In all the time I’ve been writing Celtic Quick News I don’t think I’ve talked about books until Dominik Diamond’s stunning work last week, but there are a few others we should discuss, starting with one of the most important books written about football in the modern era.
‘Why England Lose & Other Curious Football Phenomenon Explained’, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, deconstructs the game into its basic components. It asks strategic questions; why do some clubs and nations perennially fail while others seem to succeed despite facing similar odds.
The title is a bit of a misnomer; England’s regular failures are held up as exemplary examples of what not to do in football (the book was published last year, before England’s predictably poor World Cup), but the subject matter and subsequent lessons are applicable to everyone in the football business.
The book dives straight into one of this week’s topical subjects, why clubs are so bad a spending money on transfers. At the worst end of the scale some clubs churn through successive managers who grab as many players as they can to replace those who got his predecessor the sack. More often than not the new guy has not established a reliable relationship with the scouts and has a few weeks to plunge the club further into debt in what amounts to little more than a crap shoot, quickly destroying whatever inheritance he had.
Some nationalities are overvalued, the Dutch, for example, while others less so. They also give a good analysis of when to sell your best players.
Fans are also analysed. Evidence is presented to suggest that football fans are not a homogenous blob, some are genuinely faithful through thick-and-thin, but many football fans are more transient in nature. Studies into football attendees are presented which explain the percentage of football fans who will buy a season ticket irrespective of how successful the club is and different types of volatile season ticket buyers.
Poverty and affluence has a huge impact on how successful a city or country will be in producing a successful football team. The reasons why poor countries do less well than similarly sized wealthy countries, and why middle-class England continues to under-achieve, despite its abundance of facilities, are explored.
It’s not all negative; there are plenty of examples given of clubs who have smarter systems than most of the rabble they compete against. Some of them are even happy to talk to the authors about their ways, confident, perhaps, that most clubs are so resistant to change, anything radical would be dismissed out of hand.
After I read Why England Lose last year I bought several copies and put them in the hands of some people in the game who I thought should read it. As a well-researched manifesto against waste and under-achievement in the game it’s a must-read.
