Soccernomics
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Read between January 18 - March 29, 2020
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sent the ball straight into the danger zone. Sometimes an
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collected millions of pieces of data on computers, logged even the slightest injury to every player, and in the process stumbled
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Meersseman says the Lab’s data-driven scientists seem to be better than experienced youth coaches at making these predictions. He told us: ‘In soccer, they say, “You know about soccer or you don’t.” And when you go and test the ones who “know”, it’s surprising how little they know. It’s based on the emotion of the moment.’
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We studied the spending of 40 English clubs between 1978 and 1997, and found that their net outlay on transfers (i.e each club’s transfer fees paid minus transfer fees received) explained only 16 per cent of their total variation in league position. In other words, taken over many years, the mere fact of being a ‘buying club’ in the transfer market didn’t help you perform significantly better than a ‘selling club’.1
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We show the same result below using data for the Premier League and the Championship for the decade up to 2012 (see figures). In that period, wage spending still explained more than 90 per cent of the variation in league position. It seems that over the long term, high wages help a club much more than do spectacular transfers.
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The wisdom of crowds fails when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough.
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Only a handful of world-class players in each generation, most of them creators or goalscorers – Pelé, Maradona, Wayne Rooney, Lionel Messi, Cesc Fàbregas – reach the top by the age of 18. Most footballers get there considerably later. Almost all defenders and goalkeepers do. You can be confident of their potential only when they are more mature.
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As a free service to clubs, here are the 12 main secrets of the transfer market in full: 1. A new manager wastes money on transfers; don’t let him. 2. Use the wisdom of crowds. 3. Stars of recent World Cups or European championships are overvalued; ignore them. 4. Certain nationalities are overvalued. 5. Older players are overvalued. 6. Centre-forwards are overvalued; goalkeepers are undervalued. 7. Gentlemen prefer blonds; identify and abandon ‘sight-based prejudices’. 8. The best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties. 9. Sell any player when another club offers more than ...more
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A man we know once tried to do business with a revered institution of English football. ‘I can do business with stupid people,’ he said afterwards, ‘and I can do business with crooks. But I can’t do business with stupid people who want to be crooks.’
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In fact the world earns more from football than the football industry itself does.
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Football is not merely a small business, it’s also a bad one. Until very recently, and to some degree still today, anyone who spent any time inside football soon discovered that just as oil was part of the oil business, stupidity was part of the football business.
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In a panel at the International Football Arena conference in Zurich in 2006, Johansson explained that in ‘normal’ business ‘an average search process takes four to five months’. In football, a club usually finds a coach within a couple of days of sacking his predecessor. ‘Hesitation is regarded as weak leadership,’ explained another panellist in Zurich, Ilja Kaenzig, then general manager of the German club Hannover 96.
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The new manager is interviewed only very cursorily. In ‘normal’ business, a wannabe chief executive writes a business plan, gives a presentation and undergoes several interviews. In football, a club calls an agent’s mobile and offers the job.
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The new manager is always a male ex-player. The entire industry discriminates illegally against women. He is also almost always white, with a conservative haircut, aged between 35 and 60, and a former professional footballer.
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The point is that football clubs, prompted by media and fans, are always making financially irrational decisions in an instant. They would like to think long-term, but because they are in the news every day they end up fixating on the short term.
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‘Football is more than just a business. No one has their ashes scattered down the aisle at Tesco.’
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As it happens, after the manager is sacrificed, a team’s performance does tend to improve briefly. Sue Bridgewater of Warwick Business School analysed sackings in the Premier League from 1992 to 2008 and found that ‘there is a boost for a short honeymoon period’. For instance, after Manchester City sacked Mark Hughes at Christmas 2009, it won its first four games under Roberto Mancini. However, that’s not because Mancini or any other new manager can work magic. The short honeymoon is easy to explain. The average club earns 1.3 points a match. Typically, Bridgewater found, a club sacks its ...more
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As Anelka prepared to take Chelsea’s seventh penalty, the gangling keeper, standing on the goal-line, extended his arms to either side of him. Then, in what must have been a chilling moment for Anelka, the Dutchman pointed with his left hand to the left corner. ‘That’s where you’re all putting it, isn’t it?’ he seemed to be saying. (This is where books fall short as a medium. We urge you to watch the shootout on YouTube.)
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He kept logging matches, and over time he developed a theory – based on extremely shaky numbers – that too much passing was a risky waste of time. Most goals came from very short moves, he said. The way to win, he concluded, was long balls forward. Reep advised the strong Wolves team of the 1950s, and in the early 1980s influenced Graham Taylor, the future England manager, and Charles Hughes, the FA’s future director of education and coaching. Using his dodgy stats, Reep encouraged both men to develop the long-ball thinking that would eventually lead to England failing to qualify for the World ...more
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‘Chained’ is a very Hornbyesque word for a Fan’s feelings for his club. Often, the Fan uses metaphors from drugs (‘hooked’) or romantic love (‘relationship’, ‘fell for’). Indeed, some adult Englishmen who would hardly dare tell their wives that they love them will happily appear in public singing of their love for a club, or for a player who would snub them in a nightclub if they ever managed to sneak past his entourage.
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Hornby himself recognised the prevalence of casual fans in football. Many of the people who pop up briefly in the pages of Fever Pitch enjoy the game but are not wedded to a particular club. Hornby calls this type the ‘sod-that-for-a-lark floating punter’, and speaks of it with admiration: ‘I would like to be one of those people who treat their local team like their local restaurant, and thus withdraw their patronage if they are being served up noxious rubbish.’
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Fletcher Research, in one of the first serious market analyses of English football in 1997, found that only about 5 per cent of supporters of Premier League clubs attend even one match in an average season. If only a small minority of football fans get to the stadium at all, even fewer see every single home game for years on end as Hornby did.
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In our data for the period 1947–2008, there were 4,454 changes in clubs’ league position. The average club moves six or seven positions a year. In 64 per cent of the cases where the club rose in the league, its home crowd increased too. In 74 per cent of the ‘down’ years, home attendance fell. This means that 69 per cent of all cases confirmed the simple hypothesis that fans respond to performance. Simply put: there is a market in football spectators.
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Tapp ends by cautioning sports marketers that for all the rhetoric of undying love pervading English football, fans’ loyalty ‘cannot be relied upon’. He urges marketers to ‘look under the surface of supporter loyalty’, where they will find ‘loyalty patterns quite similar to, say, supermarket goods sectors’.
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As so often, it was Arsène Wenger who put this best. In January 2009 he gave Arsenal’s website an untraditional account of how he thought fandom worked: Football has different types of people coming to the game. You have the client, who is the guy who pays one time to go to a big game and wants to be entertained. Then you have the spectator, who is the guy who comes to watch football. These two categories are between 40 and 60 [years old]. Then you have two other categories. The first is the supporter of the club. He supports his club and goes to as many games as he can. Then you have the fan. ...more
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Joiner’s article ‘On Buckeyes, Gators, Super Bowl Sunday, and the Miracle on Ice’ makes a strong case that it’s not the winning that counts but the taking part – the shared experience.
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Had Spain been able to field just one other product of the Masia – and when the Argentine Messi was a boy the Spaniards had begged him to play for their national youth teams – FIFA could have dispensed with the World Cup altogether and simply handed Spain the trophy at a quick ceremony in Zurich.
José García-Herz
They would have won five in a row
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But then something changed. Over the last 30 years, sport has been the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment business, and football has been the fastest-growing sport.