Soccernomics (39 page)

Win Goal

Team

Played

Won

Tied

percentage

difference

Brazil

285

0.625

0.235

0.742

1.29

Germany (united)

128

0.609

0.219

0.719

0.97

France

188

0.590

0.239

0.710

0.98

Italy

203

0.557

0.276

0.695

0.78

Iraq

146

0.548

0.288

0.692

1.13

Czech Republic

83

0.554

0.217

0.663

0.88

Yugoslavia

(Serbia and Montenegro)

65

0.523

0.277

0.662

0.78

Spain

198

0.520

0.273

0.657

0.88

West Germany

102

0.520

0.265

0.652

0.76

England

228

0.491

0.320

0.651

0.84

features the usual suspects. Let’s rank the top ten countries by the percentage of games won, or, given that around one-third of matches are ties, by the “win percentage” statistic calculated by valuing a tie as worth half a win.

The top four are exactly as you would expect. Even in a twenty-two-year period when Brazil won just one World Cup and tried to reinvent its national style of soccer, its win percentage was almost 75 percent.

That equates to bookmakers’ odds of 3 to 1, or about as close as you can get to a sure thing in a two-horse race.

Strangely, the old West Germany appears only near the bottom of the top ten, alongside England with a win percentage of around 65 percent. Moreover, England’s average goal difference was actually slightly higher than West Germany’s. It’s just that West Germany had a knack of winning the matches that counted.

Only in fifth place do we find our first big surprise: Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. It was the only country other than Brazil in this period to win its matches by an average of more than a goal a game. Of course, the Iraqis’ presence illustrates the problem of ranking national teams absent a league format. It is hard to imagine that they would have done all that well against the other teams in the top ten. In fact, they did not meet any of them in full internationals during this period (Saddam’s 278

boys didn’t get many invitations to friendlies at Wembley). Mostly, Iraq beat Middle Eastern and Asian countries.

Yet whatever their route to the top ten, getting there was some achievement. The years from 1980 through 2001—wars, massacres, sanctions, Saddam—were not happy ones for Iraq. Nonetheless, the country produced a “golden generation” of soccer players.

It did so under the thumb of the ruling family, which loved sports.

Each April Baghdad celebrated Saddam’s birthday by hosting the “Saddam Olympics.” You may not have caught these on ESPN, but as late as 2002, with Baghdad’s Russian-Iraqi Friendship Society as sponsor, these Games attracted athletes from seventy-two countries. And not many people know that Baghdad was also bidding to host the real Olympics in 2012 before events intervened.

Saddam left control of the soccer team to his bestial son Uday. A play-boy and pervert, paralyzed from the waist down in an assassination attempt, Uday motivated his players by threatening to amputate their legs if they lost. One former international reported being beaten on the soles of his feet, dragged on his bare back through gravel, and then dipped in raw sewage so that his wounds would be infected. Some players spent time in Abu Ghraib prison. After Kuwait came to Baghdad in 1981 and won, one of the ruling family’s helpers beat up the referee, who was then

“driven hurriedly to the airport and put bleeding on a plane out of the country,” writes Declan Hill in his book on global match fixing,
The Fix
.

Stories like these from Iraqi defectors prompted FIFA to send a committee to Iraq to investigate. The Iraqis produced players and coaches who swore blind that it was all lies. FIFA believed them, and so the Lions of Mesopotamia were allowed to keep on collecting prizes.

Only when American troops entered Baghdad in 2003 did they find the prison Uday maintained in the basement of Iraq’s Olympic headquarters. It featured “a rack and a medieval torture device used to rip open a man’s anus,” writes James Montague in his
When Friday Comes:
Football in the War Zone
.

But despite everything, under Saddam the Lions of Mesopotamia were the strongest team in the world’s largest continent. Though they T O M T H U M B

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had to play on neutral ground for much of Saddam’s reign due to the war with Iran, they qualified for the World Cup of 1986 and for three Olympics. They won the 1982 Asian Games, four Arab Nations Cups, three Gulf Cups of Nations, and the 1985 Pan Arab Games despite fielding a B team. As Iraqi supporters used to chant (often while firing bullets into the air): “Here we are Sunni—yah! Here we are Shiite—

yah! Bring us happiness, sons of Iraq!” Even Kurds supported the Lions.

Montague calls the team “arguably the last symbol of national unity left in Iraq.” Only in the 1990s, as Saddam’s regime became even more isolated and brutal, did Iraqi soccer decline.

All this may be a case of people immersing themselves in soccer because it was their only form of public expression. Huthyfa Zahra, an Iraqi artist who now produces soccer-themed “pop art” from the safety of nearby Abu Dhabi, says, “Even during the wars, in the nineties, there were bombs above us, and we were playing in the streets. Because we didn’t have anything to do.”

Why were the Lions so good under Saddam? Zahra is surprised to hear that they were. “We are much better now,” he replies. “Because the players play without fear now. If you don’t feel comfortable, you can’t play.” He points out that since the fall of Saddam and Uday, Iraq’s Lions have finished fourth in the Athens Olympics and won the Asian Cup of 2007. If Iraq ever experiences normality, then watch out Brazil.

Also in our top ten of most successful soccer countries, the new Czech and Serbian republics inherited proud soccer traditions. Even so, their performances are remarkable: each country has only about 10 million inhabitants, compared to the 40–80 million of the large European nations and Brazil’s 178 million.

Some readers may be surprised to see Spain and England complete the top ten, given that both countries are often described as “notorious underachievers”—meaning that they don’t win as many championships as the very best teams.

