Soccernomics (36 page)

But if people gain a lot of happiness after hosting a tournament, they lose a little happiness before it. The ritual fuss over whether the H A P P I N E S S

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stadiums will be ready, whether English thugs will invade their country, whether their team will be made to look ridiculous appears to cause stress. Six years and four years before hosting a tournament, many of the subgroups we studied showed a decline in happiness.

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It turns out that hosting doesn’t make you rich, but it does make you happy. This begs a question. If countries want to host soccer tournaments (and American cities want to host major league teams) as part of their pursuit of happiness, why don’t they just say so? Why bother clothing their arguments in bogus economics?

The answer is that it took politicians a long time to discover the language of happiness. Until very recently, European politicians talked mostly about money. Anything that served only to make people happy was derided with the contemptuous phrase “feel-good factor,” as if politics should be above such trivialities. Most politicians simply assumed that the real business of government was to make people richer. For one thing, measuring income was easier than measuring happiness. And so, when politicians argued for hosting tournaments, they typically used the language of money. It was almost the only vocabulary they had.

But it gradually became clear that in rich countries, more money didn’t make people happier. Robert Kennedy was one of the first to see this, remarking in March 1968, three months before he was murdered, that the gross domestic product “measures everything . . . except that which makes life worthwhile.”

Only in the past few years have many European politicians begun talking less about money and more about happiness. In Britain, the change is obvious: Gordon Brown is an old-fashioned “money” politician, whereas David Cameron is more of a newfangled “happiness” one.

In a speech in 2006, Cameron tried to introduce the acronym

“GWB”—“general well-being”—to counter the decades-old “GDP” for

“gross domestic product.” He said, “Improving our society’s sense of well-being is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times. . . .

Politics in Britain has too often sounded as though it was just about 250

economic growth.” Instead, Cameron wanted politics “to recognize the value of relationships with family, friends and the world around us.”

It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies. We’ve seen that the mere fact of following a team in the World Cup deters some very isolated people from committing suicide. If playing in a tournament creates social cohesion, hosting one creates even more. The inhabitants of the host country—and certainly the men—come to feel more connected to everyone else around them. Moreover, hosting can boost the nation’s self-esteem, and so makes people feel better about themselves.

Even politicians are made happy by hosting. Most of their work is frustrating. You try to get money to build, say, roads, but other politicians stop you. Even when you get the money, it’s hard to build the roads because people pop up to object. It’s the same with housing or foreign policy or recycling: being a politician is an endless tedious struggle with your enemies.

But it isn’t when you want to host a sports tournament. Suddenly, everyone gets on board. While London was bidding for the Olympics, the rower Steve Redgrave pulled an Olympic gold medal out of his pocket during a meeting at the House of Commons, and MPs of all parties began drooling over him. Even going to war doesn’t create that sort of unanimous sentiment anymore.

The end of ideology—the disappearance of nationalism, socialism, religion, communism, and fascism from western Europe—has left many politicians with little better to do than to plug sports events using specious arguments. Ken Livingstone wrote when he was mayor of London, “Crucially, the Olympics will also bring much-needed new facilities: an Olympic-size swimming pool in a city that has just two Olympic pools to Berlin’s 19, and a warm-up track that would be turned over to community use.”

Plainly, arguments like these are just excuses. If you want to regenerate a poor neighborhood, regenerate it. Build nice houses and a train H A P P I N E S S

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line. If you want an Olympic pool and a warm-up track, build them.

You could build pools and tracks all across London, and it would still be cheaper than hosting the Olympics. The only good reason to host an Olympics is that it makes people happy. The politicians behind London’s bid did not say so, because when the city was bidding in the early 2000s they hadn’t yet discovered the politics of happiness. But they did sense that the voters would reward them for winning the Games.

The London Games may pay for themselves in terms of happiness.

After all, in 2008 the monthly income of the third quartile of British earners was £1,033 (then about $1,800), while the top quartile earned

£2,608 (about $4,500). Based on past data, the increase in happiness from hosting could be as much as $2,750 per employee, or a staggering national total of $54 billion worth of happiness. The eight million Londoners, in particular, have the highest incomes in the European Union, and so would need to receive a fortune in tax rebates to buy the happiness that the Games could bring them.

Puritans might rightly argue that even a rich country like Britain has better things on which to spend money. However, the likely gain in happiness from the Olympics does mean the politicians are canny to give the people bread and circuses. In postmaterialist countries like Britain, the math of hosting and happiness probably stacks up.

But it’s much less likely that South Africa will get its money’s worth in happiness from hosting the World Cup. This is still very much a sub-

$15,000 country, where putting more money in people’s pockets would make them happier. About a third of all South Africans live on less than $2 a day. These people need houses, electricity, vacations, doctors.

We already know that the World Cup won’t make Sowetans richer.

It’s also questionable whether it’s an efficient way to make them happier. At last count, the ever-rising bill for the stadiums alone for the World Cup stood at 13 billion rand, or about $1.6 billion (up from an initial estimate of 2 billion rand). For $1.6 billion you could buy hundreds of thousands of houses for poor people, or a lot more than the South African government builds each year. The World Cup will keep a lot of South Africans in shacks.

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Driving out of Soweto, you see the pain in the advertisements painted on the roadside billboards: “Motaung Funeral Directors—We Salute the Spirit of Ubuntu!” There are also the “21st Century Funeral Brokers,” or you can buy a “Rasta funeral.” Just outside town, you pass a flower bed beside the road where the flowers form the shape of a number: “2010.” It’s the year the Americans will land in airplanes and save everybody.

