Soccernomics (25 page)

This disposes of our first truism: the claim that the NFL is much more equal than the Premier League. What about the second one: the notion that sports fans, like French revolutionaries, desire equality?

If fans want all teams to be equal, then they will shun games in which results are predictable. If so, more of them will watch games whose outcome is very uncertain. How to test whether fans really behave like that? Researchers have tried to gauge expected outcomes of games either by using prematch betting odds or the form of both teams over the previous half-dozen games. Studies of soccer, mostly in England, show mixed results. Some studies find that more balanced games attract more fans. Others find the reverse.

The British economists David Forrest of Salford Business School and Robert Simmons of Lancaster University have done some of the best work in this field. They found that a balanced English game could sometimes increase attendance. However, they also carried out a simulation to show that if the English leagues became more balanced, they would attract
fewer
fans. That is because a balanced league, in which all teams are equally good, would turn into an almost interminable proces-sion of home wins. By contrast, in real existing soccer, some of the most balanced games occur when a weak team plays at home against a strong team (Stoke versus Manchester United, for instance).

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Forrest and Simmons found that the people who care most about competitive balance are television viewers. The spectators at the grounds tend to be the hard core: they simply want to see their team win. However, most TV viewers are “floating voters.” When the outcome of a game seems too predictable, they switch off. The two economists found that the closer a televised English soccer game was expected to be (measured by the form of both teams going into the game), the higher the viewing figures on Sky TV. Still, the size of this effect was modest. Forrest and Simmons said that even if the Premier League were perfectly balanced (in the sense that each team had an equal probability of winning each game), TV audiences would rise by only 6 percent. That would be a small effect for such a revolutionary change.

A moment’s thought suggests why some unequal games might be very attractive. Most fans in the stadium are fans of the home team, and so they do not really want a balanced outcome. Often the most attractive games involve strong home teams playing weak visiting teams (Manchester United versus Stoke, again), in which case the home team typically has a lot of supporters who enjoy watching their heroes score a lot of goals, or they are games between weak home teams and strong away teams (Stoke versus Manchester United), in which local fans come to see the visiting stars, or in the hope of an upset.

Furthermore, big teams have more fans than small ones, and so if Manchester United beats Stoke, more people are happy than if Stoke wins. Also, fans are surprisingly good at losing. Psychological studies show that they are skilled at transferring blame: “We played well, but the referee was garbage.” This means that fans will often stick with a team even if it always loses. It also explains why, the morning after their team gets knocked out of the World Cup, people don’t sink into depression but get on with their lives.

Last, dominant teams create a special interest of their own. Millions of people support Manchester United, and millions of others despise it.

In a way, both groups are following the club. United is the star of En -

glish soccer’s soap opera. Everyone else dreams of beating it. Much of the meaning of supporting a smaller club like West Ham, for instance, F O O T B A L L V E R S U S F O O T B A L L

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derives from disliking Manchester United. Kevin Keegan, when he was chasing the title as manager of Newcastle in 1996, thrillingly captured that national English sentiment with his famous, “I will love it if we beat them! Love it!” monologue. (United beat him instead.) Big bad United makes the Premier League more fun.

Another way of looking at competitive balance is to view the league as a whole, rather than match by match. Do more spectators come when the title race is exciting than when one team runs away with it?

It turns out that a thrilling title race does little to improve attendance. English fans will watch their teams play in the league even when they haven’t a hope of winning it (or else dozens of English clubs would not exist).

It is true that a game has to be significant to draw fans, but that significance need not have anything to do with winning the title. A study by Stephen Dobson and John Goddard showed that when a match matters more either for winning the league
or
for avoiding relegation to a lower league, then attendance tends to rise. In every soccer league in Europe, the bottom few teams are “relegated” at the end of the season to a lower tier. The worst three teams in the Premier League, for instance, drop to the Championship. It’s as if the cellar teams in Major League Baseball got exiled to Triple A. Relegation is brutal, but the device has a genius to it. The annual English relegation battle boosts fans’ interest to the point that teams at the bottom often outdraw teams at the top as the season comes to an end. The NFL, too, could do with a system of relegation. That would replace losers like the Lions with rising teams. This would be in the fans’ interest, but not in the owners’.

Fans need a reason to care. Most matches in the Premier League are significant for something or other, even if it’s only qualifying for European competition. Given that games can be significant in many different ways, it is unclear why a more balanced Premier League would create more significance.

There is a third way of looking at balance: the long term. Does the dominance of the same teams year in, year out turn fans off?

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Let’s compare a long period with dominance in English soccer to a long period without dominance: the fairly equal era that ran from 1949

to 1968, and the “unfair” era that began around 1989 and still continues today.

In the first, “equal,” twenty-year period, eleven different teams won the English league. The most frequent champion, Manchester United, won five titles in the period. The second period was far more predictable: only six teams won the title, with United taking it ten times.

Yet during the first “equal” period, total annual attendance in the top division fell from an all-time high of 18 million in 1949 to only 15 million in 1968 (and even that figure got a temporary boost from England winning the World Cup in 1966). During the second, “unequal,” period, total attendance rose from 8 million to 13 million, even though tickets became much more expensive and people had many more choices of how to spend their free time.

Anyone who dismisses the Premier League as “one of the most boring leagues in the world” (in the words of Kevin Keegan), a closed shop that shuts out smaller clubs from the lower divisions, has to explain why so many people now watch all levels of English league football. In the 2006–2007 season, 29.5 million spectators paid to see professional games in England, the highest number since 1970. The Premier League pulls fans even though, as Keegan has noted, everyone knows the top four finishers in advance. But more than half of those 29.5 million spectators in 2006–2007 watched the Football League, the three divisions below the Premier League. The clubs in the Championship, the second tier of English soccer, have supposedly been doomed to irrelevance by Manchester United, and can only dream of one day clinging on at the bottom of the Premier League, yet their division in 2006–2007 had the fifth-highest-average crowd of any league in Europe.

