Soccernomics (16 page)

Crick began collecting data from the 1970s onward to see which clubs had hired black players. This was no easy task. How do you decide who is “black”? Crick took a commonsense approach. He started with N E E D N O T A P P LY

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the old Rothmans Soccer Yearbooks, which published a photograph of every English league team. From this he made a judgment as to which players “looked black.” He then followed up by asking clubs and supporters’ clubs to fill in any gaps. It took him months to come up with a list of players who, to most fans, would have appeared to be black. This sounds arbitrary, but it is precisely what was required. Prejudice is based on appearance. For example, several years after Crick did his research, it emerged that Ryan Giggs’s father was black. Giggs even spoke publicly about his pride in his Caribbean ancestry. However, until that point, most people would not have considered Giggs a black player. He didn’t
look
black, and for that reason he would have been unlikely to face discrimination. So Crick was right not to count Giggs as black.

When Crick told Stefan about his list of black players, it was a cinch to create a test for discrimination. All that was necessary was to count how many times each black player had played for his club in a given season. It would then be clear which teams hired a larger proportion of black players.

Stefan then matched these data with figures on each team’s league position, and its spending on wages. If there were no discrimination in the market, then wages alone would almost entirely explain league performance. Everything else would just be random noise—“luck.” But if black players were systematically being paid less than equally talented white players, then logically the teams that hired an above-average proportion of black players would do systematically better than their wage bill alone would predict.

Back in the 1970s, there were very few black players in English soccer. Combining our data on wages with Crick’s database had given us a sample of thirty-nine out of the ninety-two professional league teams.

In the 1973–1974 season only two of these clubs had fielded any black players at all. By 1983–1984 there were still twenty teams in our sample that did not a field a black player all season. However, at this point there seems to have been a major breakthrough. By 1989 every team in the sample had fielded at least one black player at some point. By 1992, when the Premier League was founded, only five teams in the sample 106

did not field a black player that season. This implied that about 90 percent of clubs were putting blacks in the first team. Attitudes were changing. Bananas left the game. When Noades voiced his theories on black players in 1991, he was widely mocked.

It is interesting to look at the characteristics of the black players in the English game in these years. For purposes of comparison, Stefan constructed a random sample of an equal number of white players with similar age profiles. Almost all the black players (89 percent) were born in Britain, not very different from the white players (95 percent). Most of the black players were strikers (58 percent) compared to only 33 percent of white players. There were no black goalkeepers at the time.

Noades would have noted the fact that black players seemed underrep-resented in defense. But then strikers always carry a premium to defenders in the market: it takes more talent to score than to stop other people from scoring.

Certain facts about the sample stood out: The careers of the black players averaged more than six years, compared to less than four for the whites. And 36 percent of the blacks had played for their countries compared to only 23 percent of the whites. On this evidence, it looked suspiciously as if the black players were better than the whites.

The proof came when Stefan deployed the economist’s favorite tool, regression analysis. He used it to isolate the distinct effects of wages and the share of black players on each club’s league performance. What he found was discrimination. The data showed that clubs with more black players really did have a better record in the league than clubs with fewer blacks, after allowing for wage spending. If two teams had identical annual wage budgets, the team with more blacks would finish higher in the league. The test implied that black players were systematically better value for money than whites. Certain teams of the 1980s like Arsenal, Noades’s Palace, and Ron Atkinson’s West Bromwich Albion (this was years before Atkinson called Marcel Desailly “a fucking lazy thick nigger” on air) benefited from fielding blacks.

The clubs with fewer blacks were not suffering from a lack of information. Anyone who knew soccer could judge fairly easily how good a N E E D N O T A P P LY

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player was just by watching him play. So the only credible reason clubs would deny themselves the opportunity to hire these players was prejudice. Clubs didn’t like the look of black players, or they thought their fans wouldn’t, either simply because of skin hue or because they perceived weaknesses that were just not there. By testing the behavior of managers against the market, it proved possible to uncover evidence of discrimination.

In soccer, you can judge someone’s performance only against other competitors. This means that I lose nothing by being inefficient if my competitors are inefficient in the same way as I am. I can go on hiring mediocre players as long as other clubs do, too. As long as all clubs refused to hire talented black players, the cost of discriminating was low.

What the data showed was that by the beginning of the 1980s, so many teams were hiring talented blacks that the cost of discriminating had become quite high. Teams that refused to field black players were over-paying for white players and losing more matches as a consequence. Yet some level of discrimination persisted. Even by the end of the 1980s, an all-white team like Everton would cost around 5 percent more than an equally good team that fielded merely an average proportion of black players. As Dave Hill wrote in the fanzine
When Saturday Comes
in 1989, “Half a century after Jesse Owens, a quarter of a century after Martin Luther King, and 21 years after two American sprinters gave the Black Power salute from the Olympic medal rostrum, some of these dickheads don’t even know what a black person is.” But by the time Hill wrote that, precisely because soccer is so competitive, more and more clubs had begun to hire black players. In 1995 even Everton signed the Nigerian Daniel Amokachi. The economic forces of competition drove white men to ditch their prejudices.

Quite soon, enough clubs were hiring blacks that black players came to be statistically overrepresented in soccer. Only about 1.6 percent of people in the British census of 1991 described themselves as black. Yet in the early 1990s, about 10 percent of all players in English professional soccer were black. By the end of the decade, after the influx of foreign players, the share was nearer 20 percent.

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So did clubs learn to overcome their prejudices? A few years after Stefan ran his first test for discrimination, he badgered some students who were looking for undergraduate projects into compiling a list of black players for another six seasons. That took the data set up to the 1998–1999 season. Once again, Stefan merged the data with figures on wages and league performances. Now he could run the regression to the end of the 1990s. For these six additional years, there was no evidence that the share of black players in a team had any effect on team performance, after allowing for the team’s wage bill. In other words, by then black players were on average paid what they were worth to a team.

