Soccernomics (5 page)

Western Europe excels at soccer for the same fundamental reason it had the scientific revolution and was for centuries the world’s richest region. The region’s secret is what historian Norman Davies calls its

“user-friendly climate.” Western Europe is mild and rainy. Because of that, the land is fertile. This allows hundreds of millions of people to inhabit a small space of land. That creates networks.

From the World Cup in Germany, you could have flown in two and a half hours to about twenty countries containing roughly 300 million people. That is the densest network on earth. There was nothing like that in Japan at the previous World Cup: the only foreign capital you 26

can reach from Tokyo within that time is Seoul. South Africa, host of the next World Cup, is even more isolated.

For centuries now, the interconnected peoples of western Europe have exchanged ideas fast. The “scientific revolution” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could happen in western Europe because its scientists were near each other, networking, holding a dialogue in their shared language: Latin. Copernicus, Polish son of a German merchant, wrote that the earth circled the sun. Galileo in Florence read Copernicus and confirmed his findings through a telescope. The Englishman Francis Bacon described their “scientific method”: deductions based on data. England at the time was very much part of the European network.

A typical product of that network was the lens grinder, a crucial new machine in the development of the microscope in the early 1660s.

Robert Hooke in London invented a new grinder, which made lenses so accurate that Hooke could publish a detailed engraving of a louse attached to a human hair. But meanwhile Sir Robert Moray, a Scot in London who knew what Hooke was up to, was sending letters in French about the new grinder to the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens. Thanks to Moray, Huygens had previously gotten hold of details of Hooke’s balance-spring watch.

Moray and Huygens “sometimes wrote to each other several times a week,” writes the historian Lisa Jardine. Their letters crossed the Channel in days, or about as quickly as mail does now. Meanwhile, the French astronomer Adrien Auzout in Paris was getting copies of some of their letters. So Hooke’s breakthroughs were being spread to his European competitors almost instantly.

All this irritated Hooke. But the proximity of many thinkers in western Europe created an intellectual ferment. That is why so many of the great scientific discoveries were made there. These discoveries then helped make the region rich.

Centuries later, soccer spread the same way. In the nineteenth century the game infected western Europe first, because there it had the shortest distances to travel. Later the proximity of so many peoples brought the region two world wars. After 1945, western Europeans 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

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cided they could live crammed together only under a sort of single government: the European Union. Borders opened, and the region became the most integrated in the history of the world.

Again the best ideas spread fastest there, just as they had in the scientific revolution. The region’s soccer benefited. One of the men who carried tactical ideas around Europe was Arrigo Sacchi. His father was a shoe manufacturer in Ravenna, Italy, and the young Sacchi used to accompany him on business trips. He saw a lot of games in Germany, Switzerland, France, and the Netherlands. “It opened my mind,” he later said. As manager of AC Milan in the 1980s, he imported a version of Dutch soccer that revolutionized the Italian game.

Ideas spread even more quickly in European soccer than in other economic sectors, because soccer is the most integrated part of the Continent’s economy. Only about 2 percent of all western Europeans live in a different European Union country, because few companies bother hiring bus drivers or office administrators from neighboring countries. In some professions, language barriers stop workers from moving abroad. But many soccer players do find work abroad, largely because television advertises their wares to employers across Europe.

And so most of the EU’s best players have gathered in the English, Spanish, and Italian leagues, and meet each other on weekday nights in the Champions League. This competition is the European single market come to life, a dense network of talent.

The teams in the Champions League can draw talent from anywhere in the world. Nonetheless, an overwhelming majority of their players are western Europeans. With the world’s best players and coaches packed together, the world’s best soccer is constantly being refined there.

The best soccer today is Champions League soccer, western European soccer. It’s a rapid passing game played by athletes. Rarely does anyone dribble, or keep the ball for a second. You pass instantly. It’s not the beautiful game—dribbles are prettier—but it works best. All good teams everywhere in the world now play this way. Even the Brazilians adopted the Champions League style in the 1990s. They still have more skill than the Europeans, but they now try to play at a European pace.

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In other words, western Europe has discovered the secret of soccer.

More precisely, a core group of western European countries has, namely, five of the six nations that in 1957 founded the European Economic Community, ancestor of the European Union. (We’ll leave out the sixth founding nation, the hopeless minnow Luxembourg.) West Germany, France, Italy, Holland, and even Belgium don’t all play exactly the same style. Holland and Italy, say, are rather different. But they all adhere to the basic tenets of rapid collectivized western European soccer. Here are some results from the past thirty years:

• The core five countries won twelve European championships and World Cups between them.

• The countries at the corners of Europe, the Brits, the former Soviet bloc, the Balkans, and Scandinavian nations north of the Baltic Sea between them won one: Greece’s European championship of 2004, delivered by a German coach.

• Europe’s only other trophy in these thirty years has gone to Denmark and Czechoslovakia. Denmark enjoys an utterly permeable border with the five core countries.

Countries separated from the core of the EU—either by great distance, by poverty, or by closed borders under dictatorships—often underperform in soccer. In the vast landmass running from Portugal in the west to Poland in the east, every country of more than 1 million inhabitants except Belgium qualified for Euro 2008. The nations that didn’t make it are on Europe’s margins: the Brits, most of Scandinavia, and most of Europe’s eastern edge. The countries at great distance—and it can be a distance of the mind rather than geographical distance—are often out of touch with core European soccer. Many countries on the margins have traditionally had dysfunctional indigenous styles of soccer. The Greeks, for instance, dribbled too much. The Brits played mindless kick-and-rush.

