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Why England Lose: And other curious phenomena explained by Kuper, Simon, Szymanski, Stefan (2009) Hardcover
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About the author
Simon Kuper
59 books377 followersSimon Kuper is a journalist for the Financial Times in England. He was born in Uganda of South African parents and moved to the Netherlands as a child. He studied History and German at Oxford University, and attended Harvard University as a Kennedy Scholar. He has written for The Times, Observer, Guardian and Le Monde, and also writes regularly for the Spectator and Dutch newspapers.
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December 26, 2025
Super interesting little football book here are the best bits:
Eriksson understood the problem. When one of the authors of this book asked him why England lost in the quarter-finals in the World Cup 2002 and Euro 2004, he said his players were tired after tough seasons. Was that really the only reason? 'I would say so, Eriksson replied. 'If you're not fit enough ... in Japan, we never scored one goal in the second half.
This is particularly sad because there is growing evidence that sporting talent and academic talent are linked. The best athletes have fast mental reactions, and those reactions, if properly trained, would make for high-calibre intellects.
The region's secret is what the historian Norman Davies calls its 'user-friendly climate'. Western Europe is mild and rainy. Because of that, the land is fertile, allowing hundreds of millions of people to inhabit a small area of land. That creates networks. From the World Cup in Germany, you could have flown in two-and-a-half hours to about 20 countries containing about 300 million people. That is the densest network on earth. There was nothing like that in Japan at the previous World Cup: the only foreign capital you can reach from Tokyo within that time is Seoul. South Africa, host of the next World Cup, is even more isolated. For centuries now, the interconnected peoples of western European have exchanged ideas fast.
However, the obvious statistical truth is that England is not exceptional. It is typical of the second-tier football countries outside core western Europe.
Habitually English footballers charge out of the gate, run around like lunatics, and exhaust themselves well before the match is over, even if they aren't hung over. You see this in England's peculiar scoring record in big tournaments. In every World Cup ever played, most goals were scored in the second halves of matches. That is natural: in the second half players tire, teams start chasing goals, and gaps open up on the field. But England, in their last five big tournaments, scored 22 of their 35 goals in the first halves of matches. Their record in crucial games is even starker: in the matches in which they got eliminated from these tournaments, they scored seven of their eight goals before half-time. In other words, England perform like a cheap battery. This is partly because they play in such an exhausting league, but also because they don't seem to have thought about pacing themselves.
If Britain keeps letting in immigrants, and if the German population drops by millions as predicted, and if English football finally enfranchises the middle classes, then that same match at Euro 2032 might have a different outcome; though given everything we know about life, possibly not.
Here is our finding: England's win sequence over the 400 games is indistinguishable from a random series of coin tosses.
In 1983 AC Milan spotted a talented young black forward playing for Watford. The word is that the player they liked was John Barnes, and that they then confused him with his fellow black teammate Luther Blissett. Whatever the truth, Milan ended up signing Blissett for £1 million.
In short, the more you pay your players in wages, the higher you will finish; but what you pay for them in transfer fees doesn't seem to make much difference. (This suggests that, in general, it may be better to raise your players' pay than risk losing a couple of them and have to go out and buy replacements.)
The best time to buy player is in the summer when he’s just done well at a big tournament. Everyone in the transfer market has seen how good the player is, but he is exhausted and quite likely sated with success. Overpaying for these shooting stars fits what Moneyball calls 'a tendency to be overly influenced by a guy's most recent performance: what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next.'
At least one big English club noticed that its scouts kept recommending blond players. The likely reason: when you are scanning a field of 22 similar-looking players, the blonds tend to stand out (except, presumably, in Scandinavia). The colour catches the eye. So the scout notices the blond player without understanding why. The club in question began to take this distortion into account when judging scouting reports.