PA RT I I I

Countries

Rich and Poor, Tom Thumb,

Guus Ghiddink, Saddam, and

the Champions of the Future

13

THE CURSE OF POVERTY

Why Poor Countries Are Poor at Sports

When Didier Drogba was five, his parents put him on a plane in the Ivory Coast and sent him to live with an uncle in France. The six-hour flight, alone with his favorite toy, passed in a blur of tears and tissues.

About a decade later Drogba’s father lost his job at a bank in Ivory Coast, and the family moved to a suburb of Paris, where they were re-united with their exiled son. Eight Drogbas ended up living in an apartment of about 110 square feet. “A very large wardrobe, really,” Drogba recalled in his autobiography. “Hard. Very hard. Even enough to drive you crazy.” The apartment was cold, and his little brothers were so noisy he couldn’t concentrate on his schoolwork. “Luckily, my father had allowed me to start playing soccer again.”

There is a myth that poor people are somehow best equipped to make it as sportsmen. A cliché often used about them is that sport is their “only escape route from poverty.” The poor are supposedly figura-tively “hungrier” than the rich. If they are black, like Drogba, they are sometimes thought to have greater genetic gifts than white people.

And the evidence that poor people excel at sports seems to be in front of our eyes. England is not the only national soccer team dominated by 255

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players from lowly backgrounds. France since the 1990s has generally fielded a majority of nonwhite players, and few Brazilian internationals are sons of corporate lawyers, either. Most of the world’s best soccer players started life poor: South Americans like Diego Maradona, who as a toddler almost drowned in a local cesspit, Africans like Samuel Eto’o who appear to support hundreds of people back home, or European immigrants like Zlatan Ibrahimovic or Zinedine Zidane, who grew up in some of the toughest neighborhoods on the Continent.

Drogba’s childhood was only slightly more Dickensian than most. The origins of American basketball players and football players are mostly lowly, too. The best preparation for sporting greatness seems to be a poor childhood.

Yet it is not. The facts show that the world’s poor people and poor countries are worse at sports than rich ones. It is true that poorer immigrants in rich countries often excel at sports, but the reasons for that have nothing to do with skin color or “hunger.”

Let’s look at poor countries first. The vast majority of countries on earth are even more firmly excluded from sporting success than England is, simply because they are poor. This becomes apparent in a simple exercise to discover which country is the world’s best at sports and which country is best for its size.

To find the best countries, we combined the historical results from many major international sporting events: the Summer and Winter Olympics, World Cups in several sports, and the most popular individual sports. For some sports the data go back more than a century, for others, only a couple of decades. For all sports, we took 2006 as the end point.

Our methodology is not perfect. We started with the men’s world cups in biggish sports that have seldom or never featured at the Olympics. We ranked the top five countries in these sports, based first on the number of world titles they have won, and in case of ties, on finishes in the final four. We gave the best country in each sport five points, the second four, the third three, the fourth two, and the fifth T H E C U R S E O F P O V E R T Y

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one. There is no need to read the rankings for every sport, but following are the detailed points tallies for those who are interested:
Rugby Union

Australia

New Zealand

England

South Africa

France

Karate
(counting only team events)

Japan

France

England

Spain

Italy and Turkey

1 each

Cricket

Australia

West Indies

India

Pakistan

Sri Lanka

Baseball was trickier. Historically the US dominates the sport.

However, it traditionally sends amateurs or minor leaguers to the world cup. The US ranks only third all-time in the tournament. But we used our judgment to rank it as the world’s best country in baseball, producing this ranking:

US

Cuba

Venezuela

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Colombia

South Korea

Basketball is an Olympic event. However, as the world’s second-most-popular team game it deserves additional input in this quest. We therefore added the results of the basketball world cup. Again the US rarely fields its best players, and historically ranks second behind Yugoslavia. But using common sense we placed the US first here, too, producing this ranking: US

Yugoslavia

USSR/Russia

Brazil

Argentina

Favoring the US in baseball and basketball did not affect the outcome of our quest.

The only women’s world cup we counted was soccer. Women’s soccer is an Olympic event, too, but far more popular than most other women’s team games, and therefore it seemed to merit more input. The rankings for women’s soccer:

US

Norway and Germany

4 each

Sweden

China

We also assessed popular individual sports that are seldom or never represented in the Olympics. We rewarded countries for triumphs by their citizens. In tennis we counted men’s and women’s Grand Slam tournaments—tennis being a rare sport in that it is played widely by women. We used only results from the “Open era” starting in 1968, when tennis became very competitive.

T H E C U R S E O F P O V E R T Y

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Men’s Tennis

US

Sweden

Australia

Czechoslovakia

Spain and Switzerland

1 each

Women’s Tennis

US

Germany

Australia

Yugoslavia

France

In golf we used the results of the men’s majors:

US

Britain (including all four home countries)

South Africa

Australia

Spain

In chess we ranked countries by the number of years that they provided the world champion:

USSR/Russia

Germany

France

US

Cuba

In cycling we counted victories by citizens of each country in the Tour de France, a more prestigious event than the world championship: 260

France

Belgium

US

Italy

Spain

In auto racing we chose the most prestigious competition, Formula I, thus discriminating against the US, which prefers its own races.

Again, we counted world championships by citizenship. The rankings: Britain

Brazil

Germany

Argentina

France, Australia, and Austria

1 each

We did not include the world cups of popular sports like volleyball and ice hockey, because these are Olympic sports, and so we will assess them through their role in the Olympics’ all-time medals table. Boxing was too hard to assess, as there are various rival “world championships.”