Soccernomics (24 page)

WHILE AMERICA SLEPT: HOW SOCCER INVADED THE US

After the British Victorians spread their games, sports experienced a century of relative stability. The Indians played cricket, the US resisted soccer, and the isolated town of Melbourne favored Australian Rules football, which barely existed even in other parts of Australia. But from F O O T B A L L V E R S U S F O O T B A L L

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the 1980s, new TV channels—free, cable, and satellite—began mushrooming almost everywhere. They took up the burden of carrying sports around the world. When Britain’s Channel Four was created in 1982, for instance, it began broadcasting NFL games. They were a hit.

Suddenly, there were people in Norwich or Manchester who called themselves 49ers fans. William “the Refrigerator” Perry, the supersize Chicago Bears lineman, became a cult hero in Britain. Alistair Kirkwood, the NFL’s UK managing director, fondly recalls that for a year or two in the 1980s, the Super Bowl had higher ratings in Britain than the beloved soccer program
Match of the Day
on the same weekend.

It didn’t last. English soccer cleaned up its stadiums, kicked out most of its hooligans, sold its rights to Sky Television, and revived.

Eventually, Channel Four dropped the NFL. The halfhearted American invasion—albeit led by British TV—had been repelled.

Meanwhile, across the ocean, soccer was slowly infecting American life. Even though the US already had four big team sports and seemed to have no need of another, in the 1970s the game came from almost nowhere to conquer American childhoods. It turned out there was a gap in the American sports market after all. The country’s most popular sport, football, was too dangerous, too male, and too expensive for mass participation. Fitting out a kid with all the necessary equipment for football costs around three to four hundred dollars, a significant cost, especially if the child quickly decides that he doesn’t like being beaten up. Today, probably fewer than 1 million people in the world play tackle football, compared to the 265 million who (according to FIFA) play soccer.

Victorian Britons had conceived of soccer as a “man’s game.” But Americans saw that it was a soft sport, safe for girls as well as boys. So soccer in the US became an unlikely beneficiary of feminism. It did almost as well out of another post-1960s social trend, Mexican immigration. The estimated 43 million Hispanics now living in the US (up threefold since 1980) outnumber the population of Spain.

And so more American children under twelve play soccer than baseball, football, and ice hockey put together. The strange American 164

equilibrium, whereby kids play soccer and follow football, has been in place since the 1980s.

Contrary to popular opinion, soccer in America has been a success.

When David Beckham joined the LA Galaxy, the cliché was that his task was to “put soccer on the map” in America. In fact, this was impossible, because soccer was already “on the map” in America. The US

has a strong soccer culture. It’s just different from any other country’s soccer culture. In particular, it doesn’t require a strong domestic men’s professional league.

Major League Soccer is not American soccer. It’s just a tiny piece of the mosaic. Kids’ soccer, college soccer, indoor soccer, Mexican, En -

glish, and Spanish soccer, the Champions League, and the World Cup between them dwarf the MLS. To cite just one example: nearly 17 million Americans saw the World Cup final of 2006, 4 million more than watched an average game in the NBA finals and almost as many as saw the average World Series game in 2006. Moreover, soccer has penetrated most branches of the American entertainment industry, from
The
Sopranos
to presidential elections in which “soccer moms” are considered pivotal figures.

American soccer people often fret over the MLS’s marginality. As Dave Eggers has noted, “Newspaper coverage of the games usually is found in the nether regions of the sports section, near the car ads and the biathlon roundups.” Some TV ratings for MLS games “are in the realm of—or, in some cases, actually below—tractor pulls, skate boarding competitions, and bass fishing tournaments,” writes Andrei Markovits, politics professor at the University of Michigan. The lowli-est MLS players earn as little as fifteen thousand dollars a year.

But to worry about this is to misunderstand why so many American suburban families like soccer. The game has thrived as a pastime for upscale kids in part precisely
because
there is no big soccer in the US. Many soccer moms are glad that soccer is not a big professional American sport like basketball or football. Like a lot of other Americans, they are wary of big-time American sports, whose stars do lousy and unethical things like shooting their limousine drivers.

