Soccernomics (4 page)

Jamie Carragher

Pub landlord

Ashley Cole

None given, but in his autobiography describes “a grounded working-class upbringing in east London”

Joe Cole

Fruit and vegetable trader

Peter Crouch

Creative director at international advertising agency

Stewart Downing

Painter and decorator on oil rigs

Kieron Dyer

Manager of Caribbean social club

Rio Ferdinand

Tailor

Robbie Fowler

Laborer; later worked night shift at railway maintenance

depot

Steven Gerrard

Laborer (bricklaying, paving, and so on)

Emile Heskey

Security worker at nightclub

Paul Ince

Railway worker

David James

Artist who runs gallery in Jamaica

Jermaine Jenas

Soccer coach in the United States

Frank Lampard

Soccer player

Rob Lee

“Involved in a shipping company”

Graeme Le Saux

Ran fruit and vegetable stall

Steve McManaman Printer

Paul Merson

Coal worker

Danny Mills

Coach in Norwich City’s youth academy

Michael Owen

Soccer player

Wayne Rooney

Laborer, mainly on building sites; often unemployed

Paul Scholes

Gas-pipe fitter

David Seaman

Garage mechanic, later ran sandwich shop, then worked at

steelworks

Alan Shearer

Sheet-metal worker

Teddy Sheringham

Policeman

Gareth Southgate

Worked for IBM

John Terry

Forklift-truck operator

Darius Vassell

Factory worker

Theo Walcott

Royal Air Force administrator; later joined services

company working for British Gas

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manual laborers: Vassell, Terry, Shearer, Seaman, Scholes, Rooney, Merson, McManaman, Ince, Heskey, Gerrard, Fowler, Adams, Batty, Beckham, Campbell, Ferdinand, and Downing. Ashley Cole with his

“working-class upbringing” is probably best assigned to this category, too. Four players ( Jenas, Lampard, Mills, and Owen) had fathers who worked in soccer. Le Saux and Joe Cole were both sons of fruit and vegetable traders. Anderton’s dad ran a moving company, which seems to have failed, before becoming a cab driver. Sheringham’s father was a policeman. Carragher’s and Dyer’s dads ran a pub and a social club, respectively. That leaves only five players out of thirty-four—Crouch, James, Lee, Southgate, and Walcott—whose fathers seem to have worked in professions that required them to have had an education beyond the age of sixteen. If we define class by education, then only 15

percent of England players of recent years had “middle-class” origins.

The male population as a whole was much better educated. Of British men aged between thirty-five and fifty-four in 1996—the generation of most of these players’ fathers—a little more than half had qualifications above the most basic level, according to the British Household Panel Study.

English soccer’s reliance on an overwhelmingly working-class talent pool was only moderately damaging in the past, when most English people were working class. In the late 1980s, 70 percent of Britons still left school at the age of sixteen, often for manual jobs. But by then, the growth of the middle classes had already begun. In fact, middle-class values began to permeate the country, a process that sociologists call

“embourgeoisement.” It happened on what used to be the soccer terraces, which because of high ticket prices are now slightly more middle class than even the country at large.

Nowadays, more than 70 percent of Britons stay in school past the age of sixteen. More than 40 percent enter higher education. More and more, Britain is a middle-class nation. Yet because soccer still recruits overwhelmingly from the traditional working classes, it excludes an ever-growing swath of the population. That must be a brake on the England team.

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The shrinking of the talent pool is only part of the problem. Until at least the late 1990s British soccer was suffused, without quite knowing it, by British working-class habits. Some of these were damaging, such as the sausages-and-chips diet, or the idea that binge drinking is a hobby. “Maybe in earlier generations the drinking culture carried over from the working-class origins of the players,” wrote Manchester United’s manager Alex Ferguson in his autobiography. “Most of them came from families where many of the men took the view that if they put in a hard shift in a factory or a coalmine they were entitled to relax with a few pints. Some footballers seem determined to cling to that shift-worker’s mentality. . . . Also prevalent is the notion that Saturday night is the end of the working week and therefore a good time to get wrecked.” Of course, “problem drinking” exists in the British middle classes, too. And of course most working-class people have no issues with alcohol. However, Ferguson is explicitly describing a traditional working-class attitude.

Another problem was that the British working classes tended to regard soccer as something you learned on the job, rather than from edu-cationalists with diplomas. It was the attitude you would expect of an industry in which few people had much formal education. One British national soccer administrator, who worked for decades to introduce coaching courses, told us that clubs mocked his attempts as “some newfangled thing got up by college boys—as if there was shame in being educated.” He recalls that
coaching
and
tactics
became “shame words.”

“People would say, ‘The trouble with soccer today is that there is too much coaching.’ That’s like saying, ‘The trouble with school is that there’s too much education.’”

It would be crazy to generalize too much about the working classes.

There is a strong working-class tradition of self-education. Large numbers of postwar Britons became the first people in their families to go to college. Nonetheless, the anti-intellectual attitudes that the soccer administrator encountered do seem to be widespread in the English game.

These attitudes may help explain why English managers and English players are not known for thinking about soccer. When the Dutchman 22

Johan Cruijff said, “Soccer is a game you play with your head,” he wasn’t talking about headers.

Over the past decade these traditional working-class attitudes have begun to fade in British soccer. Foreign managers and players have arrived, importing the revolutionary notions that professional athletes should think about their game and look after their bodies. But one working-class custom still bars middle-class Britons from professional soccer: what you might call the “antieducational requirement.”

