Soccernomics (2 page)

Some people may not want their emotional relationship with soccer sullied by our rational calculations. On the other hand, the next time England loses a penalty shoot-out in a World Cup quarter-final these same people will probably be throwing their beer glasses at the TV, D R I V I N G W I T H A D A S H B O A R D 5

when instead they could be tempering their disappointment with some reflections on the nature of binomial probability theory.

We think it’s a good time to be writing this book. For the first time ever in soccer, there are a lot of numbers to mine. Traditionally, the only data that existed in the game were goals and league tables. (Newspapers published attendance figures, but these were unreliable.) At the end of the 1980s, when Stefan went into sports economics, only about twenty or thirty academic articles on soccer had ever been published. Now there are countless. Many of the new truths they contain have not yet reached most fans.

The other new source of knowledge is the bulging library of soccer books. When Pete Davies published
All Played Out: The Full Story of
Italia ’90
, there were probably only about twenty or thirty good soccer books in existence. Now—thanks partly to Davies, who has been described as John the Baptist to Nick Hornby’s Jesus—there are thousands. Many of these books (including Bellos’s
Futebol
) contain truths about the game that we try to present here.

So unstoppable has the stream of data become that even people inside the game are finally starting to sift it. Michael Lewis, the author of
Moneyball
, wrote in the
New York Times
in February 2009, “The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport. Not just basketball and football, but also soccer and cricket and rugby and, for all I know, snooker and darts—

each one now supports a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to be played but as a problem to be solved.”

In soccer, one of these smart men (it’s part of the game’s own

“ridiculous hokum” that they have to be men) is Arsène Wenger. A trained economist, Wenger is practically addicted to statistics, like the number of kilometers run by each player in a game. What makes him one of the heroes of
Soccernomics
is his understanding that in soccer today, you need data to get ahead. If you study figures, you will see more and win more.

Slowly, Wenger’s colleagues are also ceasing to rely on gut alone. Increasingly, they use computer programs like Prozone to analyze games and players. Another harbinger of the impending Jamesian takeover of soccer is the Milan Lab. Early on, AC Milan’s in-house medical outfit found that just by studying a player’s jump, it could predict with 70 percent accuracy whether he would get injured. It then collected millions of data on each of the team’s players on computers, and in the process stumbled upon the secret of eternal youth. (It’s still a secret: no other club has a Milan Lab, and the lab won’t divulge its findings, which is why players at other clubs are generally finished by their early thirties.) Most of Milan’s starting eleven who beat Liverpool in the Champions League final of 2007 were thirty-one or older: Paolo Maldini, the captain, was thirty-eight, and Filippo Inzaghi, scorer of both of Milan’s goals, was thirty-three. In large part, that trophy was won by the Milan Lab and its database. It is another version of the Triumph of the Geeks story.

As the two of us talked more and began to think harder about soccer and data, we buzzed around all sorts of questions. Could we find figures to show which country loved soccer the most? Might the game somehow deter people from killing themselves? And perhaps we could have a shot at predicting which clubs and countries—Turkey most likely, perhaps even Iraq—would dominate the soccer of the future. Stefan lives in London and Simon in Paris, so we spent a year firing figures, arguments, and anecdotes back and forth across the Channel.

All the while, we distrusted every bit of ancient soccer lore, and tested it against the numbers. As Jean-Pierre Meersseman, the Milan Lab’s cigarette-puffing Belgian director, told us: “You can drive a car without a dashboard, without any information, and that’s what’s happening in soccer. There are excellent drivers, excellent cars, but if you have your dashboard, it makes it just a little bit easier. I wonder why people don’t want more information.” We do.

WHY ENGLAND

LOSES AND OTHERS WIN

BEATEN BY A DISHWASHER

When the England team flies to South Africa for the World Cup, an ancient ritual will start to unfold. Perfected over England’s fourteen previous failures to win the World Cup away from home, it follows this pattern:

Phase 1: Pretournament—

Certainty That England Will Win the World Cup

Alf Ramsey, the only English manager to win the trophy, predicted the victory of 1966. However, his prescience becomes less impressive when you realize that almost every England manager thinks he will win the trophy, including Ramsey in the two campaigns he didn’t.