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By contrast, many moms see soccer as an innocent game, free of certain aspects of modern America: not violent, not drenched in money, and not very black. A large number of MLS players are white college boys. American soccer has no Charles Barkley.

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY: IS THE NFL REALLY SO EQUAL?

Clearly, though, the NFL is doing something right. Here are the average attendance rates of the most-watched leagues of all the world’s ball games:

1. NFL

68,241 (regular season, 2008)

2. German soccer, Bundesliga

41,446 (2008–2009 season)

3. Australian Football League

36,996 (2008 season)

(Australian Rules football)

4. English Premier League

35,341 (2008–2009 season)

The Premier League outdraws the NFL in per-capita terms, if we take into account that England has only a sixth as many inhabitants as the US.

But in absolute terms no league can begin to rival the NFL. When people try to explain the NFL’s popularity, they often mention its famous slogan:

“On any given Sunday any team in our league can beat any other team.”

This is a boast the Premier League would never dare make. English soccer looks horribly unbalanced, with the “Big Four” teams dominating at the top, whereas the NFL claims to be a league of equals.

Indeed, the NFL is often called “the socialist league.” Its clubs share TV income equally, and 40 percent of each game’s gate receipts goes to the visiting team. This aspiration to equality is a general American sporting trait. Clubs in American baseball, basketball, and the MLS also share far more of their income than European soccer does. Take the ubiquitous New York Yankees baseball cap. Outside of New York, the Yankees receive only one-thirtieth of the profit on each cap sold, the same as every other team in baseball. By contrast, Manchester United wouldn’t dream of giving Bolton or Wigan a cut of its shirts.

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Many in European soccer, and particularly in England, have come to envy the NFL. English fans often complain that their sport is getting boring because the big clubs win everything. The “Big Four” of Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Arsenal dominate not only the Premier League but the Champions League, too. In all of continental Europe, only Barcelona can match them. Even Emilio Butragueño, sporting director of plucky little Real Madrid, told the BBC, “You need uncertainty at the core of every competition. . . . We may eventually have something similar to the [salary cap] system in the US, to give a chance to all the clubs.”

Andy Burnham, Britain’s culture secretary, warned in 2008 that although the Premier League was “the world’s most successful domestic sporting competition,” it risked becoming “too predictable.” He added:

“I keep referring to the NFL, which has equal sharing. . . . In the US, the most free-market country in the world, they understand that equal distribution of money creates genuine competition.”

Michel Platini, president of the European soccer association UEFA, seems to agree. Searching for a way to even things out in European soccer, in the spring of 2009 he put a team of UEFA officials on a plane to the US. Perhaps there was something over there that soccer could copy.

People who think like this tend to accept two truisms: The NFL is much more equal than European soccer. And sports fans like equality.

Unfortunately, neither of these truisms is true. First, the NFL isn’t nearly as balanced as it pretends. Second, we have data to show that overall, fans prefer unbalanced leagues.

At first glance, you could be forgiven for believing that the NFL really is much more equal than the Premier League. In the decade to 2009, seven different teams have won the Super Bowl. In the same period, only three teams have won the Premier League, with Manchester United bagging a snore-inducing six titles. On any given Sunday (or Saturday lunchtime, Tuesday night, whenever), Blackburn or Bolton can beat United, but the fact is that they usually don’t.

Yet is the NFL much more equal than the Premier League? Does it have a more even distribution of wins? Measuring the level of equality F O O T B A L L V E R S U S F O O T B A L L

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in both leagues is tricky, first because there are no ties in the NFL and second because the NFL’s regular season consists of just sixteen games and the Premier League’s of thirty-eight. In any given season, a weak English team has many more chances to get lucky.