The Premier League’s inequality coexists with rising attendance, revenues, and global interest, not least from North American businessmen schooled in American major league sports: the Glazer family at United itself, Randy Lerner at Aston Villa, Tom Hicks and George F O O T B A L L V E R S U S F O O T B A L L

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Gillett at Liverpool. These people do not seem too worried about competitive balance in English soccer.

They have reasons to feel relaxed. The Premier League’s TV income is starting to catch up with the NFL’s. In the 1970s the NFL generated hundreds of millions of dollars annually when soccer in Europe was generating almost nothing. By 1980 the average NFL team still had nearly as much income a year as all the clubs in the English top division put together. Today the average Premier League team earns about $60

million a year from TV, or half as much as an NFL team. That’s pretty good given that England has 250 million fewer inhabitants than the US. Moreover, the gap between the two leagues has been closing, and is likely to close further as English soccer finally begins to make money out of the global market. One day, we might see English soccer chairmen buying NFL teams.

Some of English soccer’s critics have not digested these figures.

When we pointed out to Platini at UEFA’s headquarters on Lake Geneva that English stadiums are full nowadays, he replied, “Not all.

They’re full at the teams that win.” This argument is often made but flawed nonetheless. Whenever rows of empty seats appear at struggling teams like Blackburn or Middlesbrough, it is back-page news, and regarded as ominous for the Premier League as a whole. Yet it’s natural that some fans should desert disappointing teams, while others flock to exciting ones. Sunderland, Arsenal, Manchester United, and other clubs have built bigger stadiums and filled them. Not every English team has gained spectators since 1992, but most have. All twenty clubs in the Premier League in 2008 had a higher average attendance than in 1992.

If the team had been in the Premier League in 1992, the average increase was 63 percent; if it had risen from a lower division, the average increase was an even more handsome 227 percent. Of all ninety-two teams in the four highest English divisions, only seventeen had lower average crowds in 2008 than in 1992. The rising English tide had lifted almost every boat.

Admittedly, today’s large crowds don’t in themselves prove that dominance attracts fans. After all, many other things have changed in 174

England since the more equal 1949–1968 period. Crucially, the country’s soccer stadiums have improved. However, the rising attendance rates do make it hard to believe that dominance in itself significantly undermines interest. Indeed, pretty much every soccer league in Europe exhibits more dominance than the American major leagues, yet fans still go.

WHY DAVID BEAT GOLIATH

Strangely, it was the British fanzine
When Saturday Comes
that best expressed the joys of an unbalanced league.
WSC
is, in large part, the journal of small clubs. It publishes moving and funny pieces by fans of minnows like Crewe or Swansea. Few of its readers have much sympa-thy with Manchester United (though some, inevitably, are United fans).

Many of
WSC
’s writers have argued for a fairer league. Yet in September 2008 Ian Plenderleith, a contributor who lives outside Washington, D.C., argued in
WSC
that America’s MLS, in which “all teams started equal, with the same squad size, and the same amount of money to spread among its players’ wages,” was boring. The reason: “No truly memorable teams have the space to develop.” The “MLS is crying out for a couple of big, successful teams,” Plenderleith admitted. “Teams you can hate. Dynasties you really, really want to beat. Right now, as LA Galaxy coach Bruce Arena once memorably said: ‘It’s a crapshoot.’”

In short, the MLS lacks one of the joys of an unbalanced league: the David versus Goliath match. And one reason fans enjoy those encounters is that surprisingly often, given their respective budgets, the Davids win. The economist Jack Hirshleifer called this phenomenon “the paradox of power.” Imagine, he said, that there were two tribes, one large, one small. Each can devote its efforts to just two activities, farming and fighting. Each tribe produces its own food through farming, and steals the other tribe’s food through fighting. Which tribe will devote a larger
share
of its efforts to fighting?

The answer is the small tribe. The best way to understand this is to imagine that the small tribe is very small indeed. It would then have to F O O T B A L L V E R S U S F O O T B A L L

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devote almost all its limited resources to either fighting or farming. If it chose farming, it would be vulnerable to attack. Everything it produced could be stolen. On the other hand, if the tribe devoted all its resources to fighting, it would have at least a chance of stealing some resources.

So Hirshleifer concludes—and proves with a mathematical model—

that smaller competitors will tend to devote a greater share of resources to competitive activities.

He found many real-world examples of the paradox of power. He liked citing Vietnam’s defeat of the US, but one might also add the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the Dutch resis -

tance to the Spanish in the sixteenth century, or the American resistance to the British in the War of Independence. In these cases the little guy actually defeated the big guy. In many other cases, the little guy was eventually defeated, but at much greater cost than might have been expected based on physical resources (the Spartans at Thermopylae, the Afrikaners in the Boer War, the Texans at the Alamo).

In soccer as in war, the underdog tends to try harder. Big teams fight more big battles, and so each contest weighs a little less heavily than it does with their smaller rivals. Little teams understand that they may have few opportunities to compete at the highest level, and so they give it everything. They therefore probably win more often than you would predict based on ability alone.

NOTHING WORSE THAN NEW MONEY

Fans enjoy unbalanced modern soccer. Yet the complaints about its imbalance continue. The curious thing is that these complaints are relatively new, a product of the past fifteen or so years. Contrary to popular opinion, soccer was unbalanced in the past, too, but before the 1990s fewer people complained.

It is a fantasy that Europe was ever a very balanced soccer continent.