Soccernomics (37 page)

We also excluded the athletics world cup. Athletics is copiously represented at the Olympics, and for most of the history of its world cup, the entrants have been entire continents rather than single countries.

Clearly, the Summer and Winter Games deserve to carry more weight in our quest than any single world cup. In the Summer Olympics of 2004, medals were awarded in twenty-eight sports. Many of these, such as archery or kayaking, are played by very few people.

Still, because of the event’s profusion of sports and its prestige, we gave the Summer Games ten times the weighting of world cups in single sports. So we gave the top country in the all-time medals table 50

points rather than 5 points for a single world cup. Because the whole planet competes in the Olympics—unlike, say, in baseball or cricket—

we rewarded the top ten rather than five countries in the all-time medals table. The ranking:

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

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US

50 points

USSR/Russia

40

Britain

30

France

20

Italy

10

Hungary

East Germany (GDR)

Germany

Sweden

Australia

We gave the Winter Olympics three times the weighting of a world cup. Because few countries play winter sports, we rewarded only the top five in the all-time medals table:

Norway

15 points

US

12

USSR/Russia

Germany

Austria

Finally, the soccer world cup. Soccer is an Olympic sport, but it is also the planet’s most popular game. We gave its world cup six times the weighting of world cups in other sports, and rewarded the top ten countries in the all-time points table. The ranking:

Brazil

30 points

Germany

24

Italy

18

Argentina

12

England

France

Spain

Sweden

262

Netherlands

USSR/Russia

We then totaled up all the points. Here are our top twenty-one best sporting countries on earth:

US

97

USSR/Russia

58

Britain

51

Germany

49

France

40

Brazil

36

Italy

31

Australia

20

Norway

19

Argentina

15

Sweden

11

Spain

Hungary

East Germany and Yugoslavia

South Africa, Japan, and Cuba

New Zealand, Austria, and Belgium

The winner, the US, deserves particular praise given that we omitted two of its favorite sports, football and NASCAR, because nobody else plays them. The USSR/Russia in second place can be slightly less pleased with itself, because it won most of its points when it was still a multinational empire. Third place for Britain/England shows that the country has punched above its weight, though more so in the distant past than recently. Germany, in fourth place, is a dangerous sleeper. If we credit the united country with East Germany’s Olympic medals (and forget all the male growth hormones that went into winning them), then Germany jumps to second place overall with 75 points.

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Australia in eighth place did brilliantly given that we ignored its prowess at its very own version of football, “Aussie Rules.” Brazil was the best developing country, and would have been even if it didn’t play soccer, thanks to its successful diversification into basketball and Formula I auto racing. India (1.1 billion inhabitants, 3 points for cricket) and China (1.3 billion, 1 point for women’s soccer) were the biggest flops per capita.

But which country is world champion per capita? To find out, we worked out how many points each country scored per million inhabitants. That produced this top ten of overperformers:

Norway

Sweden

1.22

Australia

0.98

New Zealand

0.97

United Germany*

0.91

Britain/England

0.85

Hungary

0.8

West Indies**

0.77

France

0.67

Italy

0.54

* Including the GDR’s Olympic medals

**Or the nations that together supply almost all West Indian cricketers, namely, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Barbados, and Antigua
Heia Norge,
again. The country that we had already crowned as the most soccer mad in Europe now turns out to be the best per capita at sport. Norway’s lead is so large that it would most probably have won our sporting Tom Thumb trophy even with a different scoring system, even, say, if we had valued the Winter Olympics only as much as a cricket or baseball world cup. This is a country where at a state kinder-garten in suburban Oslo in midafternoon, among the throng of mothers picking up their toddlers, someone pointed out to us an anonymous 264

mom who happened to be an Olympic gold medalist in cross-country skiing. Norway won more points in our competition than all of Africa and Asia (excluding Oceania) put together. We could even have omitted the Winter Olympics—almost a Norwegian fiefdom—and the country would still have made the top five of our efficiency table, thanks to its prowess at women’s soccer.

