Earlier this week, I picked up a new book: “Soccernomics”, which the New York Times says does for soccer what “Moneyball” does for baseball. Being a colossal “Moneyball” fan (and being that the book was only like $15), I figured I would pick it up.
To say that the book is the “Moneyball” of soccer books is a little bit of a stretch; “Soccernomics” is a bit too referential to the Michael Lewis epic (such as referring to Olympique Lyon as the Oakland A’s of the transfer market) for it to be the kind of ground-breaking work that it’s parent is known for. That’s not to say that the book is completely without merit, however; it’s just hard for me to say that it fills the rather large shoes of one of the biggest sports books of all time.
That’s not to say that there aren’t some fascinating gems in the book, however. Today we’re going to talk about one of those: the relationship of three factors – population, experience, and GDP per capita – to the ultimate success of a national team, and a look at who the real powerhouses of the World Cup are.
Here’s the theory (page 35): If you do a multiple regression on each national team, after having collected the above factors, you’ll find a startling correlation between certain numbers. Amongst their findings:
- Home field advanatage is worth 2/3 of a goal.
- Having twice as much international experience as your opponent is worth about 1/2 a goal.
- Having twice the population of your opponent is worth about 1/10 of a goal.
- Having twice the GDP per capita of your opponent is also worth about 1/10 of a goal.
So this is pretty good stuff. Note that they’re not saying that this means South Africa will automatically score a goal in two out of their three games in the World Cup; this more means that, when at home, this is what teams average. The game itself is still a crapshoot, which is why we watch.
However, since complete speculation is pretty much the name of the game today, I’m going to spend the morning collecting some rudimentary information (for experience, I’m going with the total number of caps earned by each player on the team that’s likely to go see edit below), and then when the groups break down I’m going to apply those figures and (hopefully) figure out later today who will win the World Cup based on 10% of a goal.
EDIT: As I was compiling data, it occurred to me that using caps for team experience was going to cause smaller nations, like Honduras, to actually be vastly overrated. This is because, when your talent pool is smaller, you go with who you have. So I re-read the book and found that the authors were actually talking about games the team has played total (i.e., in the entire history of England, how many games have they played?). So I’m working on a way of figuring that out.
EDIT #2: Okay, this sucks, there’s NO WAY to figure that out without just counting. However, there is a way of figuring out how many matches a team has played between 1872 and 2001: the book cites Russell Gerrard’s database, and it’s free and easily accessible. Since most of the teams on the list have played every international matchday since 2001 (give or take the odd World Cup, Confederations Cup, etc.), I’m going to use those numbers…however, if you were to do this for an actual paper, you’d actually need to figure these out. So I guess what I’m saying is: this is even more of an educated crap shoot than it was before.
I would say Arsenal are the A’s: they’re cheap as shit and don’t win anything, but people constantly blow them for doing things “the right way.”
Yeah, the book LOVES Arsenal; they make a lot out of the fact that Arsene Wenger is a trained economist, and that he was a good example of a team hiring a manager the “right” way (i.e., Arsenal went on a bonafide search for a manager, brought in an unknown instead of a guy who’d bombed out somewhere else, etc.). They also talk about how Arsenal will help a player through personal problems rather than sell him at a discounted rate for someone else to do well with him, and how Arsenal most likely has a set price for every player that they’d cash out at. Barcelona can probably get Fabregas if they wanted him, for example; it’s just a question of whether they meet Arsenal’s valuation.
It’s funny, I was actually reading that part on Sunday and when I heard Wenger’s comments about Drogba – about how “efficient” he is, etc. – it made sense that he was complimenting him. Getting maximum results with minimal expense – whether that expense is money or energy – is really the dream of an economist.
That said, their model franchises are Lyon (who have one sporting director who oversees the club and treat whoever the manager is the way Beane treats whomever his manager is: as a middle manager) and Nottingham Forest under Clough.
Looks like the book is only $10 right now on Amazon – it’s on the wish list, and might become an Xmas gift suggestion. I’m a sucker for new footy books, especially ones that try to break it down through statistical analysis (even if those statistics are seemingly unrelated to the matches).