Buy players with personal problems (like Burns, or the gambler Stan Bowles) at a discount. Then help them deal with their problems. Clough, a drinker, and Taylor, a gambler, had empathy with troubled footballers. While negotiating with a new player they would ask him a stock question, "to which we usually know the answer', wrote Taylor. It was: 'Let's hear your vice before you sign. Is it women, booze, drugs or gambling?' Clough and Taylor thought that once they knew the vice, they could help the player manage it. Taylor says he told Bowles, who joined Forest in 1979 (and, as it happens, failed there): 'Any problem in your private life must be brought to us; you may not like that but we'll prove to you that our way of management is good for all of us: After a player confided a problem, wrote Taylor, 'if we couldn't find an answer, we would turn to experts: we have sought advice for our players from clergymen, doctors and local councillors. Taking much the same approach, Wenger helped Tony Adams and Paul Merson combat their addictions. All this might sound obvious, but the usual attitude in football is, 'We paid a lot of money for you, now get on with it, as if mental illness, addictions or homesickness should not exist above a certain level of income.
All the inefficiencies surrounding relocation could be assuaged. Most big businesses know how difficult relocation is, and do their best to smooth the passage. When a senior Microsoft executive moves countries, a 'relocation consultant' helps his family find schools, a house, and learn the social rules of the new country. If Luther Blissett had been working for Microsoft, a relocation consultant could have found him Rice Krispies. An expensive relocation might cost £15,000, or 0.1 per cent of a largish transfer fee, but in football, the most globalised industry of all, spending anything at all on relocation is regarded as a waste of money.
Use the wisdom of crowds. When Lyon are thinking of signing a player, a group of men sit down to debate the transfer. Aulas is there, and so is Bernard Lacombe, once a bull-like centre-forward for Lyon and France, and for most of the last 20 years the club's 'technical director'. Lacombe is known for having the best pair of eyes in French foot-ball. He coached Lyon from 1997 to 2000, but Aulas clearly figured out that if you have someone with his knack for spotting the right transfer, you want to keep him at the club for ever rather than make his job contingent on four lost matches. The same went for Peter Taylor at Forest.
There is no evidence that having been a good player (or being white and of conservative appearance) is an advantage for a football manager. Arrigo Sacchi, coach of the great Milan from 1987 to 1991, who couldn't play football himself, explained: "You don't have to have been a horse to be a jockey? Playing and coaching are different skill-sets. Match for match, the most successful coach in soccer's history is probably Jos Mourinho, who barely ever kicked a ball for money. When Milan's coach Carlo Ancelotti noted Mourinho's modest record as a player, the Portuguese replied: 'I don't see the connection. My dentist is the best in the world, and yet he's never had particularly bad toothache. Asked why failed players often became good coaches, Mourinho said: 'More time to study.'
In 1991 Ron Noades, chairman of Crystal Palace, popped up on Channel Four talking about blacks. 'The problem with black players, explained Noades, whose heavily black side had just finished third in the old first division, 'is they've great pace, great athletes, love to play with the ball in front of them ... When it's behind them it's chaos. I don't think too many of them can read the game. When you're getting into the mid-winter you need a few of the hard white men to carry the athletic black players through.'
The data showed that clubs with more black players really did have a better record in the league than clubs with fewer blacks, after allowing for wage spending. If two teams had identical annual wage budgets, the team with more blacks would finish higher in the league.
NEW FOOTBALL, NEW DISCRIMINATION: Trevor Phillips points a finger at his own shaven black head: 'Excuse me, here I am: bullseye!' The son of an early Caribbean immigrant, Phillips was raised in London, and has supported Chelsea for nearly 50 years. But in the 1970s, when darts-throwing was the favourite sport of the Shed Stand, he didn't go to matches. His head felt like too obvious a target. Hardly any black people went to Chelsea then. 'Now I can take my daughters
Even Alex Ferguson, who has won more prizes than anyone else in the history of foot-ball, has probably only performed about as well as the manager of the world's richest club should. Perhaps his unique accomplishment is not winning, but keeping all the interest groups in the club» united behind him for so long.
The team that wins the toss before the shootout gets to choose whether or not to go first. But this is a no-brainer: they should always go first. Teams going first win 60 per cent of the time, presumably because there is too much pressure on the team going second - that of always having to score to save the game.
