Soccernomics (38 page)

The country’s isolation continued even after that. As far as most South Africans were concerned, international soccer might still as well have been happening on Mars. Jordaan says, “South Africans played on their own. We thought we were so smart. That’s why when we played our first competitive match against Zimbabwe [in 1992], every South African knew we were going to hammer Zimbabwe. But Zimbabwe had this little player called Peter Ndlovu. Nobody knew Peter Ndlovu.

By halftime it was 3–0 for them. That was the first entry into international soccer. That really shook this country.”

As late as 1998, when South Africa entered its first World Cup, large swaths of the population assumed that the Bafana would win it. After all, everyone knew that their native style of “piano and shoeshine”—

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essentially, doing tricks on the ball while standing around—was just like Brazilian soccer but better. The Bafana did not win the World Cup.

Black South Africa was isolated twice over: first by sanctions, then by poverty. However, isolation—a distance from the networks of the world’s best soccer—is the fate of most poor countries. Their citizens can’t easily travel to Italy or Germany and see how soccer is played there, let alone talk to the best coaches. Some can’t even see foreign soccer on television, because they don’t have a television. And only a handful of the very best players in these countries ever make it to the best leagues in the world.

One reason poor countries do badly in sports—and one reason they are poor—is that they tend to be less “networked,” less connected to other countries, than rich ones. It is hard for them just to find out the latest best practice on how to play a sport.

Playing for national teams in Africa hardly lifts the isolation much.

Most poor, isolated African countries compete only against other poor, isolated African countries. At best, they might encounter the world’s best once every four years at a World Cup. No wonder they have little idea of what top-class soccer is like.

”THE ORGANIZERS. IT’S THE BIGGEST PROBLEM”: LONDON

For mysterious reasons, someone decided that the Bafana should play their annual charity match, the Nelson Mandela Challenge, not in the magnificent 78,000-seat FNB Stadium just outside Johannesburg, but more than five thousand miles away at Brentford’s Griffin Park in West London.

On a gray November London afternoon the day before the game in 2006, the South Africans were in their gray-colored three-star hotel on the outskirts of Heathrow Airport. In the lobby were flight crews, traveling salesmen, and cheery men in green-and-yellow tracksuits hanging with their entourage: the Bafana Bafana. Their opponents, the Egyp-tians, who were also staying in the hotel, had congregated in the bar.

Apparently, Egypt was furious. It had been promised a five-star hotel, and a match fee that had yet to materialize.

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Pitso Mosimane, the Bafanas’ caretaker manager—a big, bald, bullet-headed man—was also hanging around the lobby. Mosimane complained that African coaches never got jobs in Europe. He gestured toward the bar: “The coach of Egypt, who won the African Cup of Nations. Don’t you think he could at least coach a team in the English first division?” Then Mosimane went off for a prematch practice at Griffin Park.

Minutes later he was back at the table. “That was quick,” someone remarked. “No, we didn’t train!” Mosimane said. Nobody had bothered telling Brentford the Bafana were coming, and so the field wasn’t ready for them. Now they would have to play the African champions without having trained on the field. “And I’m carrying players who play for Blackburn Rovers and Borussia Dortmund, and you know? We’re laughing about it.” Mosimane jerked a thumb toward four men in suits drinking at the next table: “The organizers. It is the biggest problem.

This wouldn’t happen with any other national team.”

He was wrong. Organizational mishaps are always happening to national teams from poor countries. Senegal, for instance, clean forgot to enter the World Cup of 1994. On most sub-Saharan African national teams that do make it to a World Cup, players and officials have a ritual dispute over pay about a week before the tournament. In 2002

Cameroon’s dispute got out of hand, whereupon the squad made a brief airplane odyssey through Ethiopia, India, and Thailand before finally landing in Japan four days late. Jet-lagged and confused, the In-domitable Lions were knocked out in the first round. In 2006, Togo’s players spent much of their brief stay at the country’s first ever World Cup threatening to go on strike because of their pay dispute. They worried that after the tournament was over, Togo’s federation might never get around to paying them. Eventually, FIFA sidestepped the federation, paid the players’ bonuses directly, and told them to play or else, but it is little wonder that the team lost three matches out of three.

