Soccer by numbers

A blurb on the front of Soccernomics calls it a ‘blend of Freakonomics and Fever

Pitch…’. Now frankly that sounds like a bit of a nightmare - young, brash, know-it-
all American meets self-obsessed, maudlin Brit with literary pretensions. Despite
this, the book is good fun even if its arguments aren’t always convincing.

The authors of this book argue that it is only of recent that ‘soccer’ as a name for the
world game fell into disrepute as a nasty American usage; that in fact until the 70s
when the game took off in the States, soccer was the most popular term for the game
in Britain. Armed with this new knowledge I don’t feel provincial calling football
soccer and will do so throughout this review.

Freakonomics and Fever Pitch are called to our attention as examples, not to mention
best-sellers, of two recent popular writing genres that Kuper and Szymanski’s book
attempts to straddle.

The first of these is best described as statistical myth-busting, whereby authors

unleash an armoury of statistical tools on perplexing, if at times rather trivial, popular
problems, proving that while people commonly think X, when you look at the data it
actually shows Y.

Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of
Everything, introduced a broad readership to the genre in 2005. The work is
essentially a collection of essays in which economist, now ‘celebrity economist’
Steven Levitt, plays the numbers, while New York Times journalist Stephen Dubner
provides the praise. The results were both entertaining and illuminating. So much so
that a movie of the same name is now in production!
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1152822/) The book spawned a number of imitators
that like Kuper and Szymanski have adopted ‘onomics’ in their titles (see
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/books/16titles.html.) In 2007 Australia got its
very own Ozonomics: Inside the myth of Australia’s economic superpowers (Charlton
2007).

The other genre that Soccernomics draws upon is the longer-lived rise and rise of
writing exploring the culture of the world game. ‘New Soccer writing’ for want of a
better term is often traced to the publication of Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch in 1992,
although the influential fanzine When Saturday Comes predates it, as does Peter
Davies’ All Played Out: The Full Story of Italia ' 90 - a book Hornby describes as ‘the
first football book I thought was any good’.

This writing was an important part of British soccer’s renaissance, shifting from a
game associated with hooligans, cramped stadiums and general working class
‘oikiness’ to a more mainstream entertainment capable of being discussed in polite
company. Despite this the writing was often nostalgic and suspicious of corporate
excess and greed, but perhaps most importantly it treated football culture seriously
and was interested in exploring football’s role in wider cultures.
The authors certainly pay their respects to this writing (Simon Kuper is himself a key
figure) and it includes an excellent bibliography of examples of this writing including
Alex Bullos’ superb Futebol- The Brazilian Way of Life. The first chapter of Bullos’
book is perhaps my favourite piece of sports writing, documenting the importation of
a job-lot of Brazilians to clubs playing in the Faroe Islands league. Here we have
what all economists love a win-win situation, the Faroe Islanders wanted some
Brazilian magic to adorn their competition; the Brazilian players want to be able to
tell people back home that they played in Europe.

The story of these men plying their trade in such an alien environment is engrossing.
I particularly enjoyed the story of Robson the player who while not good enough to
make the team to whom he’d been assigned, did manage to get a steady job at the
local fish factory, meet and marry a local girl and raise a family. There is also a
fantastic photograph of one of the players, Marcelo Marcolino back home in Brazil on
a balcony looking out over the beach holding aloft his trophy for topping the goal
scoring in the Faroes wearing nothing but sunglasses, a cap, a huge grin and a tiny
pair of bathers.

The application of Freakonomics style data analysis to soccer seems an obvious move.
Soccer inspires great passion and debate giving rise to many untested views and
theories and there is a great deal of data available to test these theories. Soccernomics
makes full use of this and puts forward some terrific analysis. Very much like
Freakonomics the book is a series of independent pieces exploring various topics and
issues. The pieces are of varying length and it must be said varying quality, at least in
relation to the statistical analysis employed.