Pace
Brazil and Iraq, one thing the table tells us is that Europeans dominate world soccer. The continent has eight countries in the top ten.

The most obvious explanation for that is tradition: European nations 280

are generally older, and have played international soccer for longer, than the rest of the world. It may also help that control of global soccer has largely remained in Europe. FIFA makes the rules of the game from a posh suburb of Zurich, and although western Europe has only 6 percent of the world’s population, it has hosted ten out of eighteen World Cups.

But tradition does not in itself secure dominance. If it did, then British companies would still dominate industries like textiles, ship-building, and car making. Dominance is transitory unless producers have the resources to stay ahead of the competition. The key resource in soccer is talent. Generally speaking, the more populous countries are more likely to have the largest supply of talented people. We have also seen that rich countries are best at finding, training, and developing talent. In short, it takes experience, population, and wealth to make a successful soccer nation.

The easy bit is recognizing this. The hard work is assembling the data to answer our question: which countries do best relative to their resources of experience, population, and wealth?

Thankfully, Russell’s data can help us with the issue of experience.

He has a complete list of every single international game in history.

With it, we can measure the cumulative number of games a country had played up to any given date. Sweden is the most experienced nation in soccer, with 802 internationals played through 2001, while England had played 790, Argentina 770, Hungary 752, Brazil 715, and Germany (including West but not East Germany) 713. Pedants might dispute some of these numbers—identifying international games is often a judgment call if we go back more than fifty years, when arrangements could be quite informal—but even if these figures were off by 5 percent, it wouldn’t significantly affect the statistical analysis.

We also have data on each country’s income. The measure typically used is gross domestic product. GDP is the total value of all goods and services bought and sold within an economy. (It includes imports and exports, but excludes income from assets owned overseas and profits repatriated to foreign countries.) The best source for GDP figures are the Penn World Tables, produced by the Center for International Com-T O M T H U M B

281

parisons at the University of Pennsylvania. The center has estimates of GDP for 188 countries between 1950 and 2004. To measure the economic resources available to each person, it divides GDP by population.

Admittedly, there are all sorts of finicky issues involved in making comparisons across countries and across time, not to mention worries about measurement error and statistical reliability. Nonetheless, these data are the best we’ve got.

Now we run the multiple regressions we described in chapter 2. Our aim is to find the connection between goal difference per game and our three key inputs—population, wealth, and experience—while also allowing for home advantage.

After all these pyrotechnics, we can make another ranking. But this time, we can compensate all the world’s national teams for that trio of factors beyond their control: experience, population, and income per head.

Oddly, if we rank every team no matter how few international matches they have played, it is the “Stans” of central Asia that emerge as the world’s leading overperformers relative to their experience, income, and populations. Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan all feature in our first draft of a top ten of overachieving countries. All the Stans are poor in experience and income, while Tajikistan and Turkmenistan are short of inhabitants, too. Most of the Stans have a negative goal difference, but they do not lose as badly as they have reason to fear. Even so, their high rankings feel counterintuitive: name five great Uzbek soccer players. The fact is that these countries do well not because they are particularly good at soccer but because they have exploited a geographical loophole.

When the Stans were still Soviet republics, they were a part—albeit a distant part—of European soccer. Their clubs played in Soviet leagues, and their best players dreamed of playing in all-Soviet “national” teams for their age groups. That means their benchmark was Europe, where the world’s best soccer was played. They were learning soccer in the top school. They became pretty decent at it.

Then, after the Soviet Union broke up, the Stans joined the Asian Soccer Confederation. (Kazakhstan switched to the UEFA only in 282

F I G U R E 1 4 . 2
The top ten national teams in the world, allowing for population,
wealth, and experience, all games 1980–2001 (teams playing more than 100 games)
Win Goal

Team

Played Won

Tied

percentage difference Overperformancea

Honduras

167

0.491

0.275

0.629

0.84

0.978

Iraq

146

0.548

0.288

0.692

1.13

0.882

Syria

104

0.375

0.269

0.510

0.54

0.852

Iran

163

0.515

0.264

0.647

1.10

0.730

New Zealand

124

0.379

0.210

0.484

0.37

0.691

South Africa

111

0.450

0.261

0.581

0.23

0.673

Brazil

285

0.625

0.235

0.742

1.29

0.665

Spain

198

0.520

0.273

0.657

0.88

0.585

Australia

162

0.475

0.235

0.593

0.90

0.569

Ireland

172

0.395

0.308

0.549

0.34

0.547

aOverperformance is defined as the expected goal difference minus the actual goal difference.

2002, after the period covered by our database.) Suddenly, they could flaunt their European know-how against much weaker Asian countries.

Of course they did well. But the Stans have played too few matches to accumulate much of a sample size. Here we will concentrate on the teams that play more often. Figure 14.2 is our “efficiency table” of the ten best countries in the world relative to their resources, including only those that played more than 100 games in the period.

The final column of the table is the one to notice. It shows what you might call each country’s “overperformance,” the gap between the goal difference they “should” have achieved against opponents—given their national resources and experience—and what they actually did achieve (listed in the penultimate column). Honduras, the most overachieving country in soccer according to this table, score 0.978 goals per game more than you would have expected judging by their resources. All our top ten scored on average between half and one goal per game more than their resources would predict. Of our original “absolute” top ten, only Iraq, Brazil, and Spain survive in this “relative” top ten. It turns out that “notorious underachiever” Spain has in fact long been an overachiever. Everyone instinctively benchmarks the Spanish team against Germany, Italy, and France, but that is unfair. Spain is a much smaller T O M T H U M B