The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong

by Chris Anderson

In their book Why England Lose, the soccer journalist Simon Kuper and the economist Stefan Szymanski found that money matters a great deal for the success of soccer clubs. According to their calculations, 92 percent of the differences in English soccer clubs’ league position can be explained by a club’s relative wage bill.1 It might not be the case that the team with the highest wage bill finishes top each and every season, but over the long term, the correlation is uncanny. At the other end of the table, it seems inevitable that, eventually, in soccer poverty will drag you down.

But Martínez’s Wigan were not your typical club. In 2010/11, they created goals in extremely unusual ways. They relied much less on traditional open-play goals than most and did not bother with anything that resembled a patient buildup. In half their games they failed to score from open play at all. When they did, they tended to come from what are known among analysts as “fast breaks”—lightning-quick counterattacks.6 And the rest of their goals came from free kicks. Their output in both these categories was exceptional. They scored twice as many goals on the break as the average side, and they scored almost four times as many goals from free kicks.

Just like rich countries that specialize in complicated products such as aircraft, software and luxury resorts, rich soccer clubs invest more capital and technology into their organizations and play the game in a way that poorer clubs cannot duplicate.

Pérez knew that he could not afford to buy eleven superstars all over the pitch—or more, as injuries and suspensions would always mean he would need a squad. He could, at best, manage half a dozen of the very best in the world. The rest would have to come from the youth team. This was the policy of Cracks y Pavones, of superstars like Zidane and homegrown hopefuls such as Francisco Pavón, with the emphasis very much on the superstars.

“I convinced Gullit and van Basten by telling them that five organized players would beat ten disorganized ones,” he said. “And I proved it to them. I took five players: Giovanni Galli in goal, Tassotti, Maldini, Costacurta and Baresi. The other team had ten players: Gullit, van Basten, Rijkaard, Virdis, Evani, Ancelotti, Colombo, Donadoni, Lantignotti and Mannari. They had fifteen minutes to score against my five players, the only rule was that if we won possession or they lost the ball, they had to start over from ten meters inside their own half. I did this all the time and they never scored. Not once.”

For all Pérez’s flaws, he had seen a truth: because soccer is an O-ring process, good players do cluster together. But he had missed the ultimate conclusion of this idea: that the weak links are the crucial determinant in a team or a company’s success, not the strong ones.

This is the second option open to a manager: if you have a weak link, get your other players to help him out.

As Rocco famously told his players: “Kick everything that moves; if it is the ball, even better.”

That should not, however, be allowed to cloud what catenaccio, in its original form, was meant to be: a way of solving soccer’s most significant structural problem—protecting your team’s weak links.

Benítez was often accused of managing by numbers; that may have been the case, but in terms of his substitutions, it appears he could have been using the wrong numbers. Across every league, the <58<73<79 rule offered a greater hope of mounting a comeback than any other substitution pattern. The greatest difference came in Serie A, where it brought a 52 percent chance of taking something from the game, as opposed to 18 percent if the rule was not followed. Those managers who never followed it paid the price. Take Tenerife’s José Luis Oltra, who never once used the <58<73<79 rule to replace his starters. They managed just two comebacks in games where they were trailing, were duly relegated and their manager sacked.

In other words, players who come on perform at a higher level than players who come off. If a manager waits for clear signs of fatigue, he might be substituting too late; he might make better decisions by following a set rule such as <58<73<79. During his ill-fated reign at Portsmouth in the 2009/10 season, Avram Grant could have followed that rule in twenty-one games. He chose to do so only four times. On two of those occasions, his team made a dent in their deficit. In the seventeen other games, where he did not follow that rule, the deficit stayed the same or increased fourteen times. If he’d followed the rule, Pompey’s results might have been sufficient to avoid relegation.

There are countless Brazilian strikers—Adriano, Edmundo—who regularly chose not to train, relying instead on their inherent ability. The effect on players without their talent would have been profound: work all you like, you’ll never be in my class. Not good for the team.

