Soccernomics (26 page)

In smaller countries, clubs from the capital have tended to rule. The Italian league was always dominated by Juventus, Milan, and Inter, and the Spanish league by Barcelona and Real Madrid. By the 1980s Bayern 176

Munich controlled the Bundesliga, and in the postwar era English soccer has been dominated by Manchester United, Arsenal, and Liverpool.

United’s ten titles in the past twenty years may sound boring, but Liverpool won ten in twenty between 1969 and 1988. Almost all other clubs are so firmly excluded from power that even giant Newcastle has not won the title since 1927. The imbalance in England as in all European leagues was reinforced by the European Cup (now the Champions League), which handed the dominant teams more money.

The old European Cup was seldom much fairer than the Champions League is now. We saw earlier in the book that only between 1970

and 1981 did clubs from modest-size towns regularly win the trophy.

Usually, the cup went to the biggest provincial cities, or to Madrid.

Even Platini admits, “For forty years it’s been the biggest clubs that won the Champions League; when I played, too. With or without homegrown players, it was Real Madrid, Liverpool, Manchester, Juventus who won. English clubs won the cup ten times in a row, I think. No?

In the 1980s.”

Oh, dear. Platini is not going to win any bar quizzes anytime soon.

In fact, English clubs won six straight European Cups from 1977

through 1982. But his point stands: inequality in European soccer is nothing new.

Platini smiles, thinking again of that English dominance in the 1980s: “It’s funny. There were no great debates then, saying, ‘We have to change everything.’ Today it’s the money that makes the difference.”

That is precisely the point. Today’s inequality in soccer bothers people not because it is unprecedented, but because it is more driven by money than it used to be. In the old days, a middling soccer team could suddenly enjoy years of dominance if it happened to hire an excellent manager who signed excellent players. That’s what happened in the 1970s to Liverpool under Bill Shankly, or to Nottingham Forest under Brian Clough. Today, a middling team can suddenly enjoy years of dominance if it happens to be bought by a billionaire who hires an excellent manager who signs excellent players. That is what happened to Chelsea under Roman Abramovich, and what may happen to Man-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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chester City under Abu Dhabian rule. So inequality in soccer, as well as not being boring, is not even new. All that’s new is the money.

Many people tend to feel that inequality becomes unfair when it is bought with money. It disgusts them that Chelsea (or the New York Yankees) can sign the best players simply because it is a rich club. This is a moral argument. It’s a form of idealistic egalitarianism, which says that all teams should have more or less equal resources. This stance may be morally right (we cannot judge), but it is not a practical political agenda, and it probably doesn’t reflect what most soccer fans want.

Spectators vote with their feet. It’s certainly not the case that millions of them are abandoning the Premier League because the money offends them. Based on the evidence of what they go to watch, they want to see the best players competing against each other. Many people will say they find Manchester United evil. Not many seem to find them boring.

COUCH POTATOES AND

THE STRUGGLE FOR WORLD DOMINATION

Sometime in the early 2000s, when Paul Tagliabue was NFL commissioner, he told the team owners something like this: “You have to ask yourself, ‘Do you want a potential fan base of 400 million or 4 billion in twenty or thirty years?’” His point was that if they wanted 4 billion, they’d have to find them abroad.

That was when the sporting struggle between the American and British empires finally got serious. The NBA had been trying to conquer the world since the 1980s, but at last the NFL plunged in, too. It now plays games each year in London and Toronto, and that may be just a first step.

The market in sports fans is becoming more global. This means that a century-old model of fandom—the man who supports the hometown team he inherited from his father—is collapsing. The new globalized sports fan will happily snub his local domestic league. If you live in London and you like football, you probably support an NFL team rather than some bunch of no-hopers playing on a converted rugby field 178

a few miles from your house. Similarly, if you live in the US and like soccer, you are more likely to support Manchester United than your local MLS team, which in any case may be hundreds of miles from your house. Even in Argentina, with its great historic soccer clubs, people increasingly watch United on TV. That’s all the more true in the US, China, or Japan, countries whose soccer fans mostly came of age during the second wave of sporting globalization.