When his team was knocked out in 1970 he was stunned and said,

“We must now look ahead to the next world cup in Munich where our chances of winning I would say are very good indeed.” England didn’t qualify for that one.

Glenn Hoddle, England’s manager in 1998, revealed only after his team had been knocked out “my innermost thought, which was that England would win the World Cup.” Another manager who went home early, Ron Greenwood, confessed, “I honestly thought we could have won the World Cup in 1982.” A month before the World Cup of 2006, Sven Goran Eriksson said, “I think we will win it.”

The deluded manager is never alone. As the England player Johnny Haynes remarked after elimination in 1958, “Everyone in England thinks we have a God-given right to win the World Cup.” This belief in the face of all evidence was a hangover from empire: England is soccer’s mother country and should therefore be the best today. The sociologist Stephen Wagg notes: “In reality, England is a country like many others and the England soccer team is a soccer team like many others.”

This truth is only slowly sinking in.

Phase 2: During the Tournament

England Meets a Former Wartime Enemy

In five of their last seven World Cups, England was knocked out by either Germany or Argentina. The matches fit seamlessly into the British tabloid view of history, except for the outcome. As Alan Ball summed up the mood in England’s dressing room after the defeat to West Germany in 1970: “It was disbelief.”

Even Joe Gaetjens, who scored the winning goal for the US against England in 1950, turns out to have been of German-Haitian origin, not Belgian-Haitian as is always said. And in any case, the US is another former wartime enemy.

Phase 3: The English Conclude That the Game Turned on One

Freakish Piece of Bad Luck That Could Happen Only to Them

Gaetjens, the accounting student and dishwasher in a Manhattan restaurant who didn’t even have an American passport, must have scored his goal by accident. “Gaetjens went for the ball, but at the last moment, de-W H Y E N G L A N D L O S E S A N D O T H E R S W I N

cided to duck,” England’s captain Billy Wright wrote later. “The ball bounced on the top of his head and slipped past the bewildered Williams.”

In 1970 England’s goalkeeper Gordon Banks got an upset stomach before the quarter-final against West Germany. He was okay on the morning of the game and was picked to play, but a little later was discovered on the toilet with everything “coming out both ends.” His un-derstudy, Peter Bonetti, let in three soft German goals.

There was more bad luck in 1973, when England failed to qualify for the next year’s World Cup because Poland’s “clown” of a goalkeeper, Jan Tomaszewski, unaccountably had a brilliant night at Wembley. “The simple truth is that on a normal day we would have beaten Poland 6–0,” England’s midfielder Martin Peters says in Niall Edworthy’s book on England managers,
The Second Most Important
Job in the Country
. Poland went on to reach the semifinals of the ’74

World Cup.

In 1990 and 1998 England lost in what everyone knows is the lottery of the penalty shoot-out. In 2002 everyone knew that the obscure, bucktoothed Brazilian kid Ronaldinho must have lucked out with the free kick that sailed into England’s net, because he couldn’t have been good enough to place it deliberately. In 2006 Wayne Rooney would never have been sent off for stomping on Ricardo Carvalho’s genitals if Cristiano Ronaldo hadn’t tattled on him. These things just don’t happen to other countries.

Phase 4: Moreover, Everyone Else Cheated

The Brazilian crowd in 1950 and the Mexican crowd in 1970 deliberately wasted time while England was losing by keeping the ball in the stands. The CIA (some say) drugged Banks. Diego Maradona’s “hand of God” single-handedly defeated England in 1986. Diego Simeone playacted in 1998 to get David Beckham sent off, and Cristiano Ronaldo did the same for Rooney in 2006.

Every referee opposes England. Those of his decisions that support this thesis are analyzed darkly. Typically, the referee’s nationality is 10

mentioned to blacken him further. Billy Wright, England’s captain in 1950, later recalled “Mr Dattilo of Italy, who seemed determined to let nothing so negligible as the laws of the game come between America and victory.” The referee who didn’t give England a penalty against West Germany in 1970 was, inevitably, an Argentine. The Tunisian referee of 1986 who, like most people watching the game, failed to spot the “hand of God” has become legendary.

