Soccernomics. Simon Kuper
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because his team, Middlesbrough, reached the UEFA Cup final in 2006 and avoided relegation just as the English Football Association was deciding who to pick. By the time Middlesbrough were thumped 4–0 by Sevilla in the final, McClaren already had the job.
The problem is that there is a lot randomness in results in the short term. The underlying patterns can only be identified once you let the law of large numbers do its work. Match results (like daily movements in share prices) are a random walk, and only after many observations can you start to see the trend. Consider the main candidates to manage England in 1996: Bryan Robson, Frank Clark, Gerry Francis and the eventual choice, Glenn Hoddle. Today none of them works as a manager, none had his last job in the Premier League and none will probably work that high again. They were in the frame in 1996 because they had had good results recently, had been good players and were English – another illegal consideration in hiring. Or think of the Football Association’s back-to-back appointments of the immediately available Englishmen Sam Allardyce and Gareth Southgate in 2016.
The new manager is traditionally chosen not for his alleged managerial skills but because his name, appearance and skills at public relations are expected to impress the club’s fans, its players and the media. It was brave of Milan to appoint the unknown Sacchi, and Arsenal the unknown Wenger. Tony Adams, Arsenal’s then captain, doubted the obscure foreigner on first sight. In his autobiography, Addicted, the player recalls thinking, ‘What does this Frenchman know about football? He wears glasses and looks more like a schoolteacher. He’s not going to be as good as George. Does he even speak English properly?’
A manager must above all look like a manager. Clubs would rather use traditional methods to appoint incompetents than risk doing anything that looks odd.
The most obvious reason football was such an incompetent business for so long is that football clubs tended to hire incompetent staff. The manager is only the start of it. Years ago one of us requested an interview with the chairman of an English club quoted on the stock market. The press officer asked me to send a fax (a 1980s technology revered by football clubs well into the twenty-first century). I sent it. She said she never got it. On request I sent three more faxes to different officials. She said none arrived. This is quite a common experience for football journalists. Because football clubs are the only businesses that get daily publicity without trying to, they treat journalists as humble supplicants instead of as unpaid marketers of the clubs’ brands. The media often retaliate by being mean. This is not very clever of the clubs, because almost all their fans follow them through the media rather than by going to the stadiums.
A month after all the faxes, I was granted permission to send my request by email. When I arrived at the club for the interview, I met the press officer. She was beautiful. Of course she was. Traditionally, football clubs recruited the women on their office staff for their looks, and the men because they played professional football or were somebody’s friend.
When Mino Raiola entered football as an agent in his early twenties, straight out of his family’s restaurant business, he ‘was not impressed at all’, he told us. ‘It’s a closed world, with a gigantic potential, and where a lot of money circulates, but it’s often managed by people of whom I think, “What the fuck?” It’s hard to understand that on the field there are people who have made it through sweat and tears, through a certain natural selection – but not at the top, in the boardroom. That’s very strange.
‘You have to have done something in the football world to get another job in the football world. The average level in the football world is low, and why is it low? Because we don’t want outsiders to influence and change or improve our football world.’
A clever person who has never played professional football can (after rigorous study) become a brain surgeon, but however long that person studies, he can never become coach of Ajax Amsterdam, marvels Raiola. ‘That’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’ When a football director’s job opens up, he notes, it’s rarely advertised publicly. Nor do many clubs or federations scour the world for the best possible candidate. ‘No,’ scoffs Raiola, ‘we’ll take someone from within our own ranks. Incest makes this world weak.’
This is all the more bizarre because it would be easy for football clubs and federations to recruit excellent executives. Professors at business schools report that many of their MBA students (who in the UK in 2017 paid between £16,000 and £73,000 a year in tuition fees) dream of working in football for a pitiful salary. Often the students beg clubs to let them work for free as summer interns. Clubs seldom want them (though here again, as the football business gradually gets clever, more MBAs are creeping in). If you work for a football club, your goal is generally to keep working there, not to be shown up by some overeducated young thing who has actually learned something about business.
In part this is because much of the traditionally working-class football industry distrusted education. In part, says Emmanuel Hembert of A. T. Kearney, it is because many clubs are dominated by a vain owner-manager: ‘Lots of them invested for ego reasons, which is never a good thing in business. They prefer not to have strong people around them, except the coach. They really pay low salaries.’ If you work for a football club as anything but a player or manager, you typically get paid in stardust.
Historically, only Manchester United recruited respected executives from normal industries (such as Peter Kenyon from Umbro). Only after about 2010 did most of the other biggest European clubs start to do so, too.
Baseball for a long time was just as incompetent. In Moneyball Lewis asked why, among baseball executives and scouts, ‘there really is no level of incompetence that won’t be tolerated’. He thought the main reason was ‘that baseball has structured itself less as a business than as a social club. … There are many ways to embarrass the Club, but being bad at your job isn’t one of them. The greatest offense a Club member can commit is not ineptitude but disloyalty.’ Club members – and this applies in football as much as in baseball – are selected for clubbability. Clever outsiders are not clubbable, because they talk funny, and go around pointing out the things that people inside the Club are doing wrong. ‘It wasn’t as simple as the unease of jocks in the presence of nerds,’ wrote Lewis – but that unease does have a lot to do with it.
The staff of football clubs traditionally tend not merely to be incompetent. They are also often novices. This is because staff turnover is rapid. Whenever a new owner arrives, he generally brings in his cronies. The departing staff rarely join a new club, because that is considered disloyal (Kenyon, an exception, was persecuted for moving from United to Chelsea), even though players change clubs all the time. So football executives are always having to reinvent the wheel.
Worse, the media and fans often make it impossible for clubs to take sensible decisions. They are always hassling the club to do something immediately. If the team loses three games, fans start chanting for the club to sack the coach or buy a new player, in short tear up the plans it might have made a month ago. Tony Fernandes, the Malaysian businessman who had run a tight ship at his airline AirAsia, couldn’t do the same after taking over QPR in 2011. ‘Two things are different from AirAsia,’ he told us in 2013. ‘One is I can control almost everything in AirAsia. You can do whatever you want in football, but it’s up to the eleven guys on the pitch at the end of the day, right? The second thing is, you have a very vocal bunch of shareholders – called fans. Everyone has an opinion. The plans get thrown out of the window when you start losing. The excitement you get when you win a football game is unbelievable. The downside is that when you lose you want to kill yourself.’
‘Consumer activism in this industry is extreme,’ agreed A. T. Kearney in its report ‘Playing for Profits’. Hembert says, ‘The business plan – as soon as you sign a player for £10 million, you blow up your business plan. Commercial employees have to fight for £100,000 of spending here or there, but then suddenly the club spends £10 million.’
Or more. Sven-Göran Eriksson once flew into Zurich to