When it works it really works. The chapter exploring whether English soccer
discriminates against black people presents work done by one of the co-authors
(Szymanski). Having previously established that there was a strong relationship
between total player payments and success (not though between transfer fees paid and
success) he undertook regression analysis to isolate the impact of player payments and
the number of black players in a team. What he found was that when you hold player
payments constant teams with more black players outperformed those with fewer
blacks. This implies that the black players were better value than their white
counterparts most likely due to systematic discrimination. Encouragingly the research
demonstrates that as more clubs hired black players the costs of not doing so
increased to the point where hold-out clubs were all but forced to fall into line.

Perhaps an even starker example of discrimination in soccer and the corresponding

potential for gaming by participants is the Celtic-Rangers rivalry in Scotland.
Rangers did not hire a catholic player from the end of the second world war until
1989. Yet in the words of Sean Fallon, assistant manager of Celtic from 1965 to 1980
‘We could sign catholics or protestants, even coloureds.’ Legendary Celtic manager
Jock Stein claimed to actually discriminate in favour of protestants knowing that their
arch-rivals would not take catholics left behind. Results would suggest that Celtic did
well out of this arrangement.

While overall this book is a diverting romp- it has some great anecdotes and throws
forward some interesting ideas and statistics- the tone of the analysis is at times a little
self-important and too quick to yell ‘myth-busted’. The authors are keen to talk up
the virtues of the scientific method when it suits them but they themselves are too
eager to try and pass off statistical relationships as causal ones. Too often we get one
possible explanation for a phenomenon presented as the only explanation. For
example this paragraph early in the book

Another harbinger of the impending Jamesian takeover of soccer is the Milan

Lab. Early on, AC Milan’s in-house medical outfit found that just by studying a
player’s jump, it could predict with 70 per-cent accuracy whether he would get
injured. It then collected millions of data on each of the team’s players on
computers, and in the process stumbled upon the secret of eternal youth. (It’s
still a secret: no other club has a Milan Lab, and the Lab won’t divulge its
finding, which is why players at other clubs are generally finished by their early
thirties.)

This is then supported by pointing out that most of Milan’s starting eleven in the 2007
Champion’s League Final was aged 31 or over. Now that might be exceptional- I
don’t know as no comparative data is presented. A quick internet search suggested
that top Italian teams have higher average ages than the top Spanish and English ones
and that Milan has the oldest of these. But one Champion’s League victory isn’t
enough evidence to prove the Lab’s efficacy. While later we get lectured on the role
of chance in one-off victories here it is irrefutable evidence of the Lab and its work.

As for the more general claims about Milan Lab I’m frankly sceptical. They don’t
divulge their findings but claim a 70% rate in predicting injury but whether that
means in the next five minutes, over the course of a game, a season or a career we
don’t know. And just for good measure this is termed the ‘secret of eternal youth’, a
term not often associated with scientific analysis. Milan Lab marketing is clearly not
impressing fans however as the age of the squad is seen more as a concern rather than
a cause for pride- clearly Milan need the help of the authors to disabuse their fans of
outmoded shibboleths.

In the last chapter the authors’ thesis that Gus Hiddink had introduced the Australian
players to ‘European soccer’ would have made more sense to me if not for the fact
that the entire squad plied their trade in Europe. Sure he may have tinkered with
match tactics but it’s hard to believe that in the short time he was with the players they
learnt much they hadn’t learnt in a decade or more playing in European leagues.

In many places the statistical analysis in the book does cast a new light on an old
problem but sometimes it just demonstrates that statisticians see the world in a
different way to the general population. An example of the latter is contained in the
chapter titled ‘The Economist’s Fear of the Penalty Kick’ which includes a quite
bizarre analysis that demonstrates that penalty kicks make no difference to the overall
pattern of results between home and away teams and between favourites and
underdogs. Now there are many issues debated by soccer fans the world over but the
overall pattern of results and the awarding of penalty kicks is not one of them in my
experience.

These quibbles aside this book is interesting and entertaining- read it and discover
why Australia is destined to become a world soccer power and that hosting a world
cup won’t make you rich but will make you happy. The Football Federation of
Australia despite its anachronistic name must be licking its lips.