These people want to see the real thing. Global fans want global leagues. For most of them, that means the NBA, the NFL, or the Premier League. It was therefore wrong to imagine that Beckham could save American soccer by playing for the Galaxy. American soccer is alive and well and lying on the sofa watching Manchester United on the Fox Soccer Channel.

The Premier League is going to spread ever further, and the NFL

will try to. This struggle won’t be fought to the death. There is room for them both. “I personally don’t know anybody who follows only one sport and nothing else,” Kirkwood, the NFL’s UK managing director, told us. “I don’t think it’s as competitive as it looks. We don’t have a vision of being a top-three sport in Britain. If you go into a big-enough market, you can carve a niche. So you can be an Arsenal fan and a New York Giants fan.”

Some Arsenal fans are going to become Giants fans, but probably a lot more Giants fans are going to become Arsenal fans. Long after the sun set on the British Empire, it is achieving a posthumous victory in sports.

PA RT I I

The Fans

Loyalty, Suicides, Happiness, and

the Country with the Best Supporters

THE COUNTRY THAT

LOVES SOCCER MOST

Which country loves soccer most?

This might sound like a matter of the heart that is hard to measure, but in fact the data exist. Loving soccer expresses itself in three main ways: playing the game, going to the stadium, and watching soccer on television. We have international figures for all three.

First, a caveat: not all the numbers are reliable. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, and statistics from outside the Western world tend to be even worse. We will therefore limit our quest to Europe. Using a bit of judgment, by the end of the chapter we will be able to say with some confidence which European country cares most about the game.

PLAYERS: OH, TO BE A TINY ISLAND

In 2006 FIFA tried to count how many people in the world played soccer. The “Big Count” came up with 265 million soccer players, more than 90 percent of them males. Some were registered with proper clubs.

The overwhelming majority, though, were “unregistered occasional 181

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players” who kicked around with friends on playgrounds and beaches and five-a-side courts. The only way to find out whether these people played soccer was by asking them—or at least a tiny representative sample of them.

None of these obstacles put off FIFA. The organization is a bit vague about exactly how it got ahold of the figures, saying it used “the standard practice of a questionnaire as well as an online tool.” It also threw in its Big Count 2000, plus a UEFA survey and other “internal analyses,” to “supplement missing data from associations and for plau-sibility purposes.” Reading between the lines of the survey, it seems that more than a fifth of national FAs didn’t even bother to take part. The whole endeavor was “scientifically observed by Lamprecht & Stamm SFB AG, a social research company based [handily] in Zurich.”

Anyway, the most ambitious survey of soccer participation in history came up with a list of the most enthusiastic soccer-playing countries.

China and the United States were found to have the most players (26

million and 24 million, respectively), but of course the key question is which countries had the largest proportion of their inhabitants playing.

Figure 9.1 shows FIFA’s list.

It’s striking how many of the most enthusiastic soccer players live on little islands where there presumably isn’t much else to do but play soccer and watch the waves roll in. The Faeroe Islands, Aruba, Barbados, Vanuatu, Anguilla, Bermuda, Iceland, and the Cook Islands (combined population about 1 million) all make the top twenty.

FIFA’s list is interesting if true. Let’s take the case of Mali, tenth on the list. This is a vast country with poor or nonexistent roads. It stretches much of the way across the Sahara. The average inhabitant has a daily income of about three dollars. Who worked out that 11 percent of the 12 million Malians play soccer?

Even the European figures are dubious. When the Mulier Instituut in the Netherlands set out to collate data on sports participation in the EU, it began its report with a series of caveats. Different countries use different methods to establish how many people play sports, it said.

