Soccernomics (3 page)

percent or risen above 70 percent. In other words, the team’s performance is very constant.

Yes, these statistics conceal some ghastly mishaps as well as some highs, but the statistics tell us that the difference between anguish and euphoria is a few percentage points.

On the face of it, winning two-thirds of the time—meaning bookies’

odds of 1–2 on—is not too shabby in a two-horse race. Of course, some countries do even better. Brazil wins about 80 percent of its games. But against most teams, England is the deserved favorite. In the fairly typical period of 1980–2001, England’s win percentage was tenth best in the world.

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The problem comes when we try to translate this achievement into winning tournaments. England’s failure to win anything since the holy year of 1966 is a cause of much embarrassment for British expatriates in bars on the Spanish coast.

It is tricky to calculate the exact probability of England qualifying for a tournament, because it requires an analysis of many permutations of events. However, we can reduce it to a simple problem of multiplica-tive probability if we adopt the “must-win” concept. For example, England failed to qualify for Euro 2008 by coming in third in its group behind Croatia and Russia. In doing so it won seven matches, lost three, and tied twice (for an average winning percentage of exactly 66.66 percent).

It was narrowly beaten by Russia, which won seven, lost two, and tied three times (a winning percentage of 70.83 percent).

Suppose that to guarantee qualification you have to win eight games outright. Then the problem becomes one when you have to win eight out of twelve, where your winning probability in each game is 66 percent. Calculating this probability is a bit more complicated, since it involves combinatorics.

The answer is a probability of qualification of 63 percent. That means that England should qualify for fewer than two-thirds of the tournaments it enters. In fact, from 1970 through 2008 England qualified two-thirds of the time: for six out of nine World Cups and six out of nine European championships. Given that the number of qualifying matches has risen over time, England’s performance is in line with what you might expect.

The sad fact is that England is a good team that does better than most. This means it is not likely to win many tournaments, and it doesn’t.

The English tend to feel that England should do better. The team’s usual status around the bottom of the world’s top ten is not good enough.

The national media, in particular, feel almost perpetually let down by the team. England is “known as perennial underachievers on the world stage,”

according to the tabloid the
Sun
; its history “has been a landscape sculpted from valleys of underachievement,” says the
Independent
newspaper; the 14

former England captain Terry Butcher grumbled in the
Sunday Mirror
in 2006 that “historical underachievement has somehow conspired to make England feel even more important.”

“Why does England lose?” is perhaps the greatest question in English sports. In trying to answer it, we hear strange echoes from the field of development economics. The central question in that field is, “Why are some countries less productive than others?” The two main reasons England loses would sound familiar to any development economist. So would the most common reason
falsely
cited for why England loses.

Here are those three reasons for England’s eliminations—first the false one, then the correct ones.

BRITISH JOBS FOR BRITISH WORKERS? WHY THERE ARE

TOO MANY ENGLISHMEN IN THE PREMIER LEAGUE

When pundits gather to explain why England loses, their favorite scapegoat of the moment is imports: the hundreds of foreigners who play in the Premier League (EPL). Here is England’s midfielder Steven Gerrard speaking before England lost to Croatia and failed to qualify for Euro 2008: “I think there is a risk of too many foreign players coming over, which would affect our national team eventually if it’s not already. It is important we keep producing players.”

After all, if our boys can barely even get a game in their own league, how can they hope to mature into internationals? After England lost to Croatia, FIFA’s president, Sepp Blatter; Manchester United’s manager, Alex Ferguson; and UEFA’s president, Michel Platini, all made versions of Gerrard’s argument.

These men were effectively blaming imports for the English lack of skills. The reasoning is that our own workers don’t get a chance because they are being displaced by foreign workers. Exactly the same argument is often made in development economics. Why are some countries not very productive? Partly because their inhabitants don’t have enough skills. The best place to learn skills—such as making toothpaste, or teaching math, or playing soccer—is on the job. To learn how to make W H Y E N G L A N D L O S E S A N D O T H E R S W I N

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toothpaste, you have to actually make it, not just take a class to learn how to make it. But if you are always importing toothpaste, you will never learn.

That is why, for more than half a century, many development economists have called for “import substitution.” Ban or tax certain imports so that the country can learn to make the stuff itself. Import substitution has worked for a few countries. Japan after the war, for instance, managed to teach itself from scratch how to make all sorts of high-quality cars and electrical gadgets.

The idea of “import substitution” in the Premier League has an emotional appeal to many English fans. Britons often complain about feeling overrun by immigrants, and few spots in the country are more foreign than a Premier League field on match day. Arsenal, in particular, has wisely dispensed with Englishmen almost altogether. All told, Englishmen accounted for only 37 percent of the minutes played by soccer players in the Premier League in the 2007–2008 season before Croatia’s night at Wembley. To some degree,
English
soccer no longer exists.

“It is my philosophy to protect the identity of the clubs and country,” said Platini. “Manchester United against Liverpool should be with players from Manchester and Liverpool, from that region. Robbie Fowler was from Liverpool. He grew up in that city, it was nice, but now you don’t have the English players.”

Imagine for a moment that Platini somehow managed to suspend EU law and force English soccer clubs to discriminate against players from other EU countries. If that happened, Platini and Gerrard would probably end up disappointed. If inferior English players were handed places in Premier League teams, they would have little incentive to improve. This is a classic problem with import substitution: it protects bad producers. What then tends to happen is that short-term protection becomes long-term protection.

But, in fact, Platini’s entire premise is wrong. If people in soccer understood numbers better, they would grasp that the problem of the England team is not that there are too few Englishmen playing in the 16

Premier League. To the contrary: there are too
many
. England would do better if the country’s best clubs fielded even fewer English players.

