Soccernomics: a dull book that's not really worth reading

Ah football, that relentless generator of guff. As I get older I'm struck by the growth in the number of journalists willing to pretend that there's something high minded about it all though. Perhaps this dawning awareness of tasteful anorakdom is all a part of the ageing process, like experiencing awful hangovers and feeling profoundly alienated by ads for certain mobile phone networks. Or perhaps its one of those singular facts of the Age, a consequence of the potential extension of adolescence until one is well into one's thirties (at least). Did our fathers really spend hours analysing the merits of pundits? Did their fathers spend significant chunks of their weekly income on replica jerseys?

Regardless, the reach of the football “experience” extends ever more deeply into pockets of our lives that had previously been untroubled by its clammy grasp. One of the undoubted high priests of its hermeneutics is Simon Kuper, football correspondant for the FT and the co-author (alongside economist Stefan Szymanski) of the book under review today: Soccernomics. Channelling the spirit of a zany management consultant watching Sky Sports News they've set out to uncover the key determining statistics and economic trends that lie at the heart of the modern game.

The first thing to note about this irritatingly absorbing collection of expanded newspaper articles (sample chapter title: “Why Poor Countries are Poor at Sport”) is that the authors themselves seem deeply confused about the merits of their approach: “Football is neither big business nor good business. It arguably isn't even business at all.” Economics, however, is primarily concerned with the most efficient means by which goods and services are delivered to the public. But if football clubs don't really make sense as a business then they are presumably not run with the intent of maximising the return on investment for their owners. As a result, all attempts to analyse how they can be best run from an economic perspective will collapse into a confused pile of sentimental opinions. To put it another way, one could well imagine a scenario where K & S present their findings to an assembly of chairmen, and the chairmen simply reply: “Well, d'uh!”

Unfortunately, this section appearing near the start is probably the most interesting in the book. Having apparently not noticed that they've seriously damaged the underlying premise of the whole enterprise they blithely carry on with rapidly diminishing returns. Their answers to questions like “are black managers discriminated against?” (yes, managers have so little influence that the market can't punish discriminatory hiring behaviour) and “what countries in the west care most about football?” (Norway ad Iceland, who knew?) are interesting enough but the exhaustive description of the statistical analyses involved are eye wateringly tedious.

Beyond the “football isn't really business” point highlights are hard to identify. The discussion of re-location consultants and the refusal by clubs to appoint them is instructive though as it actually shows the authors getting excited about something. Regardless of the frequently obscene sums of money involved in player transfers many of these deals fail because the purchasing club refuses to spend a franction more in attempting to reduce the unease inevitably felt by what are usually heavily sheltered young men in alien environments. Yet Kuper & Szymanski's estimable anger at clubs refusing to pay a relatively small amount of good money after wasting huge amounts of bad money is all too rare.

The absence of this vaguely ethical sense is also evident in their discussion of the shrewdest operators in the transfer market as great play is made of the “regression to the mean”. Despite the authors' insistance on how significant this tool is much of the insights advanced are most vividly explained through references to Peter Taylor's memoir of his time with Brian Clough. As other names like Wenger, Ferguson and Moyes frequently appear with disconcerting regularity the feeling that this whole section would work better simply as a description of their transfer policies only grows. Contrary to their assertion that managers don't really matter it would appear that they actually do have a fair amount of influence. Indeed, any self respecting economist would point out that it could hardly be otherwise in any well developed capitalist economy, obsessed as they are with marginal returns. Personality, or the ethical business of getting the most out of people, is all important when other resources are more or less equal.

Ultimately this obsession with the median seems to be a failing common to many of these “stats will change your life” books (and one hardly discernible at all in Kuper's “Football Men”). Rather than focusing on those who do well and considering the reasons for their success they emphasise life's dutiful trudgers. The effect of this is that they create a sort of mystery gap between the good and the middling and the only way to bridge this gap is to BUY THIS BOOK AND YOU WILL UNDERSTAND! In truth though the basic point seems to be that there's little to understand, generally the fields of endeavour in question aren't profoundly difficult and those under observation simply need to pay more attention to what their betters are already doing.

So, to recap before I sign off: the joy of stats - a fairly thin conceit for an entire book.