To win at sports, you need to find, develop, and nurture talent.

Doing that requires money, know-how, and some kind of administrative infrastructure. Few African countries have enough of any.

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”COLOURED” BEATS “BLACK”: THE CAPE FLATS

If you stand on Table Mountain at night and look down at Cape Town, you will see a city of lights. Next to the lights are the railway tracks.

And on the far side of the tracks are “black spots”: Coloured townships without lights. These are the rainy, murderous Cape Flats where most of South Africa’s best soccer players grew up.

Benni McCarthy of Blackburn is from the Cape Flats. So is his friend Quinton Fortune, for years a loyal reserve at Manchester United.

So is Shaun Bartlett, the most capped player in South African history.

The key point is that according to the racial classifications of apartheid, still tacitly used by South Africans today, none of these players are “black.” They are “Coloured”: a group of generally lighter-skinned people, mostly derived from the lighter African tribes of the Cape, though some descend from Asian slaves and mixed white-black liaisons. Less than 10 percent of South Africans are Coloured, while about three-quarters are black. However, Coloureds often make up as much as half of the Bafana team. Pienaar and striker Delron Buckley, for instance, are from Coloured townships in other parts of South Africa. This density of Coloured talent is a legacy of apartheid.

Under apartheid, the Coloureds were slightly better off than the blacks. They had more to eat and more opportunities to organize themselves. In the Coloured Cape Flats, for instance, there were amateur soccer clubs with proper coaches like you might find in Europe. Not so in black townships, where a boys’ team would typically be run by a local gangster or the shebeen owner, who seldom bothered much with training.

At the World Cup of 2010, to the irritation of many South African blacks, the Bafana will still be a largely “Coloured” team. The blacks are simply too poor to compete within their own country, let alone with Europeans. Even in the simplest game, the poor are excluded by malnutrition, disease, and disorganization.

That leaves one thing unexplained. Why is it that so many of the best European soccer players—Zidane, Drogba (officially an Ivorian but 272

raised in France), Ibrahimovic, Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo—

come from the poorest neighborhoods in Europe?

It cannot be that boys from the ghetto have an unquenchable hunger to succeed. If that were so, they would do better at school and in jobs outside soccer. There must be something about their childhoods that makes them particularly well suited to soccer. That reason is practice.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book
Outliers: The Story of Success,
popu-larized the “ten-thousand-hour rule.” This is a notion from psychology, which says that to achieve expertise in any field you need at least ten thousand hours of practice. “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” says neurologist Daniel Levitin in
Outliers,

“this number comes up again and again. . . . No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time.”

In soccer, it is the poorest European boys who are most likely to reach the ten-thousand-hour mark. They tend to live in small apartments, which forces them to spend time outdoors. There they meet a ready supply of local boys equally keen to get out of their apartments and play soccer. Their parents are less likely than middle-class parents to force them to waste precious time doing homework. And they have less money for other leisure pursuits. A constant in soccer players’

ghosted autobiographies is the monomaniacal childhood spent playing nonstop soccer and, in a classic story, sleeping with a ball. Here, for instance, is Nourdin Boukhari, a Dutch-Moroccan soccer player who grew up in an immigrant neighborhood of Rotterdam, recalling his childhood for a Dutch magazine:

I grew up in a family of eight children. . . . There was no chance of pocket money. . . . I lived more on the street than at home. . . . And look at Robin van Persie, Mounir El Hamdaoui and Said Boutahar.

And I’m forgetting Youssef El-Akchaoui. [Like the other players Boukhari mentions, El-Akchaoui is a current professional soccer player.] Those boys and I played on the street in Rotterdam to-T H E C U R S E O F P O V E R T Y

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gether. We never forget where we came from and that we used to have nothing except for one thing: the ball. . . .

