Soccernomics
Why do England lose?”“Why do Germany & Brazil Win?”“How have Spain conquered the World?”Penalties - what are they good for?"“What is the price on achieving success and the true cost of failure?”These are questions every football fan has asked. Soccernomics (previously published as Why England Lose)answers them. Written with an economist's brain and a football writer's skill, it applies high-powered analytical tools to everyday football topics.Soccernomics isn't in the first place about money. It's about looking at data in new ways. It's about revealing counterintuitive truths about football. It explains all manner of things about the game which newspapers just can't see. It all adds up to a new way of looking at football, beyond clichés about "The Magic of the FA Cup", "England's Shock Defeat" and "Newcastle's New South American Star".
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers as Why England Lose in 2009
This revised and updated edition published 2018
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© Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2018
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Source ISBN: 9780008236649
Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780007466887
Version: 2018-05-15
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CONTENTS
1 Driving with a Dashboard: In Search of New Truths about Football
2 Gentlemen Prefer Blonds: How to Avoid Silly Mistakes in the Transfer Market
3 The Worst Business in the World: Why Football Clubs Haven’t Made Money
4 Safer than the Bank of England: Why Football Clubs Almost Never Disappear
5 Crooked Business: Football’s Corruption and the History of Tech
6 A Decent Business at Last? Be Careful What You Wish For
7 Need Not Apply: Does Football Discriminate Against Black People?
8 Do Coaches Matter? The Cult of the White Manager
9 The Secret of Claude Makelele: How ‘Match Data’ Are Changing the Game on the Pitch
11 The Suburban Newsagent’s: City Sizes and Football Prizes
12 Unfair and Unbalanced: Do We Need More Leicesters?
PART II: THE FANS: LOYALTY, SUICIDES AND HAPPINESS
13 Are Football Fans Polygamists? A Critique of the Nick Hornby Model of Fandom
14 Fans’ Suicide Notes: Do People Jump off Buildings when Their Teams Lose?
15 Happiness: Why Hosting a World Cup Is Good for You
16 The Curse of Poverty: Why Poor Countries Are Poor at Sport
17 Why England Lose and Other Europeans Win
18 Made in Amsterdam: The Rise of Spain and the Triumph of European Knowledge Networks
19 Tom Thumb: The Best Little Football Country on Earth
20 Core to Periphery: The Future Map of Global Football
DRIVING WITH A DASHBOARD: IN SEARCH OF NEW TRUTHS ABOUT FOOTBALL
A few years ago, the data department at Manchester City carried out a study of corner kicks. City hadn’t been scoring much from corners, and the analysts wanted to find out the best way to take them. They watched more than four hundred corners, from different leagues, over several seasons, and concluded: the most dangerous corner was the inswinger to the near post.
The beauty of the inswinger was that it sent the ball straight into the danger zone. Sometimes an attacker would get a head or foot to it and divert it in from point-blank range. Sometimes the keeper or a defender stopped the inswinger on the line, whereupon someone bashed it in. And occasionally the ball just swung straight in from the corner. Of course, you wouldn’t want to take every corner as an inswinger. It’s a good idea to hit the odd outswinger too, just to keep the opponents guessing. This is what’s known as a mixed strategy. But all in all, the analysts found, inswingers produced more goals than outswingers.
They took their findings to the club’s then manager, Roberto Mancini, who like almost all managers is an ex-player. He heard them out politely. Then he said, in effect: ‘I was a player for many years, and I just know that the outswinger is more effective.’ He was wrong, but we can understand why he made the mistake: outswingers tend to create beautiful goals (ball swings out, player meets it with powerful header, ball crashes into net) and beautiful goals stick in the memory. The messy goals generally produced by inswingers don’t.
At first Mancini didn’t change his thinking. But sometime around 2011, when City were again having trouble with corners, his assistant David Platt came to chat with the club’s data department. The analysts told Platt about the corners study. They heard nothing more about the matter, but soon they noticed that City had begun taking inswinging corners. In the 2011/2012 season City scored 15 goals from corners, more than any other team in the Premier League. Ten of those goals came from inswingers, including the header from Vincent Kompany against Manchester United that effectively sealed the title for City.
