Sean O'Conor
Simon Kuper, Financial Times journalist and author of the acclaimed Football Against The Enemy and Ajax, The Dutch, The War, has teamed up with sports economist Stefan Szymanski for a new book, Why England Lose and other curious football phenomena explained, which uses hard data to explode some popular myths about soccer. Simon told Soccerphile how facts and figures can shine a new light on the mysteries of the Beautiful Game.
How much were you inspired by Michael Lewis' 'Moneyball' to write this book?
I had not actually read Moneyball until I had finished a lot of the research but I thought it was a wonderful book and we were trying to do something related to what he was doing.
What was your overall aim?
It was to demolish the mythology which surrounds the game using facts and data, actual knowledge, information and analysis. What we think we know about football is based on what we we see before our eyes, for example Alex Ferguson is the face of Manchester United so we assume he is responsible for all that we see of his team. But we thought, let us look at the data and not be fooled by what we think we can see. That was our basic idea - to take to this traditional industry some fresh knowledge, to stand back and look with clear eyes.
But don't football fans love the game's mythology?
I am not saying we should not be emotional or not be moved by football, but people do want to understand the game properly. You can drive without a dashboard but it is probably better to have the information to hand. In the media every day people are trying to explain what happened and what is going to happen and in my view they are doing that often with false ideas. Football has this whole analysis attached to it, it is just that that analysis is often wrong.
Have you always thought British football journalism lacks an intellectual edge?
No, when I read British papers there is excellent stuff on football and I read it with enjoyment. But I do want to introduce something new to the debate. I don't think intellectualism is the right word because in the book even when the material is quite complex we try to explain it in the clearest possible terms. I just like 'clearer thinking'.
Does football lend itself to statistical analysis as easily as say baseball?
In football the figures were not kept until recently, apart from results and unreliable data on crowds, whereas baseball and cricket had a ton of data points.
When I spoke to Arsene Wenger at Euro 2008 I realised he had been looking at data which was not available to everyone else partly because it was from programs like ProZone which cost a lot of money to obtain. One of the things he was fascinated by was the number of kilometres players run each game, a data point which until a few years ago no fan or journalist could ever have known about.
Now you cannot just select players based on how many kilometres they run because they might be good athletes but bad footballers. But then Wenger said if my central midfielder runs 11km a match and his opposing central midfielder only runs 9km, then that will make a difference towards the end of a game if he is popping up in the opposition box and his opposite number is too tired to track back anymore.
We now have data on the number of passes completed, the number of tackles and average length of pass and so on and all those data do tell you something. But you have to use the material with great sophistication. It would be wrong to drop Rio Ferdinand just because statistically he does not make that many tackles.
But football still has an ebb and flow which is hard to analyse
It is less clear-cut than baseball, which is easier to extract stats from, but again in Moneyball, Lewis says they were looking at the wrong stats. In our book we are looking more at off-field data - fans, transfers, business. If you are saying we don't yet have a set of data that says Cesc Fabregas is a better player than Xabi Alonso then I agree with you and it may be possible that we may never have that data. What we do have tells us interesting stuff.
The topics you choose to focus on are very diverse
A better comparison than Moneyball would be Freakonomics where the author discusses all sorts of different stuff but looks at the data in a new way to come up with different truths. That is what we tried to do in the book, so you go from racial discrimination to England's results but ignoring what we always know try to find something new and interesting to say about them taking a cold and fresh look at the data. That was the approach.
It's called 'Why England Lose' but you actually conclude they slightly over-perform
The title comes from the great fan lament that England do not win enough tournaments, the greatest debate in English football. We say you have to remember this is a mid-size country with no more football experience than lots of other countries and no more wealth than their main rivals which is crucial, so expectations are just way off.
Claiming there are too many Englishmen in the Premier League bucks conventional wisdom; surely at some point the player pool could get too small to sustain a strong national team?
If you only had say 20 Englishmen in the Premier League, you would still have a lot more than most other countries and if all the English players were in the Championship you would still have a good-sized player base with money and crowds better than all but four European leagues. If you reached a point where there were no Englishmen in leagues of any seriousness around the world then you would get into a San Marino-esque situation. But I would say even 20 Englishmen would give you a decent start because you would have twenty players in the best league in the world.
You mention England's geographical exclusion from the continent and its football networks as a factor in the national team's weakness
It was fine when no other countries were thinking hard about football although that changed even before World War Two. Certainly by the 1950s England no longer had the best football knowledge in the world. 1939 until the early 1990s were dark years of isolation and that has now lifted which may mean England will start to over-perform even more.
You found that the seven largest metropolitan areas in Europe have never won the European Cup. But did you uncover any data on the origins of the players?
I don't know of any such data existing. I started thinking empirically that even 'Londoners' like Bobby Moore or David Beckham came from the outskirts of London. It would have to be a very extensive study because the trend of migration is towards London and big cities. All you have is players' places of birth but that does not tell you very much.
