Soccernomics (41 page)

million people), and horribly poor (even today, average income is below $4,000 per year). If the Georgians could just become as rich as Croatia, they too could start beating England at Wembley.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about our top ten is the countries that don’t make it. Germany, France, and Italy—the dominant European nations—turn out to perform not much better or even a little worse against other Europeans than you would expect. We saw at the start of the book that these countries benefited from their location at the heart of western Europe, smack in the middle of the world’s best knowledge network. Those networks correlate pretty well with high income and long experience in soccer. These are wealthy large nations that have been playing the game for more than a century. They
should
win prizes, and they do. In the decade from 1980 to 1990, West Germany reached three 288

straight World Cup finals, winning one, and won a European championship. Yet its performance against European teams was only 0.15 goals per game better than you would have expected based on the country’s vast population, experience, and income per capita. In fact, once you allow for these advantages, West Germany performed worse than Romania and only fractionally better than the improbable trio of East Germany, Scotland, and Albania.

France won two European championships and one World Cup between 1980 and 2001. Yet against fellow Europeans, it scored just one goal every thirty-four games more than it “should” have. England—

which won nothing in the period—“outperformed” its population, experience, and income by more than France did.

Italy was world champion in 1982. Nonetheless, against fellow Europeans it was a goal every nine games
worse
than it should have been given its resources.

At the bottom of our rankings of relative performance, Turkey and Luxembourg are the shockers. The Turks clearly suffered from being so far adrift from the western European network of soccer know-how. As we will explain in the final chapter, they have recently rectified this defect and are now one of our countries of the future.

If you judge by the map, Luxembourg was smack in the middle of said western European network. But networks are never simply geographical. Nobody in soccer wanted to network with Luxembourg because the country of a little more than a half-million inhabitants was too small to support a decent league or to produce many good players. Top-class foreign coaches and players were never spotted at the Jeu nesse Esch ground passing on their know-how. And so Luxembourg never gained any. It is so bad at soccer that it is even worse than it should be. Admittedly, its dry spell of fifteen years without a win ended with Paul Koch’s legendary last-minute penalty save against Malta in 1995, but even after that it hardly hit the heights. In 2001, Joel Wolff, secretary-general of the country’s FA, confessed to us in a world exclusive interview: “Let’s say that we have arrived at a relative nadir.” Whenever soccer managers invoked the verity, “There T O M T H U M B

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F I G U R E 1 4 . 5
Worst underperformers, 1980–2001, entire world
Goal

Win difference

Team

Rank Played

Won

Tied

Percentage

per game Underachievementa

Canada

88

174

0.339

0.259

0.468

-0.36

-0.535

Malaysia

89

146

0.384

0.219

0.493

0.13

-0.717

Ethiopia

90

106

0.302

0.274

0.439

-0.38

-0.721

US

91

276

0.384

0.272

0.520

0.17

-0.734

Finland

92

193

0.207

0.275

0.345

-0.73

-0.814

Indonesia

93

134

0.299

0.231

0.414

-0.22

-0.948

Malta

94

158

0.114

0.152

0.190

-1.79

-0.969

Venezuela

95

122

0.107

0.213

0.213

-1.73

-0.992

Estonia

96

105

0.124

0.238

0.243

-1.44

-1.021

India

97

110

0.318

0.273

0.455

-0.26

-1.364

Luxembourg 98

109

0.046

0.083

0.087

-2.17

-1.392

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

are no more minnows in international soccer,” they were forgetting Luxembourg.

We award the country both our relative and our absolute prizes for worst soccer team in Europe. But the competition for the relatively worst team in the world is hotter. Of the ninety-eight teams with more than one hundred games in our database, figure 14.5 shows the worst underperformers relative to their population, income, and soccer experience.

We’re sorry: the US doesn’t do well at all. If only Americans took soccer seriously, the country’s fabulous wealth and enormous population would translate into dominance. As it is the US wins or ties most of its games, but it “should” score nearly three-quarters of a goal more per game than it does. However, for once Canadians are in no position to smirk.

