The economics of football do not only concern its commercialisation; it is the way one perceives and analyses it as a phenomenon, setting aside the – seemingly romantic – empirical approach and instead breaking down into quantities and mechanisms all its constituent elements. It is essentially the perception of football in a technocratic way, one that goes beyond the framework of pub talk, but at the same time one that can explain why everything happens: why one team wins and not another, why one club has more supporters, why in some countries reactions to the result of a football match differ from those in others, even how all these are connected with processes that affect to a much greater extent the life of societies.
These elements, as well as the description of the analytical methods that examine them, are presented in their book Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski. Kuper, a journalist with many years at the Financial Times but better known for some emblematic works in football literature, the most famous being Football Against the Enemy, met Szymanski, now Professor of Sport Management at the University of Michigan, at a conference in Paris, where the idea for this book was born – a work that has since been constantly renewed and enriched in order to explain the most recent developments in the global football scene, while also being shaped so as to contain the most up-to-date knowledge regarding the methodology with which every phenomenon related to the popular sport is analytically approached.
In the introduction to their book, the authors make clear reference to their inspiration: Moneyball, a book that changed the way information was collected and utilised in baseball, whose fame reached such heights that the process of its writing and its use by the Oakland A’s even became a film. They note, however, from the outset the differences between football analytics and those of baseball, and for this reason the book does not confine itself to the presentation of the relations between numerical data and quantities, but to a synthesis of methodologies originating from many sciences.
The aim of the authors is to demonstrate that, many times, the wisdom of the pub – which has produced entrenched views of how the sport and its economy function – is not always correct, and often provides quite a distorted way of understanding how football works, especially at the highest professional level and that of national teams. For this reason, on the one hand they start by dismantling myths widely accepted as eternal truths, and on the other they explain how managers, presidents and other club and federation officials need, beyond empirical knowledge, to trust analytics if they wish to see tangible results in the efforts made for footballing development and improvement at any level.
In the first chapter of the book, they deal with the development of clubs, focusing attention on the way Premier League clubs evolve and the points at which they fall short. Through data, they present the underlying racism that exists in the commodified sport, as it appears that white footballers more easily serve the image of the star which, in turn, the owners wish to offer to supporters; the situation is even worse in the case of non-white managers, whose presence is extremely rare at the highest level.
In the same part, presenting the financial figures of clubs, they show that despite its reach, football is not such a large industry in economic terms. A striking example they cite is that a mid-level Premier League club has a turnover comparable to that of a branch of a supermarket chain. They therefore explain that the involvement of tycoons with the sport is not undertaken for profit – as the sums are small – nor even for modest profit, since investment in football is usually a loss-making activity. What truly makes football stand out, even as a field of business activity, is its social reach: the fact that a tycoon can gain recognition and popularity by being a stakeholder in a football club, whatever the financial cost this may entail.
They explain that the aim of a president-investor is often not even sporting success. On the contrary, what is sought are the seemingly safe choices: those that may cost dearly, but leave no room for supporters to question their contribution to the life of the club. In short, a president prefers to buy a player by spending an enormous sum, even if the data show that he will not help the team much, rather than rely on analytical evidence showing that a more prudent financial approach would yield better footballing results. If the team loses on the pitch having spent in the boardroom, the manager will simply take the blame. But if he makes the prudent financial choice, he takes the risk that, should a downturn occur, he himself will appear responsible for the decline.
At the end of the first chapter, the authors explain why football has greater success in large cities, beyond historical circumstances, owing to the higher likelihood of gathering the necessary conditions for a club to distinguish itself. They also explain why the British sport dominated worldwide, except in the United States, where its place at the peak of popularity was taken by the so-called “American football” (gridiron). By analysing a series of cultural, colonial and contemporary diplomatic and international economic conditions, they help the reader understand why football, beyond being a people’s passion, is also the most marketable sport worldwide outside America and a few other former British colonies.
In the second chapter, the authors leave aside the financial aspects of clubs and football as commodity in order to focus on the statistics and sociology of supporters. They explain differences from country to country in the degree and manner of participation in footballing life, and how these features, on the one hand, create distinct footballing schools and, on the other, distinct footballing myths, which do not always correspond to reality. They examine to what extent the wealth of a country or of its inhabitants determines success in football, and, using the examples of Brazil and Norway, they explain a series of cultural elements present in one culture – and absent in another – which distinguish it football-wise in relation to others.
Finally, in this chapter they also deal with the psychology of supporters, the very particular and unique bond they have either with their club or with their national team, providing historical examples that reveal contrasts between different geographical regions. They analyse football as a phenomenon that contributes to social life primarily through its power to create symbols that resonate with the psychology of fans, giving rise to that unique foundation of football’s social extension.
In the final chapter, perhaps the most detailed of all, they attempt, with data, to demonstrate why some national teams win, others do not, and why some teams, based on the parameters they establish through this analytical examination, perform better or worse than expected. The wealth of a country, its population size, as well as the presence of the necessary organisation, are essential ingredients for success at the international level, and the myth of the footballer who rises from the favelas to win the World Cup solely thanks to his talent is dismantled, as they explain the conditions and preparation required for genuine popular talent to find strong organisational will behind it in order to conquer football’s Everest.
In their conclusion, they attempt a prognosis for the future of football at the global level, highlighting that what leads a country – or a group of countries – to success is their being part of a footballing network where ideas are exchanged and improvement concerns all parts of it. This, after all, runs through the entire book, which notes the same even within strict economic frameworks regarding the operation of the Premier League, where the strongest club in reality has an interest in the strengthening of the weakest.
Soccernomics is by now a classic work that anyone wishing to understand how modern football functions, and how decisions within it are and ought to be taken, must certainly read. Beyond the knowledge it contains, perhaps most important is that it presents a series of different scientific approaches, opening horizons so that one may seek an understanding of football through the study of many different academic fields, even in the development of personal skills that allow the creation of new and individually shaped ways of football analysis which, gradually, thanks also to technological development, are replacing the traditional pub talk.
Football will always be discussed in the pub, because it should, and because that is how it was formed, and because that is part of its tradition and its romanticism. But in reality football has always evolved and grown thanks to those who understood the necessity of using modern scientific knowledge for the development of a game. That is the story Soccernomics tells us!