Happily, there is a way to allow for these differences so that we can compare the two leagues. We will do this by dreaming up another league, a totally equal one in which every team always has an equal chance of winning any given game. This equal league would be a league of coin flips. Obviously, in the coin-flip league each team would be expected to win an average of 50 percent of its games. Even so, the outcome of any sixteen- or thirty-eight-game sequence would produce some random inequalities. Hardly any team in the coin-flip league would win exactly half its games. Rather, the win percentages for the season would be randomly dispersed around 50 percent. The question then is: which looks more like the totally equal coin-flip league, the NFL or the Premier League?

To work this out, we must calculate how random the dispersion of wins is in each of our three leagues. The measure of dispersion is commonly called the standard deviation. Let’s calculate standard deviation for the coin-flip league, and then for the NFL and the Premier League.

(And please feel free to skip the next few paragraphs if you aren’t interested in the math.)

The standard deviation of win percentages for any league is calculated by first taking the difference between each team’s win percentage and 50 percent (the difference will be positive when the team has a winning season, negative for a losing season). Then we square the difference, to make sure pluses and minuses don’t cancel out. Next we add up the difference for all teams in the league, and take the square root. That gives a number that is comparable to the average win percentage.

Now we are ready to find the figure we want: the standard deviation, or dispersion of win percentages. If our average win percentage is 50, a standard deviation of 1 would mean that most teams are close to the average. If the standard deviation were 20, it would mean that there is quite a lot of dispersion. In coin-tossing leagues, we know what the 168

standard deviation should be: close to half of the reciprocal of the square root of the number of games played. This is easy to calculate. If you play sixteen games, the square root is four, the reciprocal is one-quarter, and half of that is one-eighth, or 12.5 percent.

That is what the standard deviation of win percentage in the NFL

would be if on any given Sunday any team in the league really had a fifty-fifty chance of beating its opponent. Well, the NFL is not a coin-tossing league. This century, the standard deviation of win-loss records has fluctuated between 16 and 21 percent, and has averaged 20 percent.

That’s well above the 12.5 percent of the coin-tossing league.

The Premier League is only slightly less equal than the NFL. If the Premier League were a coin-tossing league, the expected standard deviation would be just over 8 percent. In fact, this century the Premier League’s standard deviation has averaged 14 percent. So it’s not a coin-tossing league, either, but the difference is not much greater than for the NFL. To put it another way, the NFL has a standard deviation about 60

percent larger than a coin-tossing league, while the EPL has one about 70 percent larger. This is a difference, but in the scale of things a fairly negligible one.

You might object that even if the NFL and Premier League are statistically almost equally balanced, the identity of the dominant teams and doormats changes each season in the NFL but not in the Premier League. After all, each season the worst NFL team gets the first draft pick, a very large human being who is in fact a device for bouncing back. As the distinguished “Chicago school” economists Sherwin Rosen and Allen Sanderson have pointed out, the Premier League punishes failure, while the NFL punishes success.

But for all the NFL’s efforts, the identity of winners and losers is pretty stable in both leagues. The best teams in the NFL, the Patriots and Colts, have won more than 70 percent of their games so far this century, just as Manchester United, Chelsea, and Arsenal have won more than 70 percent of theirs. Likewise, there are as many losers in the NFL as in the Premier League. The Detroit Lions have won less than 30 percent of their games since the millennium, a feat matched in En -

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gland only by Bradford City. The difference is that Bradford was relegated after its only season in the Premier League, whereas the Lions look set to sustain their peculiar brand of misery unto eternity.

So the NFL isn’t much more equal than the Premier League. It just looks like it is. It does so thanks largely to randomization devices that ensure that the best team doesn’t always win the Super Bowl: first, the small number of regular-season games; second, the playoffs. Both these devices ensure that no NFL team is likely to dominate for years like Manchester United has. However, this randomization comes at the expense of justice. Fans often feel that the best team in the NFL did not win the Super Bowl. In fact, the NFL looks a lot like the Champions League, where the knockout rounds add a random element that often ambushes the best team.