Red Star Belgrade triumphed in 1991 just as Yugoslavia was breaking into pieces. The same phenomenon was at work in the communist countries as in the Fascist capitals before them. Dictators send resources to the capital because that is where they and their bureaucrats and soldiers and secret policemen live. So the dictators do up the main buildings, boost the local economy, and help the football club. That's totalitarian football.
Capitals simply have less to prove than provincial cities. They have bigger sources of pride than their football teams. Londoners don't go around singing songs about their city, and they don't believe that a prize for Arsenal or Chelsea would enhance London's status. Roman Abramovich and David Dein brought trophies to Chelsea and Arsenal, but neither could ever have been voted mayor of London. Football matters even less in Paris, where it's possible to spend a lifetime without ever knowing that football exists. Paris St Germain, whose ground is not even entirely within the city's Périphérique ring road, are hardly going to become the main focus of Parisian pride. London, Paris and Moscow don't need to win the Champions League. It is a different type of city where a football club can mean everything: the provincial industrial town. These are the places that have ousted the Fascist capitals as rulers of European football.
It helped that workers in the textile industry in the north-west began to get Saturdays off in the 1890s, a luxury that workers elsewhere in Britain did not enjoy.
The biggest clubs are not in the biggest cities they are in the formally industrial one's.
When Barcelona win something, the president of Catalonia traditionally hoists himself up on the balcony of his palace on the Plaça Sant Jaume, and shouts at the crowds below: 'Barça wins, Catalonia wins!'
At last, being in a giant capital city is becoming a strategic asset to a football club. When Arsenal and Chelsea finished in the top two spots in the Premier League in 2004, it was the first time in history that two London teams had achieved that feat. In 2005 they did it again. From 2006 to 2008, they figured in two out of three Champions League finals. Soon one of these clubs could become the first London team to be champions of Europe. Then the city will dominate every aspect of British life.
Football stole the idea for a league from baseball. Professional American baseball players had come up with the concept in 1871.
American major league soccer, in which 'all teams started equal, with the same squad size, and the same amount of money to spread among its players' wages', was boring. The reason: 'No truly memorable teams have the space to develop.'
The Cup's creator, Charles Alcock, was one of those exhausting, bewhiskered Victorians who invented much of the modern world. The son of a Sunderland shipping agent, he didn't just give us the FA Cup (1871, with Alcock captaining Wanderers to victory) and the first unofficial sports international (England v Scotland in 1870, with Alcock captaining England), but also the first cricket Test match between England and Australia, while on the side he wrote the first history of football, started several magazines, acted as London agent for a baseball tour in 1874, played a central role in legalising professional football, and so on. Now, of course, he is virtually forgotten. Alcock's great gift to football is the knockout format. He is said to have borrowed it from his old school Harrow, where the "houses' played an annual knockout House Cup', the winner of which got to call itself Cock House'. The format worked so well for the FA Cup that it was later used for the first three World Cups.
Even worse was the suicide of Amelia Bolaños. In June 1969 she was an 18-year-old El Salvadorean watching the Honduras v El Salvador game at home on TV. When Honduras scored the winner in the last minute, wrote the great Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, Bolaños 'got up and ran to the desk which contained her father's pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart.
Perhaps the most famous recent case of a man who found he could not live without sport was the Gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson. He shot himself in February 2005, four days after writing the following note in black marker entitled 'Football Season Is Over': No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring
The most football-mad country in Europe played in only one tournament in that period, the World Cup of 1994. The average for the seven Junes when Norway were not playing football was 55 suicides. But in June 1994 there were only 36 Norwegian suicides, by far the lowest figure for all eight Junes in our dataset.
On the day in May 2004 that South Africa was awarded the World Cup, people celebrating in Soweto shouted, 'The money is coming!' Half the people you meet in Johannesburg have a scheme for 2010: buying apartments just to rent them out during the tournament; selling sausage and maize pudding outside stadiums; corralling peasant women to weave bead flags in the colours of all the participating teams. Much of South African conversation now is about such schemes, and in newspaper profiles, when a celebrity describes what he is working on, he generally adds, The key thing is to be ready for 2010? The year has become a magic number, like the Year of the Beast, or 1927.
