Why England Lose
And other curious phenomena explained
Paris and London, May 13, 2009.
Dedication:
From Simon: to Pamela, who doesn’t know about football, but knows about writing; for her astonishing tolerance. And to Leila, Leo and Joey, for many hundreds of smiles.
From Stefan: to my father. We never saw eye to eye, but he taught me to question everything
Chapters
1
Driving with a Dashboard: In Search of New Truths About Football
2
Why England Lose
Section I: The Clubs: Racism, Stupidity, Bad Transfers, Capital Cities, and What Actually Happened in that Penalty Shootout in Moscow
3
Gentlemen Prefer Blonds: How to Avoid Silly Mistakes in the Transfer Market
4
The Worst Business in the World: Why Football Clubs Don’t (and Shouldn’t) Make Money
5
Need Not Apply? Does English Football Discriminate Against Black People?
6
The Economist’s Fear of the Penalty Kick: Are Penalties Cosmically Unfair, or Only if You Are Nicolas Anelka? The
7
The Suburban Newsagent’s: City Sizes and Football Prizes
Section II: The Competitions: Inequality, a Pint at the Local, and a New Tradition
8
Unfair and Unbalanced: Are Manchester United Really a Problem?
9
The Strange Death of the FA Cup
Section III: The Fans: Loyalty, Suicides, Happiness, and The Country with the Best Supporters
10
The Country That Loves Football Most
11
Are Football Fans Polygamists? A Critique of the Hornby Model of Fandom
12
A Fan’s Suicide Notes: Do People Jump off Buildings when Their Teams Lose?
13
Happiness: Why Hosting a World Cup is Good for You
Section IV: Countries: Rich and Poor, Tom Thumb, Guus Ghiddink, Saddam, and The Champions of the Future
14
The Curse of Poverty: Why Poor Countries Are Poor at Sport
15
Tom Thumb: The Best Little Football Country on Earth
16
Core to Periphery: The Future Map of Global Football
Chapter 1
Driving with a Dashboard: In Search of New Truths About Football
This book began in the Hilton in Istanbul. From the outside it’s a squat and brutalist place but once the security men have checked your car for bombs and waved you through, the hotel is so soothing you never want to go home again. Having escaped the 13-million-person city, the only stress is over what to do next: a Turkish bath, a spot of tennis or yet more overeating while the sun sets over the Bosphorus? For aficionados, there’s also a perfect view of the Besiktas football stadium right next door. And the staff are so friendly they are even friendlier than ordinary Turkish people.
The two authors of this book, Stefan Szymanski (a sports economist) and Simon Kuper (a journalist), met here. Fenerbahce football club was marking its centenary by staging the “100th Year Sports and Science Congress”, and had flown them both in to give talks.
Simon’s talk was first. He said he had good news for Turkish football: as the country’s population mushroomed, and its economy grew, the national team was likely to keep getting better. Then it was Stefan’s turn. He too had good news for Turkey. As the country’s population mushroomed, and its economy grew, the national team was likely to keep getting better. All this may incidentally have been lost on the not very Anglophone audience.
The two of us had never met before Istanbul, but over beers in the Hilton bar we confirmed that we did indeed think much the same way about football. Stefan as an economist is trained to torture the data until they confessed, while Simon as a reporter tends to go around interviewing people, but those were just surface differences. We both think that much in football can be explained, even predicted, by studying data – especially data found outside football.
For a very long time football escaped the Enlightenment. Football clubs are still mostly run by people who do what they do because they have always done it that way. These people used to “know” that black players “lacked bottle”, and they therefore overpaid for mediocre white players. Today they discriminate against black managers, buy the wrong players, and then let those players take penalties the wrong way. (We can, incidentally, explain why Manchester United won the penalty shootout in the Champions League final in Moscow. It’s a story involving a secret note, a Basque economist, and Edwin van der Sar’s powers of detection.)
Entrepreneurs who dip into football also keep making the same mistakes. They buy clubs promising to run them “like a business”, and disappear a few seasons later amid the same public derision as the previous lot. Fans and journalists aren’t blameless either. Many newspaper headlines rest on false premises: “Newcastle Land World Cup Star”, or “World Cup Will Be Economic Bonanza”. The game is full of unexamined clichés: “Football is becoming boring because the big clubs always win,” “Football is big business,” and, perhaps the greatest myth in the English game, “The England team should do better.” None of these shibboleths have been tested against the data.
Most male team sports are pervaded by the same overreliance on traditional beliefs. American baseball, too, was until very recently an old game filled with old lore. Since forever players had stolen bases, hit sacrifice bunts, and been judged on their batting averages. Everyone in baseball just knew that all this was right.
But that was before Bill James. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, James came out of rural Kansas. He hadn’t done much in life beyond keeping the stats in the local Little League, and watching the furnaces in a pork-and-beans factory. However, in his spare time he had begun to study baseball statistics with a fresh eye, and discovered that “a great portion of the sport’s traditional knowledge is ridiculous hokum”.James wrote that he wanted to approach the subject of baseball “with the same kind of intellectual rigor and discipline that is routinely applied, by scientists great and poor, to trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, of society, of the human mind, or of the price of burlap in Des Moines.”