Luxembourg is an even worse underachiever. Yet it probably doesn’t deserve the title of relatively worst soccer team on earth. Using a little bit of judgment, we reserve that honor for India. With a win percentage of just 46 percent, and a goal difference of -0.26 per game, the world’s second-most-populous country really should be doing better. And it’s a myth that India’s 1.1 billion people are not interested in soccer. Their newspapers are almost as full of the carryings-on in the English Premier 290

League as they are of cricket matches. It’s true that India’s poverty makes it hard to convert all those budding Rooneys and Ronaldos in Ra-jasthan and Orissa into stars (though that hasn’t stopped the Indian cricket team). Still, from our model we estimated that India should be outscoring its opponents by more than a goal a game.

Admittedly, the country ranks just above Luxembourg in our global efficiency table, but once you take into account that India plays most of its matches in weak Asia whereas Luxembourg plays its in strong Europe, the Indians have it by a nose. A good indication is India’s FIFA ranking (at the time of writing) of 146th in the world, six whole spots behind the Pacific island of Vanuatu.

But who gets the Tom Thumb trophy—the poor, small, inexperienced man’s Jules Rimet—for the relatively best team on earth? Which country does best allowing for experience, population, and income? Well, one day we’d like to see this played out on grass. Let’s have a World Cup in which teams start with a handicap, settled by a panel of econometricians chaired by Professor Gerrard. But until that great day comes, all we have is our model. The best little country on earth might be Honduras or Georgia, but not even the authors believe that. A safer conclusion is that the Serbs, Croats, and Czechs do wonders with their modest resources. However, the country that stands out most given what it has to work with is Iraq, even taking into account its easy Asian schedule. If the country ever sorts itself out, then watch out, world.

15

CORE TO PERIPHERY

The Future Map of Global Soccer

On a snowy night in Amsterdam, a dozen or so Dutch soccer writers and ex-players have gathered in an apartment in the dinky city center.

Guus Hiddink walks in and grabs someone’s shoulders from behind by way of greeting. Growing up with five brothers gave him a knack for male bonding. (Hiddink appears to find women more exotic, and his cohabitation with his then mistress in Seoul shocked Koreans.) The evening starts with a soccer quiz, at which the future manager of Chelsea and Russia performs indifferently. Then there is food and soccer talk until the early morning. Though Hiddink is the senior figure at the table, he never tries to dominate. He likes telling stories—

about his former player Romario, or his old teammate at the San Jose Earthquakes, George Best—but when others interrupt he is just as happy to lean back in his chair and listen. He is a solid, soothing, jowly presence. “You can feel he’s at ease,” Boudewijn Zenden, one of his former players, told us, “so if he’s at ease, the others are at ease. He creates this environment where you feel safe.”

Hiddink has a special place in the latest stage of soccer’s history. In the twenty-first century, he has been the world’s leading exporter of 291

292

soccer know-how from western Europe to the margins of the earth. We saw in chapter 2 that from about 1970 to 2000, the six founding members of the European Economic Community dominated soccer thinking and won almost all the game’s prizes. These countries perfected what you might call the continental European style: a fast, physical, collectivist soccer.

But then these countries began exporting their expertise. Hiddink and other Dutch, German, French, and Italian expat managers established themselves in Hiltons and westerners’ compounds around the planet. In the past few years they have helped several new soccer countries—Russia, Australia, South Korea, Turkey, and Greece, to name a few—overtake their own native countries. It’s because of men like these that England will not be the best soccer country of the future. Hiddink’s native Holland appears even more thoroughly doomed. On the new map of soccer, which Hiddink is helping to draw, his own country will shrink to a dot.

We bet on the US to overtake it

FROM THE BACK CORNER TO THE WORLD

Born in 1946, Hiddink grew up close to what was then just becoming the epicenter of global soccer knowledge. He is the son of a village schoolteacher and Resistance hero from a small town in the Achter-hoek, or “Back Corner,” about five miles from the German border. The Back Corner is wooded and quiet, one of the few empty bits of the Netherlands, and on visits home from stints in Seoul or Moscow, Hiddink enjoys tooling along its back roads on his Harley-Davidson Fat-boy. “Pom-pom-pom-pom-pom,” he puffs out his cheeks to mimic the motor’s roar.

He grew up milking cows, plowing behind two horses, and dreaming of becoming a farmer. But Dutch farms were already dying, and he became a soccer coach instead. At nineteen he took an assistant’s job at the Back Corner’s semiprofessional club, De Graafschap, where his father had played before him. He then made an unusual career move: from coach to player. The head coach, seeing that his young assistant C O R E T O P E R I P H E R Y

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could kick a ball, stuck him in the team, and thus began a sixteen-year playing career.

The handsome, round-faced, wavy-haired playmaker was too lazy and slow for the top, yet he was present at a golden age. The Dutch 1970s shaped Hiddink. Holland, playing what foreigners called “total soccer,” a new kind of game in which players constantly swapped positions and thought for themselves, reached two World Cup finals. Dutch clubs won four European Cups. Off the field, Dutch players of Hiddink’s generation would answer foreign journalists’ questions with sophisticated discourses in several languages. For a keen observer like Hiddink, the players’ constant squabbles provided object lessons in how to keep stars just about functioning within a collective.

Dutch soccer’s renown at the time helped even a second-rate player like Hiddink find work abroad, with the Washington Diplomats and the San Jose Earthquakes. “I was Best’s roommate
,
” says Hiddink, enjoying the quirky American word, and he mimics himself fielding the phone calls from Best’s groupies: “George is not here. George is sleeping.”

It was the start of a world tour that culminated in a suite in a five-star hotel in Moscow where, according to the president of the Russian FA, he spent a fortune ordering cappuccinos from room service. At Euro 2008 Hiddink got Russia playing the best soccer in its history, just as he had previously gotten South Korea and Australia playing their best soccer in history. Hiddink has helped to draw the new map of soccer power.

1889–2002: OFF THE PLANE WITH A LEATHER SOCCER BALL

Soccer seems to have a quality that enables it eventually to conquer every known society. The first wave of exporters of the game were Victorian British sailors, businessmen, missionaries, and colonial officers.

In 1889, to cite a typical story, twenty-one-year-old Englishman Frederick Rea disembarked on the island of South Uist off the west coast of Scotland to work as a headmaster. A couple of years later two of his brothers visited, carrying with them a leather soccer ball. Within two 294

decades the game had conquered South Uist. Shinty, a stick sport that had been played there for fourteen hundred years, “was wiped like chalk from the face of the island,” wrote Roger Hutchinson in the British soccer journal
Perfect Pitch
in 1998, “supplanted, like a thousand of its distant relatives from Buenos Aires to Smolensk, by a game almost as young and innocent as Frederick Rea himself.” Today soccer is the dominant sport on South Uist. It conquered because of its magic.

Victorian Britons spread the game to continental Europe, Latin America, and bits of Africa. However, for a century Asia and North America remained almost immune. Contrary to myth, soccer took a long time to become a global game. What people called the “World Cup” should until the 1980s have been called “the Euro–Latin American Duopoly.” Though most people on the planet lived in Asia, the continent’s only representative at the World Cup of 1978 was Iran.

Even in 1990 the British Isles had more teams at the World Cup (three) than all of Asia combined (two). Many Asian countries still barely knew about soccer. When that year’s World Cup final was shown on Japanese television, there was a surprising studio guest: baseball player Sadaharu Oh. “Mr. Oh,” he was asked during the match, “what is the difference between sliding in baseball and in soccer?” In Australia, too, soccer was then still marginal. Johnny Warren, an Australian international and later TV commentator on the game, called his memoirs
Sheilas, Wogs, and Poofters
, because according to Australian myth in the years before Hiddink landed there, those were the three core elements of the national soccer public: women, immigrants, and gays.