You could argue that English players accounted for “only” 37 percent of playing time in the Premier League. Or you could argue that they account for a massive 37 percent of playing time, more than any other nationality in what is now the world’s toughest league.

This means that English players get a lot of regular experience in top-level club soccer. Even if we lump together the world’s three toughest leagues—the Premier League, Spain’s Primera Liga, and Italy’s Serie A—then only Italians, Spaniards, and perhaps Brazilians and Frenchmen play more tough club soccer. But certainly English players get far more experience in top-level soccer than, say, Croatians or Russians do.

In fact, the English probably get too much of this kind of experience. The Premier League is becoming soccer’s NBA, the first global league in this sport’s history. So the players earn millions of dollars.

So the league is all-consuming, particularly if you play for one of the

“Big Four” clubs, as almost all regular English internationals do. The players have to give almost all their energy and concentration in every match. It’s a little easier even in the Serie A or La Liga, where smaller teams like Siena, Catania, or Santander cannot afford to buy brilliant foreigners.

Clearly, an athlete can’t peak in every match. If you are running in the Olympics, you plan your season so that you will peak only at the Olympics, and not before. If you play soccer for, say, Croatia and for a club in a smaller league (even the Bundesliga), you can husband your energy so as to peak in big international matches—for instance, when you are playing England at Wembley.

By contrast, English players have to try to peak every week for their clubs. In no other country do players face as many demanding games a season. No clubs in any other country play as many European games as the English do. Daniele Tognaccini, chief athletics coach at the “Milan Lab,” probably the most sophisticated medical outfit in soccer, explains what happens when a player has to play sixty tough games a year: “The W H Y E N G L A N D L O S E S A N D O T H E R S W I N

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performance is not optimal. The risk of injury is very high. We can say the risk of injury during one game, after one week’s training, is 10 percent. If you play after two days, the risk rises by 30 or 40 percent. If you are playing four or five games consecutively without the right recovery, the risk of injury is incredible. The probability of having one lesser performance is very high.”

So when English players play internationally, they start tired, hurt, and without enough focus. Often they cannot raise their game. Harry Redknapp said when he was manager of Portsmouth, “I think England games get in the way of club soccer for the players now. Club soccer is so important, the Champions League and everything with it, that En -

gland games become a distraction to them.” Moreover, players in the intense Premier League are always getting injured, and their clubs don’t give them time to recover. That may be why half of England’s regulars couldn’t play against Croatia. For some of the same reasons, the US

often disappoints in basketball world championships.

In short, if England wanted to do better in international matches, it should export English players to more relaxed leagues, like, for example, Croatia’s.

England’s former manager Eriksson understood the problem. When one of the authors of this book asked him why England lost in the quarter-finals in the World Cup 2002 and in Euro 2004, he said his players were tired after tough seasons. Was that really the only reason?

“I would say so,” Eriksson replied. “If you’re not fit enough . . . In Japan, we never scored one goal the second half.”

In any case, English fans
want
to see teams full of foreign players.

Platini wonders whether Liverpudlians can identify with a Liverpool team full of foreigners. Well, they seem to manage. Judging by the Premiership’s record crowds despite its record ticket prices, fans still identify enough. Arsenal’s all-foreign team now draws sixty thousand fans weekly, the highest average crowd of any London team in history.

England can have an excellent league, or it can have an English league, but it can’t have both. Given the choice, fans seem to prefer excellence. In that sense, they are typical consumers. If you try to substitute imports, 18

then, at least at first, consumers have to put up with worse products.

They generally don’t like that.

THE PROBLEM OF EXCLUSION: HOW ENGLISH SOCCER

DRIVES OUT THE MIDDLE CLASSES

The Romans built their empire with an army drawn from every part of society. Only when the militia became an elite profession open just to particular families did the empire start to decline. When you limit your talent pool, you limit the development of skills. The bigger the group of people you draw from, the more new ideas that are likely to bubble up. That’s why large networks like the City of London and Silicon Valley, which draw talent from around the world, are so creative. So is the Premier League.

The problem of English soccer is what happens
before
the best English players reach the Premier League. The Englishmen who make it to the top are drawn very largely from one single and shrinking social group: the traditional working class. The country’s middle classes are mostly barred from professional soccer. That holds back the national team.

There are many ways to classify which social class someone was born into, but one good indicator is the profession of that person’s father. Joe Boyle, with some help from Dan Kuper, researched for us the jobs of the fathers of England players who played at the World Cups of 1998, 2002, and 2006. Boyle ignored jobs the fathers might have been handed after their sons’ rise to stardom. As much as possible, he tried to establish what the father did while the son was growing up. Using players’ autobiographies and newspaper profiles, he came up with the following list. It doesn’t include every player (asked, for instance, what Wayne Bridge’s dad did for a living, we throw up our hands in despair), but most are here. Another caveat: some of the dads on the list were absent while their boys were growing up. That said, here are their professions: Many of these job descriptions are imprecise. What exactly did Rob Lee’s dad do at the shipping company, for instance? Still, it’s possible to break down the list of thirty-four players into a few categories: Eighteen players, or more than half the total, were sons of skilled or unskilled W H Y E N G L A N D L O S E S A N D O T H E R S W I N

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F I G U R E 2 . 1
Employment of World Cup fathers

Player

Father’s job

Tony Adams

Roofer

Darren Anderton

Ran moving company; later a taxi driver

David Batty

Sanitation worker

David Beckham

Heating engineer

Sol Campbell

Railway worker