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by
Simon Kuper
Started reading
September 5, 2018
when the facts change, we change our minds.
to torture the data until they confess,
love of soccer is often intertwined with a love of numbers.
Soccernomics-agency.com,
the world record fee of $263 million that Paris Saint-Germain paid Barcelona for Neymar.*
high wages help a club much more than do spectacular transfers.
wages buy success
all the usual title contenders had bad seasons simultaneously.
“God does not play dice with the universe.”
the transfer market is inefficient.
having money is no guarantee of success.
spend less of your income on transfers and more of it on wages.
Wenger runs his football club like he is going to own the club for one hundred years.”
he is going to own the club for one hundred years.”
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.
what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next.”
The Numbers Game that the best way to improve a team is to replace the worst player.
the best way to allocate a club’s transfer budget across the eleven starters:
is much easier selling, for example, a crap Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican.
After the little country got within a penalty shoot-out of reaching the semifinal, the total value of transfer fees for Costa Rican players moving internationally rose from $922,000 in 2013 to almost $10 million in 2014,
“It’s as important in soccer as in
the stock market to sell at the right time,”
buy players with personal problems (like Burns, or the gambler Stan Bowles) at a discount.
And most famously, in 2003, on the plane home from a friendly in Portugal, United’s defenders told Ferguson what a handful Sporting Lisbon’s little-known teenage winger had been. The manager promptly forked out £12.24 million ($20.3 million) for Cristiano Ronaldo.
The best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties
thirteen main secrets of
This is partly a problem of what economists call appropriability: so far soccer clubs have not been able to make money out of (haven’t appropriated) more than a tiny share of our love of soccer.
“Where were you when you were shit?” should be
revised to “Where were you when your stadium was shit?”
“You don’t need to have been a horse to be a jockey.”
“Do not take decisions on a Monday” (i.e., based on the weekend’s result).
The Numbers Game
“A fan is the most emotional thing in the world. He will do everything,”
it takes more talent to score than to stop other people from scoring.
Sacking the manager is now an ancient ritual, soccer’s version of the Aztecan human sacrifice.
“With every player there is a moment when his value is higher than the price. The key is to get that timing right.”