Perhaps the best witness to the acceptance of blacks in soccer is Lilian Thuram. A black man born on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and raised in a poor suburb of Paris, Thuram played professionally from 1991 to 2008 and became France’s most capped player. He is also a French intellectual, possibly the only soccer player ever to have spoken the words, “There’s an interesting young ethnographer at the Musée de l’Homme . . .”

Thuram is acutely sensitive to racism. He now runs an antiracism foundation. Nonetheless, he feels soccer is innocent of the sin. Over late-night pasta in an Italian restaurant in Barcelona, he explained, “In soccer it’s harder to have discrimination, because we are judged on very specific performances. There are not really subjective criteria. Sincerely, I’ve never met a racist person in soccer. Maybe they were there, but I didn’t see it.” In fact, he added, “In sport, prejudices favor the blacks. In the popular imagination, the black is in his place in sport. For example, recently in Barcelona, the fitness coach said about Abidal [a black French defender]: ‘He’s an athlete of the black race.’ It’s not because he stays behind after training to run. No, it’s because he’s black.”

So by the 1990s, discrimination against black players had disappeared. Gradually, they came to feel at home in the industry. Here is a scene from inside the marble halls of the old Arsenal stadium, after a game in 1995: Arsenal’s black Dutch winger Glenn Helder is introduc-ing his black teammate Ian Wright (one of Ron Noades’s ex-players) to N E E D N O T A P P LY

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some Dutch people. Then Helder says, “Ian, show these guys what I taught you.” A look of intense concentration appears on Wright’s face, and he begins jumping up and down and shouting in Dutch, “Buzz off!

Dirty ape! Dirty ape!” He and Helder then collapse laughing. There was still racism in soccer, but by then blacks could mock it from the inner sanctums of the game’s establishment.

The story of racism in American sports followed much the same arc.

Right through the Second World War, baseball and basketball had seg-regated blacks into “Negro Leagues.” In 1947 Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke an unspoken rule among baseball owners and hired black infielder Jackie Robinson to play for his team. Robinson eventually became an American hero. However, the costar of his story was economics. The Dodgers had less money than their crosstown rivals, the New York Yankees. If Rickey wanted a winning team, he had to tap talent that the other owners overlooked. Racism provided him with an opportunity.

Of course, discrimination against black players persisted in American sports long after Robinson. Lawrence Kahn, an economist at Cor-nell University, surveyed the data and found little evidence that before the 1990s baseball teams were withholding jobs or pay from blacks. But he did think they were giving black players unduly short careers, and using them in only certain positions. In basketball, Kahn did find wage discrimination. When he repeated his study in 2000, he discovered, like Stefan the second time around, that discrimination was fading.

NEW SOCCER, NEW DISCRIMINATION

Trevor Phillips points a finger at his own shaven black head: “Excuse me, here I am: bull’s-eye!” The son of an early Caribbean immigrant, Phillips was raised in London, and has supported Chelsea for nearly fifty years. But in the 1970s, when darts throwing was the favorite sport of Chelsea’s Shed Stand, he didn’t go to matches. His head felt like too obvious a target. Hardly any black people went to Chelsea then. “Now I can take my daughters,” he marvels.

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But as head of Britain’s Commission for Equalities and Human Rights, Phillips doesn’t think soccer has slain discrimination yet. Over breakfast one snowy morning, he identified an enduring type of discrimination in British soccer: “Loads of black players on the field and none in the dugout.”

You might think that this form of discrimination would eventually disappear: that just as competition pushed clubs into buying black players, it will push them into hiring black managers. But in fact, the prejudice against black managers will probably be harder to shift. That is because the market in soccer managers is much less efficient than the market in soccer players.

Like discrimination against black players, discrimination against black managers first became visible in American sports. As early as 1969 Jackie Robinson, who had become quite rebellious as he grew older, refused to attend Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium, in protest at baseball’s shunning of black coaches and managers.

The issue hit Britain only when the first generation of black players began to retire (its being an article of faith in soccer that only ex-players have what it takes to become managers). The former England international Luther Blissett, who as a player had made that ill-fated transfer to Milan, applied for twenty-two jobs as a manager in the 1990s. He did not get a single interview. Stella Orakwue, who recounts his story in her 1998 book,
Pitch Invaders
, concludes, “I feel a British black managing a Premiership team could be a very long way off.” Indeed, only in 2008, ten years after she wrote this, did Blackburn give Paul Ince a chance for a few months. Even after Ince’s appointment, John Barnes, who himself had struggled to get work as a manager in Britain, said, “I believe the situation for black managers is like it was for black players back in the 1970s.”

True, black managers Ruud Gullit and Jean Tigana did get jobs in the Premier League. But as Orakwue points out, the crucial point is that they were foreigners. They were perceived in Britain first of all as Dutch or French, and only secondarily as black. Gullit was cast as a typical sophisticated Dutch manager, not as an untried “black” one.

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You would think that given this discrimination, unprejudiced clubs could clean up by hiring the best black (or female) managers at low salaries. A small club like Tranmere Rovers, say, could probably take its pick of the world’s black managers. It could get the best female manager in history. Yet it probably won’t. That’s because the market in soccer managers is so different from the market in players. Markets tend to work when they are transparent—when you can see who is doing what and place a value on it. That is preeminently true of soccer players, who do their work in public. When you can’t see what people do, it’s very hard to assign a value to their work. Efficient markets punish discrimination in plain view of everyone, and so discrimination tends to get rooted out. Inefficient markets can maintain discrimination almost indefinitely.