But the main thing the top of our rankings demonstrates is the importance of wealth. Our efficiency table for sports bears a curious resemblance to another global ranking: the United Nations’ human development index. This measures life expectancy, literacy, education, and living standards to rank the countries of the world according to their well-being. We found that a nation’s well-being is highly correlated with its success in sports. Which country is top of the UN’s human development index for 2008 (based on data for 2006)?
Heia
Norge,
again.

Tied for first in the index with Norway was Iceland, though the country that turned itself into a hedge fund and then blew itself up may have slipped a little since. Iceland, with only 300,000 inhabitants, was never going to win any of our sporting points. But Sweden was second in the world for sports and seventh for human development. And the fourth country in the UN’s human development index, Australia, was our sporting number three. In all, eight of the countries in our sporting top ten were also among the UN’s twenty-three most developed countries on earth. The only poorer nations that sneaked into our sporting top ten were Hungary (with its vast Olympic program under communism) and the West Indian nations. However, even these poor cousins were all classified by the UN as “highly developed” countries except for Jamaica and Guyana, whose development was “medium.” Generally, the most developed countries also tend to be best at sports.

The case of Norway shows why. It’s Norwegian government policy that every farmer, every fisherman, no matter where he lives in the country, has the right to play sports. Norway will spend what it takes to achieve that. Just as supermarkets have sprouted all over Britain, there are all-weather sports grounds everywhere in Norway. Even in the un-T H E C U R S E O F P O V E R T Y

265

likeliest corners of the country there’s generally one around the corner from your house. Usually the locker rooms are warm, and the coaches have acquired some sort of diploma. A kid can play and train on a proper team for well under $150 a year, really not much for most Norwegians.

Almost everyone in the country plays something. Knut Helland, a professor at Bergen University who has written a book on Norwegian sports and media, notes that Norway has the biggest ski race in the world with about 13,000 participants. “I’m taking part in it myself,” he adds. When the European Commission studied time use in European countries in 2004, it found that the Norwegians spent the most time playing sports: on average, a whopping thirteen minutes a day. People all over the world might want to play sports, but to make that possible requires money and organization that poor countries don’t have.

In short, poor countries are generally poorer at sport. It’s no coincidence that China won nothing at sports before its economy took off and that it topped the medals table at the Beijing Olympics afterward.

Most African countries barely even try to compete in any sports other than soccer and a few track events. And the best place to find out why the world’s poor do worse than the world’s rich is South Africa, where some very poor and very rich neighborhoods are almost side by side, separated only by a highway or a golf course.

South Africa is the one African country to score any points at all in our sporting table. Yet it owes almost all those points to an ethnic group that makes up less than 10 percent of the country’s inhabitants: white people.

Only about 4.3 million of the 48 million South Africans are white.

Nonetheless, whites accounted for 14 of the 15 players in the Springbok rugby team that won the world cup in 1995, 13 of the 15 that won it in 2007, as well as all five South African golfers who have won majors, and nearly all the country’s best cricketers. If we treated white South Africa as a separate country, then their five sporting points would have put it in third place in the world in our sporting efficiency table. That is entirely predictable. South African whites were nurtured under apartheid on almost all the resources of the country.

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The national teams of South African whites now dominate their respective sports. At the time of this writing, the country’s mostly white cricket team is ranked second in the world, while the mostly white Springbok rugby team is world champion. Nonwhite South Africa’s national team does less well. As we write, the “Bafana Bafana” soccer team, sometimes known at home as the “Banana Banana,” is seventy-second in FIFA’s rankings, a few spots behind Panama and Gambia.

Here are five vignettes to explain why black South Africa and other poor nations fail at sport:

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT: JOHANNESBURG

Steven Pienaar, Everton’s South African midfielder, has the frame of a prepubescent boy. There’s hardly a European soccer player as reedy as he is. But in South African soccer his body type is common. Frank Eulberg, a German who very briefly was assistant coach of the Kaizer Chiefs, South Africa’s best team, says that when he arrived at the club, sixteen of the players were shorter than five foot nine. “I sometimes thought, ‘Frank, you’re in the land of the dwarves.’”

