Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski

Freakonomics meets Moneyball meets Fever Pitch in this wholly engrossing 400-plus page analysis of certain questions such as why some countries are successful at soccer while others fail, why discrimination still exists in the hiring of coaches, and why the American soccer story has been a largely successful one overall. Soccernomics has been updated a handful of times since the first edition came out in 2009, and this latest, “2022 World Cup Edition” takes a broader look at the history of women’s soccer around the world — it’s successes and failures, how far it’s come and how far it still should be able to go — along with updated materials on the effect of the COVID pandemic on soccer revenue and how our disparate viewing patterns influences the game today. I’m not a massive soccer fan although I do enjoy watching the occasional World Cup match every handful of years, but one thing that is truly striking about the “world’s game” is the level of fandom that pops out of the screen whenever a Premier League game is broadcast on TV or even in a casual viewing of Welcome to Wrexham, the fully captivating documentary series of Ryan Reynolds and Rob Mcelhenney taking over ownership of the Wrexham soccer club in northeastern Wales. Soccernomics is really a must-read for any sports executive who wants to learn how to make better, smarter decisions with his or her team because a lot of the material is transferable to other sports, as Kuper and Szymanski do a nice job of referencing American football and baseball while keeping their focus on futbol. Or if you are simply a crazed soccer fan who gets enraged when your team trades its best player or fires a manager for no reason, Soccernomics is the perfect book for you as well.

• soccer is becoming more intelligent
• widespread suspicion of numbers in soccer
• when the facts change, we change our minds — Keynes
• soccer clubs are still run mostly by men who do what they do because they have always done it that way
• soccer has embarked on its own Jamesian revolution
• data revolution enhances the capacity of humans to make new decisions; enhances, not replaces
• today the game is drowning in information
• soccer today, you need data to get ahead
• transfer system is evil
• human trafficking that gives many people the power to control where a player works
• system of buying and selling players is unjust, not efficient
• wages buy success
• more you pay the players the higher you finish
• generally, a player’s salary is a good gauge of his ability to play soccer
• human mind tends to resist the notion of luck
• true luck, i.e., statistical randomness, tends to even out over the years
• any inefficient market is an opportunity for somebody
• availability heuristic: the more available a piece of information is to the memory, the more likely it is to influence your decision, even when the information is irrelevant
• tendency to be overly influenced by a guy’s most recent performance
• buying a big name makes every person in the club feel bigger
• supporters the thrill of expectation
• Beane, Oakland A’s, sight based prejudices
• suspicious of fat guys or skinny little guys, overvalued handsome, strapping athletes; scouts tend to look for players who look the part
• systemic failures: deviations from rationality
• eager to sell good players as to buy them
• older players are overrated
• many clubs insist on paying for past performance
• overvaluation of older players exists in baseball
• buy players with personal problems at a discount
• help them deal with their problems
• relocation — biggest inefficiencies in the transfer market
• rules of the transfer market:
• use the wisdom of crowds
• aggregate as many different opinions from a diverse group of people, you are much more likely to arrive at the best opinion than if you just listen to one specialist
• when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough, wisdom of the crowd fails
• best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties
• college players are a better investment than high school players in baseball
• English soccer clubs are always being pushed by their fans to buy starts
• help your foreign signings relocate
• sell any player if another club offers more than he is worth
• don’t worry too much about buying or keeping superstars
• most clubs make losses or meager profits
• chasing glory, not riches
• no soccer club is a big business
• sportswear companies used to get paid to advertise themselves
• soccer is not merely a small business, it has also historically been a bad one
• late 80s did English soccer clubs discover that people were willing to buy replicas of their team shirts
• close link between building a nice stadium and drawing more spectators
• almost all good business ideas in soccer imposed on the game from the outside
• new manager is hired in a mad rush
• new manager is interviewed only very cursorily
• new manager is always a man
• almost always white, conservative haircut, between 35–60, and a former professional player
• no evidence that having been a good player is an advantage for a soccer manager
• immediate availability, star power
• soccer clubs tended to hire incompetent staff
• greatest offense a club member can commit is not ineptitude but disloyalty
