Failure™ Magazine

Soccernomics

Journalist Simon Kipur and sports economist Stefan Szymanski team up to dispel myths about the world’s most popular sport.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Sports

What about front-office executives? Has there been resistance to the ideas you present?
Stefan and I have spoken to people inside the game who are very receptive to our thinking. They recognize that clubs haven’t been brilliantly run, as witnessed by the turnover of managers and countless overpriced transfers.

More and more English clubs have what are known as “performance directors”—individuals who analyze data to see if it might help the club in any way. For instance, a performance director might try to determine whether the number of tackles a defender makes is a good gauge of his quality. (It isn’t.) These individuals tend to be aware of the “Moneyball” phenomenon in U.S. sports. In this regard, English soccer probably leads the continental game, because the English are copying the Americans.

How do you feel about comparisons between your book and “Moneyball”?
I can see why people make the comparison, but it’s not very exact. I read “Moneyball”—a brilliant book—after we started writing “Soccernomics,” so it wasn’t really an inspiration. Michael Lewis concentrates on one club [Major League Baseball’s Oakland Athletics] and one man [A’s general manager Billy Beane], whereas we look at the totality of a sport.

Also, “Moneyball” focuses on baseball statistics like on-base percentage, and nobody has yet identified similarly useful stats in soccer. For example, it turns out that possession time is a poor predictor of victory, and the number of kilometers players run in a game doesn’t predict wins either. Our book focuses on selection issues: don’t execute too many transfers, don’t buy certain kinds of players, and don’t be so quick to sack your manager, because managers don’t make much difference.

But Beane is now involved with the San Jose Earthquakes [of Major League Soccer], and it will be fascinating to see if he can do for soccer what he did for baseball.

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