Again, this is explained by theories of networks. If you are on the periphery, like the British were until recently in soccer, it’s harder to 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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make new connections, because you have to travel farther. Worse, those not on the periphery see you as only a second-best connection. You are the end of the line, not the gateway to a new set of connections. That’s why foreign countries stopped hiring English coaches or even English players. As a result, the people on the periphery become more and more isolated and insular. The Ukrainian manager Valeri Lobanovski was a soccer genius, but during the days of the Soviet Union he was so isolated that when a Dutch journalist came to interview him in the mid-1980s, Lobanovski pumped him for information about Holland’s players. Spain, to some degree, had the same problem under General Franco’s dictatorship. “Europe ends at the Pyrenees” was the saying in those days.

Gradually, isolation becomes your mind-set: after a while you don’t even
want
to adopt foreign ideas anymore. Anyone who has spent time in England—particularly before 1992—has witnessed this attitude. Isolation can lead you into your own blind alleys that nobody else appreciates.

For instance, the long refusal of English players to dive may have been an admirable cultural norm, but they might have won more games if they had learned from continental Europeans how to buy the odd penalty.

Happily, the era of British isolationism is now over. This era began on Sunday, September 3, 1939, when the country’s borders closed on the outbreak of the Second World War. In soccer, that isolation deepened when English clubs were banned from European competitions after the Heysel disaster of 1985. They lost what modest network they had.

But between 1990 and 1994, British isolation began to break down: English clubs were readmitted to European competitions, new laws en-forced free movement of labor and capital within the EU, and Eurostar trains and budget airlines connected Britain to the Continent. London turned into a global city. Nowadays, southern England, at least, belongs to core Europe, just as it did during the scientific revolution.

The end of isolationism meant the end of English soccer managers managing England or the best English clubs. You wouldn’t appoint a Frenchman to manage your baseball team, because the French don’t 30

have a history of thinking hard about baseball. And you wouldn’t appoint an Englishman to manage your soccer team, because the English don’t have a history of thinking hard about soccer. After various failures with the traditional British style of kick-and-rush, the English embraced European soccer. In 2000, England hired a manager with long experience in Italian soccer, Sven Goran Eriksson.

At this, the conservative
Daily Mail
newspaper lamented, “The mother country of soccer, birthplace of the greatest game, has finally gone from the cradle to the shame.” It was a wonderful statement of “English exceptionalism”: the belief that England is an exceptional soccer country that should rule the world playing the English way. However, the obvious statistical truth is that England is not exceptional. It is typical of the second-tier soccer countries outside the core of western Europe.

Other peripheral countries from Greece to Japan soon followed the English example. Importing know-how from the core of Europe turned out to be an excellent remedy for the problem of isolation, which makes it even odder that in 2006 England did an about-face and appointed the Englishman Steve McClaren. The English Football Association didn’t realize that England, as a recovering isolationist, still needed foreign help.

Many of the countries that imported knowledge did very well indeed. Under Eriksson, England always reached the quarter-finals of major tournaments. Russia under Guus Hiddink got to the semifinals of Euro 2008, their best performance since the USSR collapsed. At the same tournament Turkey also reached the semifinals, in their case chiefly by importing fitness. Over Sunday lunch in a Lebanese restaurant in Geneva during the tournament, a Turkish official explained how the team kept coming back to win matches in the last few minutes.

They had hired a fitness coach, Scott Piri, from the company Athletes’

Performance in the United States. Despite Piri’s American passport, he was really a borrowing from core Europe: in 2006 the German manager Jürgen Klinsmann had used Athletes’ Performance to turn Germany into the fittest team at the World Cup. When Piri arrived in the Turkish camp, the official explained, the players had complained that he 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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worked them too hard. They said he was causing them injuries. But soon they got used to the workload. They then became extremely fit, and achieved a string of last-ditch comebacks.

Spain in 2008 no longer needed much foreign help anymore. Spanish soccer had been opening to Europe since the early 1970s, when the Franco regime slowly began to give up on isolation and FC Barcelona imported the Dutch soccer thinkers Rinus Michels and Johan Cruijff.

It also helped that Spain was then starting to grow richer. By now the country is fully networked with Europe. Its best players experience the Champions League every season. At Euro 2008, Spain won its first prize in forty-four years.

England now seems to have accepted the need for continental European know-how. The current England manager, the Italian Fabio Capello, is like one of the overpaid consultants so common in development economics, flying in on business class to tell the natives what to do. His job is to teach the English some of the virtues of western European soccer.

To cite just one of those virtues:
a game lasts ninety minutes
. Habitu-ally, English players charge out of the gate, run around like lunatics, and exhaust themselves well before the match is over, even if they aren’t hung over.

You see this in England’s peculiar scoring record in big tournaments.

In every World Cup ever played, most goals were scored in the second halves of matches. That is natural: in the second half players tire, teams start chasing goals, and gaps open up on the field. But England, in its last five big tournaments, scored twenty-two of its thirty-five goals in the first halves of matches. The team’s record in crucial games is even starker: in the matches in which it was eliminated from tournaments, it scored seven of its eight goals before halftime. In other words, England performs like a cheap battery. This is partly because it plays in such an exhausting league, but also because it doesn’t seem to have thought about pacing itself.

Italians know exactly how to measure out the ninety minutes. They take quiet periods, when they sit back and make sure nothing happens, 32

because they know that the best chance of scoring is in the closing minutes, when exhausted opponents will leave holes. That’s when you need to be sharpest. In the World Cup of 2006, typically, Italy knocked out Australia and Germany with goals in the final three minutes.

England has already bought Italian know-how. Now all it needs to do is include its own middle classes and stop worrying about foreigners in the Premier League, and it will finally stop underachieving and perform as well as it should. But hang on a moment: who says England underachieves?