Soccernomics (22 page)

biggest problems were his players’ insistence on busing the 150 yards from the locker room to the training ground and the Brazilian Edmondo’s ritual late return from the Rio Carnaval. But those days will never return.

In the Champions League, the midsize cities are now finished.

Fiorentina’s demise can be dated to the day in July 2001 that the Italian police raided the home of the team’s owner, the Italian film baron Vittorio Cecchi Gori. What happened was exactly what should happen when police raid a film baron’s home, as if Cecchi Gori had read up on Jackie Collins beforehand.

The police broke into his apartment in the Palazzo Borghese in Rome, but then took ninety minutes to find him. This was because his bedroom door was concealed inside a mirrored wall. Only after the Fil-ipina maid had pointed this out did they enter the bedroom to find Cecchi Gori asleep with his girlfriend, Valeria Marini, a Caprice-like figure who calls herself a singer-actress but in fact can do neither.

The police told Cecchi Gori to open his safe. Donning his silk dressing gown, he did so. When the police remarked on the stash of cocaine stored inside, Cecchi Gori replied nonchalantly, “Cocaine? That’s not cocaine, it’s saffron!”

Meanwhile, his business empire was untangling. It should be said that he acquired the empire only by inheritance from his father, Mario, who before dying in 1993 had warned his old business partner, Silvio Berlusconi, “Take care of Vittorio, he is so impulsive and naive.”

Vittorio’s problem was that he wanted to be Berlusconi. He bought commercial TV channels (a failure), pumped fortunes into his soccer team (no titles), dabbled in politics (getting no further than senator), but might have been okay had he not gotten caught in a divorce expected to be so expensive that it alone could have funded Fiorentina for years. Cecchi Gori remained admirably upbeat even after all this, leaning out of the window of his Mercedes limousine on Rome’s Via Veneto to shout “
La dolce vita
!” to friends. However, he ruined Fiorentina.

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It was hard to work out which bit of Cecchi Gori’s empire owed what to which, but it was clear that he had borrowed tens of millions of dollars from the club. After everything went wrong, he tried the traditional Italian remedy, putting his eighty-two-year-old mother in charge, but even she could not save Fiorentina. A fax from a Colombian bank offering to pay off the club’s entire debt proved, amazingly, to be a forgery.

In 2002 Fiorentina went bankrupt, slipping into Italy’s fourth division, where it had to visit Tuscan village teams most of whose players were Fiorentina fans. Now it is back in Serie A, but the days of Trap, Batistuta, and “The Animal” Edmondo won’t return. Florence is just too small now.

Florence is typical. Midsize European cities (between 150,000 and 1

million inhabitants) have all but dropped off the map of European soccer. They can no longer afford to compete with clubs from bigger places. In early 2004 it was the turn of Parma, whose owners, the dairy company Parmalat, turned out to have mislaid 10 billion euros. Leeds United is the great English example. In Spain Deportivo La Coruña, pride of a midsize Galician city, suddenly discovered that its debt had hit the strictly notional figure of 178 million euros. Valencia followed a few years later. These clubs fell short because they had hardly any supporters outside their own city walls. Other midsize cities—Glasgow, Amsterdam, Nottingham—have retreated with less fanfare, but they too must know they will never again produce a European champion.

Even Newcastle is now beginning to emerge from denial.

The third period of the European Cup began in 1982 and hasn’t ended yet: rule by sturdy provincial city. There were still a few undersize winners: Porto and Liverpool twice each, and Eindhoven, Marseille, and Dortmund. However, these towns are not exactly midgets. Four of the five are agglomerations of 1.2 million inhabitants or more. Only Eindhoven has just 210,000 people and a metropolitan area—if you draw it very generously—of only 750,000. In general, European champions are getting bigger. In modern times, the race has usually gone to the rich.

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The swelling of the soccer economy—the bigger TV contracts, the new stadiums, the freer movement of players, and so on—favored the most popular clubs. For historical reasons, these tended to be the ones in big provincial cities. Their teams came to dominate the Champions League in a sort of endless loop. Every club that has won the trophy since 1998 had won it at least once before. Most had won it several times before. Are their fans growing blasé? When you have won the thing nine times, the buzz probably starts to fade.