One superstar who does fit the mold is, no surprise, Lionel Messi. He’s never viewed training as silly or unimportant. He wouldn’t be caught dead repeating Iverson’s scornful words at a press conference: “We’re sittin’ here, and I’m supposed to be the franchise player, and we’re talkin’ about practice.” Messi’s teammate Gerard Piqué observes, “He could say, ‘OK, I’m the best, but in training I don’t care, I can be lazy,’ but he’s working at the same level in training as well. It’s unbelievable.”

Soccer is not a sport where effort matters more than skill; instead, technique, physical abilities and mental aptitude are at least as important.

Strong links don’t win matches. Weak links lose them.

In that case, maybe Jimmy Davies should be considered for the title. That’s right, not Carlos Bianchi, who forged one of the finest teams of the modern age at Boca Juniors, or Pep Guardiola, inspiration behind Barcelona’s domination in recent years, or Marcello Lippi, World Cup winner with Italy and Champions League winner with Juventus, or Vicente del Bosque, who managed the same trick with Spain and Real Madrid, or Fabio Capello, or Marcelo Bielsa or Arsène Wenger or any of the other usual contenders. When it comes to longevity, none of them are a patch on Jimmy Davies, the manager of Waterloo Dock AFC, a nonleague team on Merseyside.

brought them to the play-offs in four of the last six years despite a total wage bill that was the fourth lowest in Major League Baseball, way down on the sums paid out by the New York Yankees or the Boston Red Sox. In soccer terms, it’s Sunderland reaching the Champions League knockout stages three times in half a decade.

Andrew Friedman, general manager of the Tampa Bay Rays, a club we’ve seen are at the forefront of analytics, says his club always “postmortems” decisions at a later date. “We keep copious notes on the variables we knew, everything we knew going in,” he says. “Then we go back and look at it to review the process. It’s something we’re continuing to refine and will be in perpetuity. I hope to never get to the point where we’re content, or we feel great about everything and go into autopilot mode.”

As Arrigo Sacchi famously noted when questioned about his qualifications, “I never realized that in order to become a jockey you have to have been a horse first”;

Using twenty years of Premier League and Football League data, economists Sue Bridgewater, Larry Kahn and Amanda Goodall confirmed in 2009 that a manager who had played for his national side was generally more effective than someone who had never won a cap.5 Managers who had been skilled players themselves were particularly effective when they were in charge of teams of lower-paid and lesser-talented players.

“Look, if you were a good player, you can teach things others cannot,” Fabio Capello asserts. “There are elements of technique, of timing, of coordination which I don’t think you can understand if you never played the game at a certain level.”

What does this mean for soccer players or managers? You are not born with a gift; you must work at

When observers kept logs of the training sessions of the two greatest coaches in American collegiate basketball—for men, UCLA’s John Wooden, and for women, Tennessee’s Pat Summitt—half their utterances were instructions, such as “do some dribbling between shots.”25 More than 10 percent of Coach Wooden’s actions involved demonstrations of the correct or incorrect movement or both—showing the player the right way to do something. Training sessions were fundamentally about instruction for the UCLA coach: “I felt running a practice session was almost like teaching an English class. I knew a detailed plan was necessary in teaching English, but it took a while before I understood the same thing was necessary in sports. Otherwise, you waste an enormous amount of time, effort, and talent.”

This same principle applies in soccer. Talent is not given by God. It must be honed and nurtured, sculpted and shaped. Good managers, like Wooden, script every session, so that it has an aim, a result. They must also monitor their own learning.

But soccer is a sport of rare events, a game of rare beauty. It is decided by the margins. It is at the margins where games are won and lost, where history is made and reputations forged, where light and dark meet.

One experiment showed that a keeper could stand two and a half to four inches off-center in the goal and induce 10 percent more kicks into the wider area, meaning his dives in that direction are more effective.11 He can also make the kicker believe he is bigger than he is by holding his arms out and above his shoulders.12 This provides a human equivalent of the famous Müller-Lyer illusion, which makes you think that the vertical line on the left in the diagram is longer than the one on the right. And then there is the technique that both Bruce Grobbelaar and Jerzy Dudek would recognize: he can dance. Waving your arms or generally clowning around can attract the attention of the kicker away from both the target and his eventual effort.13