In self-published mimeographs masquerading as books, the first of which sold 75 copies, James began demolishing the game’s myths. He found, for instance, that the most important statistic in batting was the rarely mentioned “on-base percentage” – how often a player managed to get on base. James and his followers (statisticians of baseball who came to be known as sabermetricians) showed that good old sacrifice bunts and base-stealing were terrible strategies.
His annual Baseball Abstracts turned into real books; eventually they reached the bestseller lists. One year, the cover picture showed an ape, posed as Rodin’s “The Thinker”, studying a baseball. As James wrote in one Abstract: “This is outside baseball. This is a book about what baseball looks like if you step back from it and study it intensely and minutely, but from a distance.”
Some Jamesians began to penetrate professional baseball. One of them, Billy Beane, the bafflingly successful general manager of the little Oakland A’s, is the hero of Michael Lewis’s earth-moving book Moneyball. (We’ll say more later about Beane’s brilliant gaming of the transfer market and its lessons for football.)
Eventually even the people inside baseball started to get curious about James. In 2002 the Boston Red Sox actually appointed him “Senior Baseball Operations Adviser”, his first regular job since the pork-and-beans plant. That same year, the Red Sox hired one of James’s followers, the 28-year-old Theo Epstein, as the youngest general manager in the history of the major leagues. In 2004 the “cursed” club won its first world series in 86 years. In 2007 they won another.
In 2006, Time magazine named James in its hundred most influential people in the world. Now football is due its own Jamesian revolution.
A Numbers Game
It’s strange that football has been so averse to studying data, because one thing that attracts many fans to the game is precisely a love of numbers.
The man to ask about that is Alex Bellos. He wrote the magnificent book Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, but he also has a maths degree, and his The Book of Numbers: Everything You Need to Know About Simple Math was due to appear at about the same time as Why England Lose.
“Numbers are incredibly satisfying,” Bellos tells us. “The world has no order, and maths is a way of seeing it in an order. League tables have an order. And the calculations you need to do for them are so simple: it’s nothing more than your three times table.”
Though most fans would probably deny it, a love of football is often intertwined with a love of numbers. There are the match results, the famous dates, and the special joy of sitting in a pub with the newspaper on a Sunday morning “reading” the league table. Fantasy Football Leagues are, at bottom, numbers games. And James Alexander Gordon’s incantation of the British football results on Saturday afternoons (“Cow-den-BEATH 1 Sten-house-MUIR [pause] 1”) is part timeless ritual, part romance of place names, and part poem of numbers.
In this book we want to introduce new numbers and new ideas to football: numbers on suicides, on wage spending, on countries’ populations, on anything that helps to reveal new truths about the game. Though Stefan is a sports economist, this is not a book about money. The point of football clubs is not to turn a profit (which is fortunate, as almost none of them do) and nor are we particularly interested in any profits they happen to make. Rather, we want to use an economist’s skills (plus a little geography, psychology and sociology) to understand the game on the pitch, and the fans off it.
Some people may not want their emotional relationship with football sullied by our rational calculations. On the other hand, the next time England lose a penalty shootout in a world cup quarter-final these same people will probably be throwing their beer glasses at the TV, 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 football, 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 20 or 30 academic articles on sport 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 football books. When Pete Davies published his All Played Out: The Full Story of Italia ’90, there were probably only about 20 or 30 good football books in existence. Now – thanks partly to Davies, who has been described as John the Baptist to Nick Hornby’s Jesus – there are thouands. Many of these books (including Bellos’s Futebol) contain truths about the game that we have tried to present here.
So unstoppable has the stream of data become that even people inside the game itself 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 football, one of these smart men (it’s part of the game’s 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 Why England Lose is that he understands that in football today, you need data to get ahead. If you are a trainspotter who studies figures, you will see more and win more.
Slowly, Wenger’s colleagues are also ceasing to rely on gut alone. Increasingly they use computer programmes like Prozone to analyse games and players. Another harbinger of the impending Jamesian takeover of football 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 per cent accuracy whether he will 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 that beat Liverpool in the Champions League final of 2007 were 31 or older; Paolo Maldini, the captain, was 38, and Filippo Inzaghi, scorer of both Milan’s goals, 33. 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 Stefan and Simon talked more, and began to think harder about football and data, we buzzed around all sorts of questions. Could we find figures to show which country loved football 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 football of the future. Stefan lives in London, and Simon in Paris, and 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 football 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.
Chapter 2
Why England Lose
Beaten by a Dishwasher
When the England team fly to South Africa for the world cup, an ancient ritual will start to unfold. Perfected over England’s 14 previous failures to win the world cup away from home, it follows this pattern:
Phase one, pre-tournament: Certainty that England will win the world cup.
Alf Ramsey, the only English manager to win the trophy, forecast 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 were 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, said: “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 England’s inside forward 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 football’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 football team is a football team like many others.” This truth is only slowly sinking in.
Two: During the tournament England meet a former wartime enemy. In five of their last seven World Cups, they were 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.