The new dominant clubs aren’t from the megacities of Moscow, London, Paris, or Istanbul but from urban areas with 2 to 4 million inhabitants: Milan, Manchester, Munich, and Madrid. These
M
cities are big enough to produce the required fan base yet provincial enough to generate a yearning for global recognition.

Strangely, one of these cities, Madrid, is a democratic capital. How could Real break the golden rule of the Champions League and win the trophy in 1998, 2000, and 2002? Because it had built its mammoth stadium, brand, and support in the days when Madrid was the capital of a dictatorship. Spain may have gone social democratic, but Real’s players still enter the Santiago Bernabeu in those white “meringue” shirts as if it were 1955. The club’s global standing is a relic of the fascist era.

GEORGE ZIPF COMES TO LONDON:

THE FUTURE METROPOLITAN ERA?

George Kingsley Zipf is an almost forgotten Harvard linguist. Born in 1902, died in 1950 just as he was starting to make a name, Zipf is now known only for having formulated a law that explains almost everything. Among other things, Zipf’s law tells us that London or Moscow should start winning Champions Leagues soon.

Consider the following: if you rank every American city by the size of its population, the difference in population between two consecutive cities is simply the ratio of their ranks. So if you compare cities number 1 and 2, city 2 has half (or 1/2) the population of city 1. If you compare cities number 2 and 3, city 3 has two-thirds (2/3) the population of city 2.

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City 100 has 99/100ths the population of city 99 and so on down the list. Statistically speaking, the fit of this relationship is almost as perfect as it is possible to be.

This is a particularly elegant example of a more general relationship known as Zipf’s law, and it applies to a lot more than city sizes.

For instance, it is also true of the frequency with which words are used in English.
The
is the most commonly used word in the language,
of
is second, and so
of
is used about half (1/2) as often as
the
. All in all, Zipf’s law has been called possibly “the most accurate regularity in economics.”

Zipf’s law also works for European cities, though not quite as neatly.

City sizes in most European countries are more closely bunched, and so the second city is closer to the first city’s size than in the United States, the third closer to the second, and so on.

Why might this be? Zipf’s law must have something to do with migration. People will always try to migrate to where the money is. In the United States, with its open markets and very high mobility of labor, they generally do. But in Europe, political and cultural barriers have limited migration. That might explain why city sizes are more com-pressed there. Nonetheless, Kwok Tong Soo from the London School of Economics has shown that if you measure European metropolitan districts, Zipf’s law works well in eight out of nine European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and Britain).

For a long time nobody could understand why Zipf’s law should hold for so many different phenomena. Now, though, economists and scientists are starting to generate models of growth in which the natural outcome of a process is a distribution obeying Zipf’s law. Recently, the MIT economist Xavier Gabaix came up with an explanation for why Zipf’s law applies to city sizes. He said Zipf’s law emerges when all cities grow at the same rate, regardless of their size and their history, but subject to random variation. This implies that common factors drive the growth of cities within a country, while the differences in growth are due to a series of random events (“shocks” in the economic jargon), like, 152

for instance, bombing during the war, which in principle could occur anywhere. A story as simple as this is enough to explain the city sizes predicted by Zipf’s law.

Two consequences of Zipf’s law are crucial to soccer. First, giants—

whether giant cities, giant soccer clubs, or giants of any other kind—are rare. That is because becoming a giant requires a long sequence of positive shocks, like tossing a coin fifty times and coming up “heads” every time. It can happen, but it is rare. Second, once a city becomes a giant, it is unlikely to shrink into the middle ranks unless it experiences a long series of repeated misfortunes (fifty “tails” in a row). By contrast, small cities are unlikely ever to become giants. In other words, the hierarchy of cities, which has established itself over centuries, probably won’t change much in the foreseeable future.

This “law of proportionate growth” has some other consequences.

