terraces before the 1990s probably excluded rather more varieties of people. In the 1970s and 1980s, when soccer grew scary, the violence forced out even many older white men.

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In the late 1980s Stefan Szymanski began thinking about the economics of soccer. He was then working for the Centre for Business Strategy at London Business School. Everyone in the center was an economist, and therefore tempted to think that markets, more or less, “worked.”

The theory was that any businessperson who came up with a brilliant innovation—inventing the telephone, say—would not keep his advantage for long, because others would imitate him and compete.

But the economists were interested in the few companies that stayed successful despite competition. Clearly, there must be something to learn from them. Stefan suggested looking for these paragons in soccer. It was clearly a highly competitive industry, yet some clubs managed to dominate for years on end. How did they manage to stay ahead for so long?

Stefan enlisted the support of Ron Smith, who had taught him when he was writing his Ph.D. Smith, as well as being an expert on Marxist economics and the economics of defense, is a well-known econometrician. Econometrics is essentially the art of finding statistical methods to extract information from data—or, as a lawyer friend of Stefan’s likes to put it, taking the data down into the basement and torturing them until they confess. Studying the accounts of soccer clubs, Stefan and Ron could 102

see how much each club spent on salaries. The two discovered that this spending alone explained almost all the variation in positions in the En -

glish Football League. We’ve already seen that when Stefan analyzed the accounts of forty clubs for the period 1978–1997, he found that their wage spending accounted for 92 percent of the variation in their league positions.

Clearly, the market in players’ pay was highly efficient: the better a player was, the more he earned. And this made sense, because soccer is one of the few markets that indisputably meets the conditions in which competition can work efficiently: there are large numbers of buyers and sellers, all of whom have plenty of information about the quality of the players being bought and sold. If a player got paid less than he was worth, he could move to another club. If he got paid more, he would soon find himself being sold off again.

But what about the variation in league position that remained unexplained after adjusting for players’ pay? If buying talent was generally enough to win titles—as rich club chairmen like Jack Walker at Blackburn Rovers and Roman Abramovich at Chelsea would soon demonstrate—what else accounted for a team’s success? If it was something that was easy to copy—a new tactic, for instance—then other teams would copy it, and the advantage would disappear. That got Stefan thinking about discrimination. What if owners were simply not willing to copy the secret of others’ success, because they didn’t want to hire the kinds of players that brought that success? He began to search for discrimination against black players.

In most industries, there is a way to demonstrate that discrimination exists. Suppose you could construct a sample of all applicants for a job, and also of all their relevant qualifications. If you then found that a much larger proportion of relevantly qualified white applicants received job offers than relevantly qualified black applicants, you could reasonably infer the presence of discrimination. For example, if 50 percent of whites with doctorates in philosophy got job offers from university philosophy departments, but only ten percent of their black equivalents did, then you should suspect discrimination.

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This is essentially how economists have tried to identify job discrimination. The method also works for wage discrimination. If equivalently qualified blacks (or women, or left-handers, or whoever) get lower wages for equivalent jobs, then there is probably discrimination going on. Researchers have put together databases of thousands of workers, each identified by dozens of relevant qualifications, to test whether discrimination exists. When it comes to ethnic minorities and women, the evidence usually shows that it does.

The problem is that there are few measurable qualifications that make someone a great soccer player. When a company is accused of racism, it often says that while the black (or purple, or female) candidates may possess some of the relevant characteristics, there are other, less quantifiable, characteristics that they don’t have. Intellectually, this point is hard to overturn. Hundreds of cases of racial discrimination have been fought in American courts, and evidence based on the kinds of studies we have mentioned has often run into trouble.

Happily, there is another way to test for discrimination in soccer.

Once again, it relies on evidence from the market. As a general rule, the best way to find out what people are up to is to see how they behave when faced with a price. Don’t know if you prefer Coke to Pepsi? Well, let’s see what you choose when they both cost the same. (Most people choose Coke.) Do managers prefer white players to blacks? Well, let’s see how they spend their clubs’ money.

If clubs discriminate, then they will prefer to hire a white player instead of an equivalently talented black player. If they do that, then blacks will find it harder to get jobs as professional soccer players. The blacks will then be willing to accept lower wages than equivalently talented whites. After all, when demand for what we sell is lower, we tend to lower our asking price. So black players become cheaper than white players. If there is discrimination, we would expect to find black players earning less than equally talented whites.

If black players are being discriminated against, that creates an economic opportunity for unprejudiced clubs. By hiring black players they can do just as well in the league as an equivalently talented (but more 104

expensive) team of whites. That means that a simple experiment will reveal whether discrimination exists:
if teams with more black players
achieve higher average league positions for a given sum of wage spending,
then the teams with fewer black players must have been discriminating
.

Otherwise, the “whiter” teams would have seen that black players were good value for the money, and would have tried to hire them. Then black players’ wages would have risen due to increased competition for their services, and the relative advantage of hiring black players would have disappeared.

Note that the argument is not that some teams hire more black players than others. That could happen for many reasons. Rather, we can infer discrimination if (a) some teams have more black players than others and (b) those same teams outperform their competitors for a given level of wage spending.

After Stefan figured this out, he had the luck of running into just the right person. Around that time, he was also researching the relationship between the pay of senior executives in the biggest British companies and the performance of their companies. (Very unlike soccer players’ wages, there turned out to be almost no correlation between the pay of senior executives and the performance of a company’s share price, until share options became common in the 1990s.) Stefan was interviewed for a BBC program by the political journalist Michael Crick.

Over time he and Crick got to talking about soccer.

Crick is a famously thorough researcher. Book reviewers delight in finding errors, no matter how trivial, but they never succeed with Crick’s political biographies. And as it happens, Crick supports Manchester United. In 1989 he wrote a fascinating history of the club with David Smith, describing how United packaged its legend for commercial gain. About this time Crick became interested in whether soccer clubs discriminated in their hiring. Everyone knew of the suspicious cases of the day, chiefly Liverpool and Everton.