But the main thing the top of our rankings demonstrates is the importance of wealth. Our efficiency table for sport 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 closely correlated with its success in sport.
It's Norwegian government policy that every farmer, every fisherman, no matter where he lives in the country, has the right to play sport. And 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 unlikeliest corners of the country there's generally one around the corner from your house. Usually the changing-rooms are warm and the coaches have acquired some sort of diploma. A kid can play and train in a proper team for well under £100 a year, really not much for most Norwegians.
One reason why poor countries do badly at sport - and one reason why 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.
Man needs nothing more than other people. Rehhagel himself called it 'learning from European football'. Becoming 'European' - code for becoming organised!
Eriksson understood the problem. When one of the authors of this book asked him why England lost in the quarter-finals in the World Cup 2002 and Euro 2004, he said his players were tired after tough seasons. Was that really the only reason? 'I would say so, Eriksson replied. 'If you're not fit enough ... in Japan, we never scored one goal in the second half.
This is particularly sad because there is growing evidence that sporting talent and academic talent are linked. The best athletes have fast mental reactions, and those reactions, if properly trained, would make for high-calibre intellects.
The region's secret is what the historian Norman Davies calls its 'user-friendly climate'. Western Europe is mild and rainy. Because of that, the land is fertile, allowing hundreds of millions of people to inhabit a small area of land. That creates networks. From the World Cup in Germany, you could have flown in two-and-a-half hours to about 20 countries containing about 300 million people. That is the densest network on earth. There was nothing like that in Japan at the previous World Cup: the only foreign capital you can reach from Tokyo within that time is Seoul. South Africa, host of the next World Cup, is even more isolated. For centuries now, the interconnected peoples of western European have exchanged ideas fast.
However, the obvious statistical truth is that England is not exceptional. It is typical of the second-tier football countries outside core western Europe.
Habitually English footballers charge out of the gate, run around like lunatics, and exhaust themselves well before the match is over, even if they aren't hung over. You see this in England's peculiar scoring record in big tournaments. In every World Cup ever played, most goals were scored in the second halves of matches. That is natural: in the second half players tire, teams start chasing goals, and gaps open up on the field. But England, in their last five big tournaments, scored 22 of their 35 goals in the first halves of matches. Their record in crucial games is even starker: in the matches in which they got eliminated from these tournaments, they scored seven of their eight goals before half-time. In other words, England perform like a cheap battery. This is partly because they play in such an exhausting league, but also because they don't seem to have thought about pacing themselves.
If Britain keeps letting in immigrants, and if the German population drops by millions as predicted, and if English football finally enfranchises the middle classes, then that same match at Euro 2032 might have a different outcome; though given everything we know about life, possibly not.
Here is our finding: England's win sequence over the 400 games is indistinguishable from a random series of coin tosses.
In 1983 AC Milan spotted a talented young black forward playing for Watford. The word is that the player they liked was John Barnes, and that they then confused him with his fellow black teammate Luther Blissett. Whatever the truth, Milan ended up signing Blissett for £1 million.
In short, the more you pay your players in wages, the higher you will finish; but what you pay for them in transfer fees doesn't seem to make much difference. (This suggests that, in general, it may be better to raise your players' pay than risk losing a couple of them and have to go out and buy replacements.)
The best time to buy player is in the summer when he’s just done well at a big tournament. Everyone in the transfer market has seen how good the player is, but he is exhausted and quite likely sated with success. Overpaying for these shooting stars fits what Moneyball calls 'a tendency to be overly influenced by a guy's most recent performance: what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next.'
At least one big English club noticed that its scouts kept recommending blond players. The likely reason: when you are scanning a field of 22 similar-looking players, the blonds tend to stand out (except, presumably, in Scandinavia). The colour catches the eye. So the scout notices the blond player without understanding why. The club in question began to take this distortion into account when judging scouting reports.