What’s true for cities is also true for many other social phenomena. For example, if your kid is behind at school, don’t worry: he or she will almost certainly catch up, since all children tend to learn at the same rate, plus or minus a few shocks. Likewise, if you think your brilliant six-year-old soccer player is going to become another Beckham or Rooney, don’t. More likely the boy had a few positive shocks in his early years, which will cancel out. Rooneys and Beckhams almost never happen. The distribution of talent is thus a bit like the distribution of city sizes: a few great talents stand out at the top, the Maradonas and Ronaldinhos, but as you go down the list, the differences become smaller and smaller.

This brings us back to European cities: there are only a few giants, chiefly Moscow, Istanbul, Paris, and London. You would expect these giant cities to produce the biggest clubs, yet none of them has ever won a Champions League.

But soon they might. Soccer is changing. It is becoming more of a free market, as fascist dictators no longer interfere and the best players are free to move between clubs almost at will. Inevitably, the best players are starting to move to the biggest markets, as happens in major league baseball. And so you would expect dominance in European soc-T H E S U B U R B A N N E W S A G E N T S

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cer to move, too: after rule by dictatorial capitals, midsize provincial towns, and big provincial cities, now London and possibly Moscow and Paris should get in on the act at last.

Moscow might, because it is Europe’s last large nondemocratic capital. Russia’s resources are being sent to the center, and with all that oil and gas under the soil, that’s a lot of resources. Paris might, because it has nearly 12 million inhabitants and only one top-division soccer club, Paris St Germain, which surely cannot be appallingly run forever.

London might do it, because even after the implosion of the City, London has the largest local economy in Europe. London already supports two of Europe’s biggest teams, and could probably cope with more. This represents quite a change. In the early 1990s, London rather resembled Moscow circa 1973. Tired people in gray clothes waited on packed platforms for 1950s Tube trains. Coffee was an exotic drink that barely existed. Eating a meal outside was forbidden. The city center was almost uninhabited, and closed at 11 p.m. anyway. There was a sense of permanent decline.

Nor had London ever been even the soccer capital of Britain. Only in 1931 did a southern club—Arsenal—first win the league. Even after that, though, the title generally went north.

But in the 1990s London transformed. Cheap flights from five airports took Londoners around Europe. Trains began running to Paris and Brussels. Today it is quicker to get there than to the shrinking northern cities of Liverpool and Manchester, and less of a culture shock when you arrive. London became a European city, detached from the rest of Britain. The geographer Daniel Dorling said Britain was starting to look like a city-state. Moreover, the city was starting to grow again.

Greater London’s population had been falling from the Second World War until the 1980s, but boom-time London changed that.

From the late 1990s until 2008, London offered a Technicolor vista of raucous young people from all over the world dressed in weird youth-culture outfits chucking cash at each other. The Tube trains ceased to be antique curios. The place came to smell of money. All this started to give London soccer dominance.

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At the same time as the city became fully international, so did the market in soccer players. The best ones could now work wherever they wanted. Many of them—like many investment bankers and actors—

chose London.

Black and foreign players liked living in a city where 95 percent of the inhabitants agree with the statement, “It is a good thing that Britain is a multicultural society.” When Thierry Henry was spending his best years at Arsenal, he said, “I love this open, cosmopolitan city.

Whatever your race, you never feel people’s gaze on you.” In a virtuous cycle, foreigners attract foreigners. The Frenchman Jacques Santini, Tottenham’s manager for about five minutes, wanted to come to London because his son Sebastien already lived there—a classic example of chain migration.

Equally to the point, even in the current economic crisis a soccer player can still earn a living in London. The capital’s clubs have been coining it. First, their customers can still afford to pay the highest ticket prices in global soccer. Arsenal charges about seventeen hundred dollars for its cheapest season ticket, which is a lot more than Barcelona charges for its most expensive. So many Londoners were happy to fork out this kind of money that Arsenal was able to build a new stadium with sixty thousand seats and sell it out. No club in London’s history has drawn such a large regular crowd. For the 2007–2008 season, the business advisory firm Deloitte ranked Arsenal and Chelsea among the world’s six richest clubs.