Most British soccer players still leave school at sixteen. The belief persists that only thus can they concentrate fully on the game. The argument that many great foreign players—Ruud Gullit, Dennis Bergkamp, Tostao, Socrates, Osvaldo Ardiles, Jorge Valdano, Josep Guardiola, Fer-nando Redondo, Kaká, and others—stayed in school after that age, or even attended college, is ignored. This is probably because many British coaches and players are suspicious of educated people.

It is true that the clubs’ new academies are meant to help players keep studying, but in practice this rarely happens. A few years ago one of us visited the academy of an English club. It’s an academy of some note: two of its recent graduates first played for their countries while still teenagers. But all the boys we met there, bright or otherwise, were sent to do the same single lowly vocational course in leisure and tourism to fulfill the academy’s minimum educational requirements. Together the boys caused such havoc in class that all the other students had dropped out of the course. It’s not that soccer players are too busy to study; they rarely train more than a couple of hours a day. Rather, it’s that being studious is frowned upon inside the English game.

English soccer consequently remains unwelcoming to middle-class teenagers. To cite just one example, Stuart Ford, who at seventeen played for England Schools, gave up on becoming a professional because he got tired of listening to rants from uneducated coaches. Being middle class, he always felt like an outsider. He recalled, “I was often goaded about my posh school or my gross misunderstanding of street fashion. That was just from the management.” Instead, he became a Hollywood lawyer. Later, as a senior executive at one of the Hollywood 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

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studios, he was one of the people behind an unsuccessful bid to buy Liverpool FC.

If the working classes get little education, that is mainly the fault of the middle-class people who oversee the British school system. None -

theless, the educational divide means that any middle-class person entering British soccer feels instantly out of place.

Many middle-class athletes drift to cricket or rugby instead. Often, this represents a direct loss to soccer. For most people, sporting talent is fairly transferable until they reach their late teens. Many English soccer players, like Phil Neville and Gary Lineker, were gifted cricketers, too.

Some well-known rugby players took up rugby only as teenagers, when they realized they weren’t going to make it in soccer. And in the past, several paragons represented England in more than one sport. Only a few sports demand very specific qualities that can’t be transferred: it’s hard to go from being a jockey to being a basketball player, for instance.

But English soccer competes with other ball games for talent, and it scares away the educated middle classes.

This is particularly sad because there is growing evidence that sporting talent and academic talent are linked. The best athletes have fast mental reactions, and those reactions, if properly trained, would make for high-caliber intellects.

All this helps explain why even though the academies of English clubs are the richest in the world, England doesn’t produce better players than poor nations. Instead of trying to exclude foreigners from English soccer, it would be smarter to include more middle-class English people. Only when there are England players with educated accents—as happens in Holland, Argentina, and even Brazil (Dunga and Kaká, for instance)—

might the national team maximize its potential.

CLOSED TO INNOVATIONS:

ENGLISH SOCCER’S SMALL NETWORK

When the Internet arrived, many pundits predicted the decline of the city. After all, why live in a small apartment in East London when you 24

could set up your laptop in an old farmhouse overlooking a sheep meadow?

The prediction turned out to be wrong. Cities have continued their growth of the past two hundred years, which is why apartments in East London became so expensive. Meanwhile, the countryside has turned into something of a desert, inhabited by a few farmers and old people, and used by the rest of us mostly for long walks. It turns out that people still want to live in dirty, overcrowded, overpriced cities. And the reason they do is the social networks. To be rural is to be isolated. Networks give you contacts.

Someone you meet at a party or at your kids’ playground can give you a job or an idea. Just as the brain works by building new connections between huge bundles of neurons, with each connection producing a new thought, so we as individuals need to find ourselves in the center of the bundle in order to make more connections.

Networks are key to the latest thinking about economic development. Better networks are one reason that some countries are richer than others. As it happens, networks also help explain why some countries have done better at soccer than England. English soccer’s biggest problem until very recently was probably geography. The country was too far from the networks of continental western Europe, where the best soccer was played.

Once upon a time, England was at the center of soccer’s knowledge network. From the first official soccer international in 1872, until at least the First World War, and perhaps even until England’s first home defeat against Hungary in 1953, you could argue that England was the dominant soccer nation. It was the country that exported soccer know-how to the world in the form of managers. The English expatriate manager became such a legendary figure that to this day in Spain and Italy a head coach is known as a “mister.”

Many English people clung to the belief in England’s supremacy long after it had ceased to be true. The astonishment each time En -

gland didn’t win the World Cup ended only with the team’s abject failures in the 1970s.

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The gradual British decline in soccer echoes the decline in Britain’s economic status. The country went from supreme economic power under Queen Victoria to having its hand held by the International Monetary Fund in the late 1970s. Admittedly, in soccer as in economics, most observers exaggerated Britain’s slide. The country’s position in the top ten of economies was never much in doubt. But in soccer it became clear by 1970 at the latest that dominance had shifted across the Channel to the core of western Europe. For the next thirty years, that part of the Continent was the most fertile network in soccer. And Britain was just outside it.

The German World Cup of 2006 demonstrated western Europe’s grip on global soccer. The region has only about 400 million inhabitants, or 6 percent of the world’s population, yet only once in the entire tournament did a western European team lose to a team from another region: Switzerland’s insanely dull defeat on penalties to Ukraine.

That summer even Brazil couldn’t match western Europe. Argentina continued its run of failing to beat a western European team in open play at a World Cup since the final against West Germany in 1986 (though it has won two of the eight subsequent encounters against Europeans on penalties). Big countries outside the region, like Mexico, Japan, the US, and Poland, could not match little western European countries like Portugal, Holland, or Sweden. If you understood the geographical rule of the last World Cup, you could sit in the stands for almost every match before the quarter-finals confident of knowing the outcome.