Buy players with personal problems (like Burns, or the gambler Stan Bowles) at a discount. Then help them deal with their problems. Clough, a drinker, and Taylor, a gambler, had empathy with troubled footballers. While negotiating with a new player they would ask him a stock question, "to which we usually know the answer', wrote Taylor. It was: 'Let's hear your vice before you sign. Is it women, booze, drugs or gambling?' Clough and Taylor thought that once they knew the vice, they could help the player manage it. Taylor says he told Bowles, who joined Forest in 1979 (and, as it happens, failed there): 'Any problem in your private life must be brought to us; you may not like that but we'll prove to you that our way of management is good for all of us: After a player confided a problem, wrote Taylor, 'if we couldn't find an answer, we would turn to experts: we have sought advice for our players from clergymen, doctors and local councillors. Taking much the same approach, Wenger helped Tony Adams and Paul Merson combat their addictions. All this might sound obvious, but the usual attitude in football is, 'We paid a lot of money for you, now get on with it, as if mental illness, addictions or homesickness should not exist above a certain level of income.
All the inefficiencies surrounding relocation could be assuaged. Most big businesses know how difficult relocation is, and do their best to smooth the passage. When a senior Microsoft executive moves countries, a 'relocation consultant' helps his family find schools, a house, and learn the social rules of the new country. If Luther Blissett had been working for Microsoft, a relocation consultant could have found him Rice Krispies. An expensive relocation might cost £15,000, or 0.1 per cent of a largish transfer fee, but in football, the most globalised industry of all, spending anything at all on relocation is regarded as a waste of money.
Use the wisdom of crowds. When Lyon are thinking of signing a player, a group of men sit down to debate the transfer. Aulas is there, and so is Bernard Lacombe, once a bull-like centre-forward for Lyon and France, and for most of the last 20 years the club's 'technical director'. Lacombe is known for having the best pair of eyes in French foot-ball. He coached Lyon from 1997 to 2000, but Aulas clearly figured out that if you have someone with his knack for spotting the right transfer, you want to keep him at the club for ever rather than make his job contingent on four lost matches. The same went for Peter Taylor at Forest.
There is no evidence that having been a good player (or being white and of conservative appearance) is an advantage for a football manager. Arrigo Sacchi, coach of the great Milan from 1987 to 1991, who couldn't play football himself, explained: "You don't have to have been a horse to be a jockey? Playing and coaching are different skill-sets. Match for match, the most successful coach in soccer's history is probably Jos Mourinho, who barely ever kicked a ball for money. When Milan's coach Carlo Ancelotti noted Mourinho's modest record as a player, the Portuguese replied: 'I don't see the connection. My dentist is the best in the world, and yet he's never had particularly bad toothache. Asked why failed players often became good coaches, Mourinho said: 'More time to study.'
In 1991 Ron Noades, chairman of Crystal Palace, popped up on Channel Four talking about blacks. 'The problem with black players, explained Noades, whose heavily black side had just finished third in the old first division, 'is they've great pace, great athletes, love to play with the ball in front of them ... When it's behind them it's chaos. I don't think too many of them can read the game. When you're getting into the mid-winter you need a few of the hard white men to carry the athletic black players through.'
The data showed that clubs with more black players really did have a better record in the league than clubs with fewer blacks, after allowing for wage spending. If two teams had identical annual wage budgets, the team with more blacks would finish higher in the league.
NEW FOOTBALL, NEW DISCRIMINATION: Trevor Phillips points a finger at his own shaven black head: 'Excuse me, here I am: bullseye!' The son of an early Caribbean immigrant, Phillips was raised in London, and has supported Chelsea for nearly 50 years. But in the 1970s, when darts-throwing was the favourite sport of the Shed Stand, he didn't go to matches. His head felt like too obvious a target. Hardly any black people went to Chelsea then. 'Now I can take my daughters
Even Alex Ferguson, who has won more prizes than anyone else in the history of foot-ball, has probably only performed about as well as the manager of the world's richest club should. Perhaps his unique accomplishment is not winning, but keeping all the interest groups in the club» united behind him for so long.