“Even within a single year, research conducted in one and the same T H E C O U N T R Y T H AT L O V E S S O C C E R M O S T

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F I G U R E 9 . 1
Most enthusiastic soccer-playing countries
Percentage of population

Country

that plays soccer

Costa Rica

27

Germany

20

Faeroe Islands

17

Guatemala

16

Chile

16

Paraguay

16

Aruba

15

Barbados

13

Vanuatu

13

Mali

12

Anguilla

12

Austria

12

Norway

12

Slovakia

11

Sweden

11

Bermuda

11

Iceland

11

Netherlands

11

Ireland

10

Cook Islands

10

country can result in significant differences in the recorded figures for sport participation for up to 40 per cent.”

Still, when it comes to European countries at least, FIFA’s list probably has some value. That’s because Europe is an organized sort of continent where a high proportion of the people who play soccer are actually registered with a club. We have a good idea of how many registered soccer players there are, because every one of them belongs to the country’s soccer federation. So the number of registered players in a European country is a fair indicator of the total of all its soccer players.

By way of reality check, let’s see whether the European countries on FIFA’s overall list of most enthusiastic players have a lot of
registered
soccer players, too.

It turns out that Germany, Holland, Austria, and Sweden—all in the top twenty of most enthusiastic soccer countries per capita—also figure 184

in FIFA’s top-twenty countries with the most registered players. Furthermore, Slovakia is in the top-twenty countries with the most registered
male
players, even though it has only 5.4 million inhabitants. In the Faeroes, Norway, and Ireland, also on FIFA’s list of enthusiastic countries, a mammoth 10 percent or so of the population are registered players. Of the most enthusiastic European countries identified by FIFA, only Iceland lags a bit in registration: just 7 percent of Icelanders were registered players.

So it seems that the European countries in FIFA’s top twenty per capita might really play a lot of soccer. Without treating the Big Count as gospel, let’s give those nine Europeans countries on FIFA’s list a little star each, and continue our quest to find the most enthusiastic of them all.

SPECTATORS: GREAT HORDES OF PEOPLE

NOT GOING TO SOCCER MATCHES

Playing is one way of expressing a love of soccer. Going to watch matches is another.

When you think of packed soccer stadiums, you think of England.

Visually, soccer crowds are one of the things that the English do best.

And everyone knows that the Premier League has the biggest crowds in the world.

Well, the second-biggest crowds, anyway. The average attendance in the Premier League in the 2007–2008 season was 36,076. That was 3,000

fewer than went to see the average Bundesliga game that same year.

This fact comes from a weirdly addictive statistics Web site. The best thing about www.european-football-statistics.co.uk (run by the Dutchman Paul in ‘t Hout) is its collection of average attendance rates for almost every soccer league in Europe, though, sadly, not Albania.

These stats give surprising insights into fandom, and help reveal which European country is maddest about the game.

The first thing you notice on the Web site is how much attendance figures fluctuate over time. The data on the site go back decades. Back in the 1980s, when Italian stadiums were as safe as family restaurants T H E C O U N T R Y T H AT L O V E S S O C C E R M O S T

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and Serie A was the world’s best league, Italians watched far more soccer than the English. In the 1984–1985 season the average crowd in Serie A was 38,872. Napoli, for crying out loud, drew more than 77,000. Meanwhile, in the English first division in that year of Bradford and Heysel, only 21,080 braved the average league match.

How times change. By the 2007–2008 season, according to the stats obtained by In ‘t Hout, Serie A and the Premier League had pretty much changed places: the average Italian game drew only 23,180 people, a good 13,000 fewer than the Premier League. Juventus, the Old Lady herself, averaged just 20,930. Here are a few teams in Europe that outdrew her that season: Genk in Belgium, Heeren-veen in Holland, 1860 Munich (averaging more than 35,000 in Germany’s second division), nine clubs in the English Championship including both Sheffield sides, and Leeds United in League One, the third tier of English soccer.