The reason capital cities struggle may be a little to do with a lack of playing space but the overriding importance of football is bigger in completely new cities like Manchester where you had no social hierarchy. In London you had the courts, the embassies, financial institutions and all sorts of ways of creating status that in new English towns like Liverpool and Manchester did not exist at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Then in the posh English towns like Oxford, Cheltenham and Bath, civic statuses were long established..
Clubs become big within their cities then transfer their identity around the world and become very rich. This happened with Milan, Barcelona and Man United and it seems this model works better with new industrial cities than established capitals.
You admit your conclusions do have exceptions. A Greece winning Euro 2004 for instance
San Marino can win the World Cup but what we are saying is that over time having a large population, large wealth and large experience will help a football country win more than them. Over time the club which pays the higher wages will win more. Particularly as football is a low-scoring game you do get a high element of randomness which is why you have to look at large samples, a whole season or in the case of wages, we looked at 50 years of data.
You believe the loyal diehard makes up barely 50% of spectators these days
A lot of people who follow football in England do not go to games and if half of those who do go don't come back the next season then over five years you are left with very few of the original group. If you are fifty and your children have grown up and you have a high income and still live in the same town you are likely to go to the same club but if you are like me and you have three small kids and your life is crazy you are likely to have to give up that season ticket.
It is this idea of the fan as a consumer. It is not that we have to buy that match ticket or else we will die; there are very few people like that. For many people it is a case of can I afford it, am I living close enough and does my family life permit me to go regularly. For most people being a fan is not this diehard loyalty existence.
You write about how complaints about the unfairness of the Premier League continue while the attendances keep on rising
Just because crowds have gone up that is not proof in itself that people like imbalance but it is an interesting indicator. People who say football is boring, there is no competition and you always know who is going to win have to explain why crowds are rising, especially while ticket prices are going up. We provide a lot of data from economists who show that actually people do not mind unbalanced football.
But there must be a tipping point where the league has become so lopsided it is unattractive
If Stoke were much, much worse so that they only had a 1% chance of beating Manchester United, then it would be less interesting, whereas now when Stoke play United at home there is an ingredient of excitement. So yes, you could reach a point when it is so unbalanced it becomes completely pointless but at the moment it seems to work pretty well.
Some fans, myself included, certainly have been priced out of regularly attending the Premier League, but when I do go I am struck not by how new and younger fans have arrived but by how much older everyone looks
I think that is quite possible. You would have to look at age analyses from 20 years ago, but again the only data on fans started to be collected a decade ago. I had the same feeling at the Manchester Utd v Chelsea final in Moscow: Everyone looked so old and I guess that is part of the wealth effect. Plus clubs like those where it is hard to get season tickets tend to give them to people who have been coming year in, year out.
Your claim that coaches do not make much of a difference will probably shock most fans, but at the same time you devote most of a chapter to how Brian Clough & Peter Taylor transformed their teams
Clough & Taylor did make a difference and I suspect if you analyse Mourinho's career you would find the same thing, but these are over-performers. Remember there are hundreds of club managers in major European leagues and going back over the last 30 years you are talking about thousands of coaches. Louis Van Gaal is another exception and Hiddink at international level but you are only talking about five or six people. There are very, very few managers who make a difference but what every club thinks who fires a manager and hires a new one is that this is a guy who is going to help us over-perform; despite our wage bill this guy is going to do it for us and that is just a fallacy. 99% of managers just don't make a difference. If you could hire Mourinho or Clough to manage your club then yes but that is not a choice available to most teams.
The manager merry-go-round is perpetual, but there often seems to be a blip in results with the new guy, otherwise why would clubs risk it?
The manager is this totemic figure who is the face of the club because players don't speak and because you can see him you think he can make a difference but he barely does. The short-term blip probably does exist and there is a very good statistical reason why when you sack the manager the new man over the first month is likely to improve results. Say you are Spurs and your wages are the tenth best in the league but you are in 18th place. Sooner or later the likelihood is you will start performing like the tenth best team in the league so you could appoint me, you or Harry Redknapp and you get a bounce. The new manager is credited with the bounce but that is wrong.
At the end of the book you name China, Japan and the USA as future winners of the World Cup based on their economic strength. The US almost won the Confederations Cup this summer but those other two countries still look some way off being world-beaters.
Well you probably would have said that about South Korea before 2002. If these countries import men from the centre of football knowledge like England has done, they very quickly raise their performance massively. Look at Turkey, World Cup semi-finalists in 2002, Greece, European Champions in 2004. Australia were unlucky to lose to the eventual world champions in 2006. So the same thing can happen to China and Japan before long. I am certainly not saying they can win the next World Cup and China have low income per capita which is a problem and low football experience, but they are catching up all the time.
There is an inexorable trend where those countries will overtake the small European countries which have done well at football - Holland, Sweden & the Czech Republic and even the mid-sized European countries like England and Spain. We can't match them for population and when they match us for experience and wealth it is a losing battle.