• prompted by media and fans, make financially irrational decisions in an instant
• fixating on the short term
• constant pressure dissuades clubs from trying anything new
• winning games is not the route to making money — club finds new revenues, that can help it win matches
• if you want glory, you have to forget about maximizing profits
• clubs didn’t really care about profits
• weren’t treating their soccer clubs as businesses
• soccer clubs are some of the most stable businesses on earth
• way to survive insolvency: phoenixing
• every English football club is a club but also a public limited company
• dissolve the old company and create a new “phoenix” company
• Phoenixing — creation of a new company — excellent way to escape creditors
• UK’s insolvency act of 1986, “administration”
• struck deals with creditors
• almost always happen to small clubs, big clubs hardly ever go bust
• highest risk is recently relegated teams
• Financial Fair Play, insisted that every club be solvent
• under communism, bad companies were propped up forever
• “budget constraint”, if they wanted to overspend their budgets, they could
• obvious consequence: unprofitable overspending became rife
• before they entered bankruptcy, performance of the club had been deteriorating
• relegation itself but the uncertainty of it — economists call this “shocks”
• an economic shock is any random event that hits the economy
• in a sense, soccer clubs are too small to fail
• easy to cut costs in times of crisis
• nonfootball businesses so unstable was competition
• soccer clubs are immune from these deficits
• in most industries, when a bad business goes bankrupt, soccer clubs almost never do
• someone will always bail them out
• “moral hazard”: when you know you will be saved no matter how much money you lose, you are free to lose money
• love — a core fan base will stick by them no matter what
• authors don’t believe soccer should be a business at all
• most lucrative thing that ever happened to the soccer business was TV
• era of billionaire sugar daddies in soccer
• salary caps wouldn’t work in soccer
• legal in the US, but that’s not the case in Europe
• cost controls were to cut players wages, there is no reason to think the savings would go back into soccer
• they would go into the offshore accounts of billionaire owners
• lose money on paper while remaining cash rich
• amortization
• adjustment made by accountant
• cash, in modern finance, means opportunity
• a business that generates a lot of cash can borrow a lot of money
• big clubs are becoming like banks
• investor — private equity
• aim is to suck cash out of businesses and transfer it into the pockets of their backers
• firm will try to sell a turned around company to other investors as a more valuable business and make a profit on the deal
• authors prefer soccer to be loss making
• prefer people who want to lose money on soccer
• sugar daddies inject support into clubs with cash
• rather they put the money back into soccer
• business of soccer is soccer
• they are like museums: public spirited organizations that aim to serve communities while remaining reasonably solvent
• neoliberalism, every activity must be run for profit, as they define it
• in European soccer, owners are there to serve the fans, and not vice versa
• lack of competition, soccer’s essential promise, which rests on promotion and relegation system, is that even the smallest clubs can triumph
• club owners will continue to yearn for guaranteed profits in an American style system
• history of women’s soccer as one of prohibition and resistance
• hamper women’s soccer to this day
• what is needed are reparations: investment in the women’s game, paid from the revenues of the men’s game
• Title IX required recipients of government funding to maintain records and demonstrate that they weren’t discriminating
• male and female sports receive equal funding
• no women’s school sport grew faster than soccer
• outside the US, little changed
• things have gradually improved
• female athletes often play their sports under the tutelage of predators
• reckoning is happening
• women’s soccer is tied to a lack of money, money is the currency of respect
• women’s soccer was banned precisely at the moment when it posed an economic threat to the men’s game
• when women’s sports aren’t banned, they can generate equal interest among fans, case in point is Tennis with Billie Jean King
• ban on women’s soccer wasn’t that long ago, fail to acknowledge the harm they did
• English soccer discriminated against Black players
• until the 1950s, most Britons had probably never seen a Black person
• Econometrics art of finding statistical methods to extract information from data
• infer discrimination if some teams have more Black players than others and those same teams consistently outperform their competitors at a given level of wage spending
• data showed that clubs with more Black players really did have a better record in the league with clubs with fewer Black players
• Black players were systematically better value for money than white ones
• end of 90s, by then Black players were on average paid what they were worth to a team
• Branch Rickey, if he wanted a winning team, he had to tap talent that the other owners overlooked — racism gave him an opportunity
• racism and discrimination still flourish in parts of soccer
• discrimination in hiring was always unspoken