Most likely, Pienaar is reedy because he grew up malnourished and without much access to doctors. He was born in a poor Coloured township in 1982, the height of apartheid, when almost all money and health care went to whites. Growing tall is not just a matter of what you eat.

When children become ill, their growth is interrupted, and because poor children tend to get ill more often than rich ones, they usually end up shorter.

Most of the players who will represent South Africa in 2010 were born in nonwhite townships in the 1980s. And so the ghost of apartheid will bug the Bafana at the World Cup. One reason South Africans are so bad at soccer is that most of them didn’t get enough good food.

Apartheid, based on the bogus ideology that races are different, ended up creating white, black, “Coloured,” and Indian South Africans who really were like separate peoples. The whites on average tower over T H E C U R S E O F P O V E R T Y

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the blacks. No wonder the cricket and rugby teams are so much better than the Bafana. “Well, they have their moments,” laughs Demitri Constantinou.

This descendant of Greek immigrants, an exercise scientist at Wits University in Johannesburg, directs FIFA’s first medical center of excellence in Africa. When we met, he was running a project with the South African Football Association to help develop young soccer players.

Constantinou’s team tested the health of all the players selected for SAFA’s program. In a Woolworths tearoom in one of Johannesburg’s posh northern suburbs, among white ladies having afternoon tea, he says, “The biggest issue was nutrition.” Is malnutrition one reason African teams perform poorly at World Cups? “I think yes. And I think it has been overlooked as a possible cause.”

Hardly any players in the latter stages of the World Cup of 2006

were shorter than about five foot eight, Constantinou notes. “There is a minimum height.” If a large proportion of your male population was below that height, you were picking your team from a reduced pool.

Conversely, though he didn’t say it, one reason that Norway and Sweden (two of the three tallest countries in the world) excel at sport is that almost all their male inhabitants are tall enough. They are picking their teams from a full pool.

A BEAST INTO A TOOTHPICK: CAPE TOWN

George Dearnaley is a big, ruddy white man who looks like a rugby player, but in fact he was once the Bafanas’ promising young center forward. Dearnaley never got beyond promising, because when he was in his early twenties his knee went. He didn’t mind much. He spoke a bit of Zulu, and had studied literature and journalism at college in Toledo, Ohio, and so he joined the soccer magazine
Kick Off
. Now he is its publisher as well as the author of an excellent column.

Over an English breakfast in a Cape Town greasy spoon near the
Kick Off
offices, Dearnaley reflected on the Amazulu team in Durban where his career peaked. Seven of his teammates from the Amazulu 268

side of 1992 were now dead, out of a squad of about twenty-four. Dearnaley said, “One guy died when his house exploded, so that was probably a taxi war or something. But the rest must have been AIDS. One player, a Durban newspaper said he was bewitched. A six-foot-four beast of a man, who was suddenly whittled down to a toothpick.”

Constantinou says it’s quite possible that a fifth of the Bafanas’ potential pool of players for 2010 carries the HIV virus. How many South Africans who could have played in 2010 will be dead instead?

THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON:

SANDTON, JUST OUTSIDE JOHANNESBURG

It is quite a step for Danny Jordaan to be organizing a World Cup, because until he was thirty-eight he had never even seen one. The chief executive officer of the World Cup 2010 grew up a million miles from the world’s best soccer. Being in South Africa under apartheid was not quite like being on the moon, or being in North Korea, but it was almost as isolated. South Africa was the last industrialized country to get television, in 1976, because the white government was afraid of the device. Even after that hardly any blacks had TV sets, and FIFA did not allow its World Cup to be broadcast in the apartheid state. So the first time Jordaan saw a World Cup on television was in 1990.