Phase 5: England Is Knocked Out

Without Getting Anywhere Near Lifting the Cup

The only exception was 1990, when they reached the semifinal. Otherwise, England has always been eliminated when still needing to defeat at least three excellent teams. Since 1970, Bulgaria, Sweden, and Poland have gotten as close to winning a World Cup as England has.

Perhaps England should be relieved that it doesn’t finish second. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, who wants to be the greatest loser? The science writer Stefan Klein points out that winning bronze at the Olympics is not so bad, because that is a great achievement by any standards, but winning silver is awful, as you will always be tortured by the thought of what might have been.

England has never been at much risk of that. The team won only five of its eighteen matches at World Cups abroad from 1950 through 1970, and didn’t qualify for the next two tournaments in 1974 and 1978, so at least it has been improving since. The general belief in decline from a golden age is mistaken.

Phase 6: The Day After Elimination, Normal Life Resumes

The one exception is 1970, when England’s elimination may have caused Labour’s surprise defeat in the general election four days later.

But otherwise the elimination does not bring on a nationwide hangover.

To the contrary, England’s eliminations are celebrated, turned into national myths, or songs, or commercials for pizza chains.

W H Y E N G L A N D L O S E S A N D O T H E R S W I N

11

Phase 7: A Scapegoat Is Found

The scapegoat is never an outfield player who has “battled” all match.

Even if he directly caused the elimination by missing a penalty, he is a

“hero.”

Beckham was scapegoated for the defeat against Argentina in 1998

only because he got a red card after forty-six minutes. Writer Dave Hill explained that the press was simply pulling out its “two traditional responses to England’s sporting failure: heralding a glorious defeat and mercilessly punishing those responsible for it, in this case Posh Spice’s unfortunate fiancé.”

Beckham wrote in one of his autobiographies that the abuse continued for years: “Every time I think it has disappeared, I know I will meet some idiot who will have a go at me. Sometimes it is at matches, sometimes just driving down the road.” He added that he kept “a little book in which I’ve written down the names of those people who upset me the most. I don’t want to name them because I want it to be a surprise when I get them back.” One day they will all get upset stomachs.

Often the scapegoat is a management figure: Wright as captain in 1950, Joe Mears as chief selector in 1958, and many managers since.

Sometimes it is a keeper, who by virtue of his position just stood around in goal rather than battling like a hero. Bonetti spent the rest of his career enduring chants of “You lost the World Cup.” After retiring from soccer, he went into quasi exile as a mailman on a remote Scottish island.

In 2006 Cristiano Ronaldo was anointed scapegoat. Only after a defeat to Brazil is no scapegoat sought, because defeats to Brazil are considered acceptable.

Phase 8: England Enters the Next World Cup

Thinking It Will Win It

The World Cup as ritual has a meaning beyond soccer. The elimination is usually the most watched British television program of the year. It 12

therefore educates the English in two contradictory narratives about their country: one, that England has a manifest destiny to triumph, and, two, that it never does. The genius of the song “Three Lions,” English soccer’s unofficial anthem, is that it combines both narratives: “Thirty years of hurt / Never stopped me dreaming.”

There is an alternative universe in which Beckham didn’t get sent off, Banks’s stomach held up, the referee spotted Maradona’s handball, and so on. In that universe England has won about seven World Cups.

Many English fans think they would have preferred that. But it would have deprived the English of a ritual that marks the passing of time much like Christmas or New Year’s and celebrates a certain idea of England: a land of unlucky heroes that no longer rules the world, although it should.

A PERFECTLY DECENT TEAM

Any mathematician would say it’s absurd to expect England to win the World Cup.

England wins two-thirds of its matches. To be precise, from 1970 to 2007 England played 411, won 217, tied 120, and lost 74. If we treat a tie as half a win, this translates into a winning percentage of 67.4 percent. If we then break this down into seven equal periods of just under four years each, England’s winning percentage has never fallen below 62