What we have in common is that we were on the street every minute playing soccer, day and night. We were always busy, games, juggling, shooting at the crossbar. The ball was everything for me, for us. We’d meet on squares.

By the time these boys were fifteen, they were much better players than suburban kids. The ten-thousand-hour rule also explains why blacks raised in American ghettoes are overrepresented in basketball and football.

But it would be misleading to say these European soccer players grew up “poor.” By global standards, they were rich. Even in Cristiano Ronaldo’s Madeira, Rooney’s Croxteth, or Zidane’s La Castellane, children generally got enough to eat and decent medical care. It is true that Cristiano Ronaldo grew up in a house so small that they kept the washing machine on the roof, but in black South Africa, that washing machine would have marked the family as rich. Besides the ten-thousand-hour rule, there is another rule that explains sporting success: the fifteen-thousand-dollar rule. That’s the minimum average income per person that a country needs to win anything. There is only one way around this: be Brazil.

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TOM THUMB

The Best Little Soccer Country on Earth

In 1970, when Brazil won its third World Cup, it got to keep the Jules Rimet trophy. The little statuette of Nike, then still known mainly as the Greek goddess of victory, ended up in a glass case in the Brazilian federation’s offices in Rio de Janeiro. One night in 1983 the trophy was stolen and was never seen again.

However, the point is that everyone agrees that Brazil deserves the Jules Rimet. The fivefold world champion is undoubtedly the best country in soccer history. Our question here is a different one: which country is best after taking into account its population, experience, and income per capita? If Brazil is the absolute world champion, who is the relative champion, the biggest overperformer? That overachieving country deserves its own version of the Jules Rimet trophy—call it the Tom Thumb. And which countries are the worst underachievers relative to their resources? Along the way we will have to consider several impressive candidates and make some judgment calls before coming up with our winner and loser.

First of all, if we are dealing with statistics, we have to construct our arguments on the basis of large numbers of games played. There have 275

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only been eighteen World Cups, and most of these involved hardly any countries from outside Europe and Latin America. So crunching the numbers from World Cups might at best tell us something about the pecking order among the long-established large soccer nations. But when the difference between, say, Argentina’s two victories and England’s one comes down to as little as Diego Maradona’s “hand of God” goal, or the difference between Italy’s four and France’s one to a prematch pep talk given by Benito Mussolini to the referee in 1934 and a comment by Marco Materazzi about Zidane’s parentage in 2006, then the statistician needs to look elsewhere. Happily, since national teams play a lot of games, we have plenty of data. As in chapter 2, we will rely on the remarkable database of 22,130 matches accumulated by math professor Russell Gerrard.

The number of international matches has soared over time. Between the foundation of FIFA in 1904 and the First World War the number rose quickly to 50 per year. After 1918 growth resumed. By the eve of the Second World War, there were more than 100 international matches a year. But this was still a world dominated by colonial powers, and only with the independence movement after the war did international competition mushroom. In 1947 there were 107 international matches; by 1957 there were 203; by 1967, 308. Few new countries were founded in the next two decades, but the number of international matches continued to rise thanks to the jet plane, which made travel less of a pain and more financially worthwhile. In 1977 there were 368 international matches; in 1987 there were 393. At that point the world seems to have reached some sort of stable equilibrium.

But then the Soviet Union broke up into fifteen separate states, and Yugoslavia collapsed. The new countries flocked into FIFA. At the same time the commercial development of soccer meant that cash-hungry national associations were eager to play lucrative friendlies. In 1997 there were 850 international games, more than double the figure of a decade before.

If we concentrate on just the past twenty years or so of Russell’s database, from 1980 through 2001, a list of the most successful teams T O M T H U M B

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F I G U R E 1 4 . 1
The top ten national teams by win percentage, 1980–2001