• authors argue that the vast majority of coaches or managers simply don’t make much difference
• NFLs Rooney Rule, Black coaches remain significantly underrepresented given that about 65 percent of NFL players are Black
• problem in the pipeline: Black coaches are underrepresented at the college level as well
• markets tend to work when they are transparent
• efficient markets punish discrimination in plain view of everyone, so discrimination tends to get rooted out
• inefficient markets can maintain discrimination almost indefinitely
• wage discrimination among Black soccer players righted itself because the market in players is transparent
• managers of national teams have a better chance of making a difference
• when he brings a country foreign knowledge that it didn’t previously have
• for a big retailer, having the right processes and tech is what matters most
• and those things are in the large part under a CEO’s control
• but if you want to beat Chelsea, you need 11 excellent soccer players
• management teams rather than individual managers
• “great man” theory of history, idea that prominent individuals, Khan, Napoleon — cause historical change
• academic historians binned this theory decades ago
• best managers tend to end up at the best clubs
• by definition, more overachieving clubs end up at the top of the league than at the bottom
• often the players rather than the manager who shape team tactics
• knowledge gaps inside a league close fast
• great managers are rare
• if you have rubbish players, there’s nothing a manager can do
• some managers find job after job in which they are ok but not great
• symbolic figurehead than for his perceived competence
• gift for PR, image
• firing the manager is now a traditional rite
• manager rarely causes the pendulum to swing
• just the beneficiary of the swing
• doing nothing is often the hardest thing
• managers don’t simply seem to matter much, clubs can continue to discriminate against Black managers without their match results suffering noticeably
• covariance, measures the relationship between two different elements
• is analytics cracking the codes of soccer
• more data become available, we become more likely to use the to make mistaken decisions
• analytics raised a manager’s chance of spotting one of the rare players who had been undervalued by other clubs
• data analytics in sport is now in the alchemy phase of development
• don’t believe that analytics is capable yet of winning trophies
• but it is transforming soccer, the open source movement
• best way to discover truths: a crowd of experts testing ideas that will generally end up knowing more than a small, secretive group
• “thin” markets, in which trades are less frequent, are often the sources of the largest inefficiencies
• perfect techniques that others neglect
• listen to the wisdom of the diversified crowd
• game theory, when what I should do depends on what you do, and what you should do depends on what I do
• Cold War, predict Soviet moves
• in a shoot out, team that goes first win on average 60 percent of the time
• suppose that a good kicker always chose the same corner for his penalty — game theorists call this a “pure strategy”
• essence of a good penalty taking is unpredictability
• calculate the proportion of times a goalkeeper should dive right or left: mixed strategies
• randomness into decision making
• real world, people tend not to use mixed strategies even when it is profitable for them to do so
• almost all the other kickers and keepers played mixed strategies
• bottom line: soccer is getting smarter
• capitals simply have less to prove than provincial cities
• a different type of city where a soccer club can mean everything: the provincial industrial town
• places that have ousted the fascist capitals as rulers of European soccer
• Britain’s other new industrial cities: migrants attached themselves to soccer clubs
• legacy of Industrial Revolution still shapes English fandom
• Man U became the most popular club on Earth largely because Manchester had been the first industrial city on Earth
• they were once new industrial centers that sucked in hapless villagers
• supporting a local club helped them make a place for themselves in the city, so clubs mattered more here
• all the other major powers are provincial industrial towns
• link between industry and soccer is almost universal across Europe
• 80s TV contracts grew, and Italy opened its borders to foreigners
• big clubs everywhere got bigger
• midsize European cities have all but dropped off the map in European soccer
• bigger TV contracts, the new stadiums, the freer movement of players, favored the most popular clubs, tended to be the ones in big provincial cities
• Zipfs Law, giants, whether giant cities, soccer clubs, are rare
• once a city becomes a giant, it is unlikely to shrink into the middle ranks unless it experiences a long series of repeated misfortunes
• by contrast, a small cities are unlikely to ever become giants
• “law or proportionate growth”
• few great talents stand out at the top, but as you go down the list, the differences become smaller and smaller
• soccer is changing, it is becoming more of a free market
• at last, being in a capital has become a strategic asset to a soccer club
• rather than prompting suicide, soccer stops thousands of people from killing themselves
