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World Cups are eventually knock-out tournaments and knock-out competitions, especially since the introduction of penalty shoot-outs, depend a great deal on chance. Billy Beane never worried about Oakland's failure to win the World Series the knockout competition that rounds off the baseball season because that was too often a matter of luck; it was only over the regular league season of games that a small statistical advantage had the time to tell.
Kuper and Szymanski admit as much they even quote the relevant passage from Moneyball , so one finishes this chapter not with a sense that something curious has been explained by statistical analysis, but that the relevant statistical sample is simply too small to bear much explanation at all. In their desire to ape an approach that was developed to analyse the highly distinctive sport of baseball, Kuper and Szymanski seem to lose sight of what is distinctive about football.
They devote a chapter to explaining why the regular complaint that football has become too unequal ie the rich clubs always win is self-defeating, because inequality is part of football's appeal. But though this is true, they miss the most obvious reason for it.
Unlike baseball indeed all other American sports , football is a low-scoring game that can end in a goalless draw. Every goal is an event, no matter how unequal the contest. Frankly, a Major League baseball game that ends is a bit of a bore, but a Premier League game that finishes lives on in the memory. Equally, unlike baseball, football is not a sport that can easily be broken down into self-contained slices of action.
It moves around the field in long, often chaotic sequences that, despite ProZone's best efforts, are very hard to capture on statistical spreadsheets. The one part of the game that is clearly amenable to this sort of analysis is the penalty shoot-out and Kuper and Szymanski devote a chapter to it here. But it's pretty elementary stuff and the conclusion — that the best penalty-takers don't always shoot to their best side but randomise the sequence so as to keep the goalkeeper guessing — is hardly a tale of the unexpected.
Serious sabermetrics really does look like rocket science in comparison. There are still plenty of good things in this book. The best chapters are more conventional economics than freakonomics, explaining how and why money flows through the game, including an eye-popping account of how poorly the financial side of the sport is still managed by people with much more money than sense.
There are also some fascinating stories, of which the most tantalising is a brief account of the rise of Olympique Lyonnais from relative obscurity to total dominance of French football, under their innovative owner, Jean-Michel Aulas. The success of Lyon and Aulas is probably the closest football has to the story of Oakland and Billy Beane, but Kuper and Szymanski are so keen to touch base with everything that they don't give it the space it deserves. It would also have been nice to hear more about the very few managers who seem to have found something in the numbers that everyone else is missing.
No doubt access was a problem — managers such as Wenger are notoriously secretive. We also hear almost nothing about the most interesting man currently working in the football business, Jose Mourinho.
Like Wenger, Mourinho has turned football management into a cross between an economics seminar and a personality cult. Neither man has won the Champions League with an English club, but then the Champions League becomes a knockout tournament in its later stages, so it doesn't count. Instead, Mourinho is the possessor of one of the most remarkable statistical record in world sport — no team he has managed Porto, Chelsea, Inter has lost a league match at home since February , a scarcely credible run of matches.
That is a truly curious football phenomenon that would be worth trying to explain, if only anyone could get close enough to find out how he does it. The Moneyball of football remains to be written.
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