Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
*Starred Review* Call it Moneyball for soccer: journalist Kuper (Soccer against the Enemy, 2006) and economist Szymanski (Fans of the World, Unite! 2008) apply cold, hard facts to our commonly held beliefs about the beautiful game and tell us that everything we think we know is wrong. England’s national team doesn’t underachieve (if anything, given its size, location, and talent pool, it overachieves); paying big money for hot players isn’t a good idea (usually, the players’ exertions mean they’ll underperform next year); and soccer clubs make terrible (though remarkably durable) businesses. Unlike Kuper’s more sober Soccer against the Enemy, there’s a teasing playfulness, almost braggadocio, here, as the authors burst bubble after bubble using the words, “We have the data to answer this question.” As they acknowledge, some fans will resist subjecting long-held emotional attachments to the cold light of statistical analysis. And some may argue their findings: just as Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s are coming off their third losing season, author-praised AC Milan is off to a terrible start. But whether analyzing the relationship of spending to winning or applying game theory to the penalty kick, the authors’ delight in discovery proves both persuasive and contagious. It’s a fascinating book with the potential to effect genuine change in the sport. --Keir Graff
Tell me about your first book, Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski
I like this book because it is breezily written and the authors clearly display a solid mastery of their subject. The book discusses ‘soccer’, which of course is the shortened Oxbridge term for association football emanating from the 1860s. Contrary to the common view in Britain and Europe that this term comprises prima facie evidence of yet another American bastardisation of a European cultural icon, the term is not an American invention at all but British slang.
Soccernomics is really the most insightful book about the globalisation of the sport and its current state. Simon Kuper writes for The Financial Times and is a very accomplished journalist on many subjects, including sports. What the book picks up on is that England typically always fails in penalty shoot-outs, whereas countries like Germany normally win in similar situations, apart from once in 1976 when Uli Hoeness – to his everlasting shame – sent his potentially game-deciding shot over the crossbar, thus making Germany the loser to Czechoslovakia in the European Nations’ Championship final in Yugoslavia.
I am less impressed with the authors’ trying to explain this – and similar – oddities of the game, but I am fully aware that they are not trying to do so in a serious manner but rather choose to use these wonderful tidbits to catch the reader’s attention for their larger project, which is to explain why and how soccer has become far and away the world’s most important game. The authors, in my opinion, rightly tie the game’s current global status to its emergence in the latter half of the 19th century.
They also examine how other countries that at the moment still seem peripheral to the game could very well become central to its future. It is in this context that they offer a fine analysis of soccer’s status in the United States. The authors are among a very small number of European football experts who truly understand the game’s different gestalt in America. Moreover, they genuinely engage in American soccer on its own terms, which they do not deride as yet another American abomination and/or a deformation of a European cultural treasure, but appreciate fully as a different social construct and cultural expression of the game’s being in football-traditional places like Europe and Latin America. The authors gained my respect and admiration for their thoughtful contrasting of American soccer to English or European football without letting their normative orientation colour their analyses.
As to their belief that such peripheral countries to the world of global football as the United States, Japan and even Iraq might indeed mutate into powerhouses and potentially win such major tournaments as the World Cup, I remain a good deal more sceptical. Personally, I am quite convinced – as this World Cup will show – that the football giants of Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Germany, England and Holland will continue to get bigger and that Iraq, Australia and the US are a long way off from winning. As in most things, on football, too, what sociologists call the Matthew Effect remains fully operative and displays an immense resilience: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
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Currently the Arthur F Thurnau Professor and Karl W Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan, Markovits was recently the Sir Peter Ustinov Professor at the University of Vienna where he offered two courses on sports identity and culture in the United States and Europe. A child of Hungarian-speaking Jews, Markovits was born in Romania where he was weaned on football, vividly remembering the Hungarian loss to the Germans in the World Cup of 1954 as well as the broadcasts of the Hungarians’ demolition of the English at Wembley and then in Budapest. The tragedy of Munich on 6 February, 1958 rendered him a life-long Manchester United fan. Immigrating to the United States in 1960, Markovits became an avid baseball, basketball, American football and ice-hockey fan. The sports language and culture on both sides of the Atlantic have influenced his entire life.