• the game seems to be a lifesaver
• globally, there were nearly fourteen times more suicides than deaths in armed conflict in 2019
• most “successful” suicides are males
• sport is the most important communal activity in many people’s lives
• fewer people kill themselves while the national team is playing in a World Cup or a European Championship
• uniting effect of the tournament lasted for a while afterward, continuing to depress the suicide rate
• very roughly, the typical soccer tourney in this period appears to have helped save several hundred European lives from suicide
• “parasuicide” aim is not death but rather self harm, cry for help
• fall in this, “social cohesion”, benefit that almost all fans get from fandom
• you can get social cohesion even from losing
• it’s not the winning, but the taking part, the experience
• “pulling together”
• sense of belonging
• that is the lifesaver
• isolated people, types of people at most risk of suicide, are given social cohesion
• rowdy communal emotion can also encourage crime, and domestic violence, however
• overall, these events are a force for good
• hosting world cup’s don’t make your rich, but they do make you happier
• public investment in stadiums does not provide a good return for taxpayers
• for every dollar going in, there is probably a dollar going out somewhere else
• hosting sports tourneys doesn’t increase the number of tourists or full time jobs, or the total economic growth
• lots of money doesn’t in itself make you happy
• what we care about is our rung on the ladder
• extra income is really valuable when it lifts people away from sheer physical poverty
• people gain a lot of happiness after hosting a tourney, they seem to lose a little happiness in the run up
• reason for hosting a WC is that it’s fun
• in wealthy countries, math of hosting and happiness probably stacks up
• soccer has become a bad word among the British, probably for the simple reason that they found Americans were using it
• English gave people around the world an easy connection with Britain
• American culture isn’t necessarily conquering the world, really a lot of British culture
• not only sports, Americans generally didn’t want to be in the business of empire
• soccer in the US became an unlikely beneficiary of feminism
• more American children under 12 play soccer than baseball, football, and ice hockey put together
• soccer in America has been a success
• vibrant soccer culture around the country
• professional soccer is gaining ground
• measured by the number of fans inside the stadium for any given game, no other professional league on earth can begin to rival the NFL
• NFL is often called a socialist league
• overall, fans prefer unbalanced leagues
• for all the NFL’s efforts, the identities of winners and losers are pretty stable in both leagues
• as many losers in the NFL as in the Premier League
• NFL isn’t much more equal than the Premier League
• people who care about competitive balance are TV viewers
• dominant teams create a special interest of their own
• attendance rates do make it hard to believe that dominance in itself significantly undermines interest
• Davids win — “paradox of power”
• small competitors will tend to devote a greater share of resources to competitive activities
• Vietnam
• in soccer, as in war, underdog tends to try harder
• inequality in soccer is not new, all that’s new is the money
• global fans want global leagues
• very large proportion of people who like soccer are polygamous consumers
• overwhelming majority of soccer fans in Britain are armchair fans
• fans rarely or never enter soccer stadiums
• fans respond to performance: “BIRGing” “basking in reflected glory”
• always been a hard core, majority of people who go to English soccer matches go only once in a while and are often quite fluid about whom they choose to watch
• loyalty cannot be relied upon
• for many, fandom is not a static condition but a process
• Britain was the first country on Earth where peasants left their native villages to go work in rootless industrial cities
• churches began to empty
• hard for people this transitory to build up deep ties of any kind
• working class to middle class nation
• 90sm British soccer went upscale
• world’s poor people and poor countries are worse at sports than rich ones
• wealth is a significant contributor to national sporting success
• also with well being
• Norway, government policy that every farmer, fisherman, no matter where he lives has the right to play sports
• Icelanders can play year round, whether they belong to a club or not
• trained by qualified and paid soccer coaches
• broad access to sports is much less common in poor countries
• wealth and democracy tend to correlate very closely
• impossible to say whether Norway is good at sports because it’s rich, because it’s a democracy, or because it’s highly educated
• poor countries tend to be less networked
• less connected to other countries, hard for them to find out the latest best practice on how to play a sport
• to win, you need to find, develop, nurture talent
• doing that requires money, know how, administrative infrastructure
• few African countries have enough of any
• poor are excluded from soccer due to malnutrition, disease, disorganization
• why is it that so many of the best european soccer players grew up in poor places?