The team that wins the toss before the shootout gets to choose whether or not to go first. But this is a no-brainer: they should always go first. Teams going first win 60 per cent of the time, presumably because there is too much pressure on the team going second - that of always having to score to save the game.
Red Star Belgrade triumphed in 1991 just as Yugoslavia was breaking into pieces. The same phenomenon was at work in the communist countries as in the Fascist capitals before them. Dictators send resources to the capital because that is where they and their bureaucrats and soldiers and secret policemen live. So the dictators do up the main buildings, boost the local economy, and help the football club. That's totalitarian football.
Capitals simply have less to prove than provincial cities. They have bigger sources of pride than their football teams. Londoners don't go around singing songs about their city, and they don't believe that a prize for Arsenal or Chelsea would enhance London's status. Roman Abramovich and David Dein brought trophies to Chelsea and Arsenal, but neither could ever have been voted mayor of London. Football matters even less in Paris, where it's possible to spend a lifetime without ever knowing that football exists. Paris St Germain, whose ground is not even entirely within the city's Périphérique ring road, are hardly going to become the main focus of Parisian pride. London, Paris and Moscow don't need to win the Champions League. It is a different type of city where a football club can mean everything: the provincial industrial town. These are the places that have ousted the Fascist capitals as rulers of European football.
It helped that workers in the textile industry in the north-west began to get Saturdays off in the 1890s, a luxury that workers elsewhere in Britain did not enjoy.
The biggest clubs are not in the biggest cities they are in the formally industrial one's.
When Barcelona win something, the president of Catalonia traditionally hoists himself up on the balcony of his palace on the Plaça Sant Jaume, and shouts at the crowds below: 'Barça wins, Catalonia wins!'
At last, being in a giant capital city is becoming a strategic asset to a football club. When Arsenal and Chelsea finished in the top two spots in the Premier League in 2004, it was the first time in history that two London teams had achieved that feat. In 2005 they did it again. From 2006 to 2008, they figured in two out of three Champions League finals. Soon one of these clubs could become the first London team to be champions of Europe. Then the city will dominate every aspect of British life.
Football stole the idea for a league from baseball. Professional American baseball players had come up with the concept in 1871.
American major league soccer, in which 'all teams started equal, with the same squad size, and the same amount of money to spread among its players' wages', was boring. The reason: 'No truly memorable teams have the space to develop.'
The Cup's creator, Charles Alcock, was one of those exhausting, bewhiskered Victorians who invented much of the modern world. The son of a Sunderland shipping agent, he didn't just give us the FA Cup (1871, with Alcock captaining Wanderers to victory) and the first unofficial sports international (England v Scotland in 1870, with Alcock captaining England), but also the first cricket Test match between England and Australia, while on the side he wrote the first history of football, started several magazines, acted as London agent for a baseball tour in 1874, played a central role in legalising professional football, and so on. Now, of course, he is virtually forgotten. Alcock's great gift to football is the knockout format. He is said to have borrowed it from his old school Harrow, where the "houses' played an annual knockout House Cup', the winner of which got to call itself Cock House'. The format worked so well for the FA Cup that it was later used for the first three World Cups.
Even worse was the suicide of Amelia Bolaños. In June 1969 she was an 18-year-old El Salvadorean watching the Honduras v El Salvador game at home on TV. When Honduras scored the winner in the last minute, wrote the great Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, Bolaños 'got up and ran to the desk which contained her father's pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart.
Perhaps the most famous recent case of a man who found he could not live without sport was the Gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson. He shot himself in February 2005, four days after writing the following note in black marker entitled 'Football Season Is Over': No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring
The most football-mad country in Europe played in only one tournament in that period, the World Cup of 1994. The average for the seven Junes when Norway were not playing football was 55 suicides. But in June 1994 there were only 36 Norwegian suicides, by far the lowest figure for all eight Junes in our dataset.