• practice, Gladwell, 10K hours
• a highly skill based sport like soccer, practice makes perfect
• poorest European boys who are most likely to hit that number
• small apartments, time outside, supply of local boys, parents are less likely to force them to do school work
• less money for other leisure pursuits
• importance of practice, why Black men are overrepresented in basketball and football — $15K rule, minimum average income to actually win something
• to be rural is to be isolated, networks give you contacts
• also explain why the best soccer is in Western Europe
• gradual decline in British Soccer echoes the decline in Britain’s economic status
• Western Europe, user friendly climate
• mild and rainy, land is fertile, networked
• proximity of many thinkers in Western Europe created an intellectual ferment, many scientific discoveries made
• centuries later, soccer spread the same way
• soccer is the most integrated part of the Continent’s economy
• intensity of competition inside Europe, on the field and in the boardroom
• strive constantly for improvements
• with the world’s best players and coaches packed together, the world’s best soccer is constantly being refined there
• 1990, third wave of globalization, soccer by now had the prestige of being world’s biggest sport
• Spain aside, soccer powers of a generation ago are mostly still the powers of today
• poorest countries have improved the fastest
• simpler in soccer than in macroeconomics
• copying the training tactics used in the best countries
• soccer’s equivalent of the middle income trap
• “import substitution”, ban or tax certain imports so that the country can learn to make stuff for itself
• classic problem is that it protects bad producers
• in any international match, three factors — size of population, national income, country’s experience in international soccer — highly affect the outcome
• being large and rich helps a country win matches, but having a long soccer history helps a lot more
• enormous role of luck in history
• bigger the talent pool you recruit from more new ideas are likely to bubble up
• more and more, Britain is an upper middle class nation
• yet the English soccer continues to recruit overwhelmingly from the traditional working classes
• growing evidence that sporting talent and academic talent are linked
• best athletes have fast mental reactions, and those reactions if properly honed, could make for high intellects
• home field advantage is mostly a result of biased refs
• psychological factors probably matter too
• only in the 50s that Brazil turned into soccer’s superpower
• tradition itself does not secure dominance
• dominance is transitory unless producers have the resources to stay ahead of the competition
• Palestinian national team success has something to do with the quest for statehood
• recruited from the diaspora
• Gaza is Palestine’s soccer hotbed
• country’s overachievement is astonishing
• Middle East has a remarkable soccer tradition, proximity to Europe is beneficial
• former Yugoslovia, Middle East, Iberian Peninsula are the world’s overachieving hot spots
• India, country’s failure on the field seems odd given its venerable soccer history
• last thirty years, soccer has been the fastest growing sport, much has happened because of TV
• planet’s favorite game
• new tech that spread action beyond the stadium have always created more revenue
• first time ever, viewers no longer need a TV set to watch football