On the day in May 2004 that South Africa was awarded the World Cup, people celebrating in Soweto shouted, 'The money is coming!' Half the people you meet in Johannesburg have a scheme for 2010: buying apartments just to rent them out during the tournament; selling sausage and maize pudding outside stadiums; corralling peasant women to weave bead flags in the colours of all the participating teams. Much of South African conversation now is about such schemes, and in newspaper profiles, when a celebrity describes what he is working on, he generally adds, The key thing is to be ready for 2010? The year has become a magic number, like the Year of the Beast, or 1927.
But the main thing the top of our rankings demonstrates is the importance of wealth. Our efficiency table for sport 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 closely correlated with its success in sport.
It's Norwegian government policy that every farmer, every fisherman, no matter where he lives in the country, has the right to play sport. And 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 unlikeliest corners of the country there's generally one around the corner from your house. Usually the changing-rooms are warm and the coaches have acquired some sort of diploma. A kid can play and train in a proper team for well under £100 a year, really not much for most Norwegians.
One reason why poor countries do badly at sport - and one reason why 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.
Man needs nothing more than other people. Rehhagel himself called it 'learning from European football'. Becoming 'European' - code for becoming organised!
July 8, 2023
An interesting blind read, all about strange quirks and oddities about football.
It isn't, as the title suggests, all about the reasons for England's continual lack of success, which the writers fail to explain, stating that there is no clear pattern to the national team's losses.
The arguments put forward in this book would probably only appeal to "hardcore" football fans, but the writers did make some interesting points. For example, football teams from Capital Cities tend not to be the most successful in their national league, but teams from industrial cities do, explaining the success of Manchester United. The writers also note that Europe tends to dominate in football successes, and that the ability of football teams often affects a national team's success. The book even analyses the backgrounds of footballers, including their fathers' professions, as well as providing an explanation about why many good footballers come from poor neighbourhoods, which is probably true.
The only real issue I had with this book was that a lot of the time, it felt like a list of statistics being rattled off by the writers. It was written over ten years ago, and most of what is in it still feels accurate, bar a couple of things.
It isn't, as the title suggests, all about the reasons for England's continual lack of success, which the writers fail to explain, stating that there is no clear pattern to the national team's losses.
The arguments put forward in this book would probably only appeal to "hardcore" football fans, but the writers did make some interesting points. For example, football teams from Capital Cities tend not to be the most successful in their national league, but teams from industrial cities do, explaining the success of Manchester United. The writers also note that Europe tends to dominate in football successes, and that the ability of football teams often affects a national team's success. The book even analyses the backgrounds of footballers, including their fathers' professions, as well as providing an explanation about why many good footballers come from poor neighbourhoods, which is probably true.
The only real issue I had with this book was that a lot of the time, it felt like a list of statistics being rattled off by the writers. It was written over ten years ago, and most of what is in it still feels accurate, bar a couple of things.
Read
October 20, 2024This is a fascinating book, but also a bit disappointing. Great because it does exactly what it says on the tin; it looks into the real stats and other research & analysis to try and understand the underlying economic, social and politic reasons that football works the way it does. Which countries win more than they should, who takes the best penalties, why certain towns have such fervent club supporters (and others don't), what are the emerging nations on the world stage (and why) etc. etc. The minor criticism is that it is - OK the clue is in the title(!) - a bit dry and football nerdy even for me! These guys could have written a smaller more widely appealing book, like Freakonomics or anything by Malcolm Gladwell. But still this is a timely, wide-ranging, interesting, sometime counterintuitive book about the biggest sport in the world and one of the UKs greater exports (even if we are a bit rubbish ourselves!)*
2024 update; mostly rubbish! The men's team are showing signs of enough grit and wiles to get to finals, but can't quite get over the line. But we're football fans, we live in hope ;)
2024 update; mostly rubbish! The men's team are showing signs of enough grit and wiles to get to finals, but can't quite get over the line. But we're football fans, we live in hope ;)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews