Sporting life
By Simon Kuper
Published: August 1 2009 03:00 | Last updated: August 1 2009 03:00
Why Europe's best football clubs hail from the provinces
There is something odd about Europe's biggest football clubs: they aren't from Europe's biggest cities. Manchester United, Milan, Barcelona and Bayern Munich are provincial clubs. According to a recent survey by the researchers Sport+Markt, the most popular team in each of Europe's seven largest countries is not from the capital city.
This was one of the quirks that Stefan Szymanski and I stumbled on while writing our new book, Why England Lose: And Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained . We think we've found the explanation.
Let's take the archetypal provincial city with giant club, Manchester, because what happened there prefigured later events in towns such as Barcelona and Milan. In 1878 a football club for workers of a railway company started up in Manchester. Newton Heath played in work clogs against other works teams. Newton Heath, of course, became Manchester United. What matters here are its origins. The workers were "sucked in from all over the country to service the growing need for locomotives and carriages," writes Jim White in Manchester United: The Biography .
During the industrial revolution, Manchester's population jumped from 84,000 in 1800 to 1.25m in 1900. Most "Mancunians" were in fact rootless migrants. Unmoored in a place so brutal that it helped give Karl Marx the idea for communism, many embraced the local football clubs. Football must have offered them something of the sense of community that they had previously known in their villages.
In other British industrial cities, too, migrants adopted football clubs with a fervour unknown in more established towns. Their support brought the clubs success. That success attracted other fans from around Britain, and later from abroad. Theindustrial revolution still shapes English fandom. Today the region around Manchester and Liverpool has only 11 per cent of the English population. Nonetheless, this season the region is providing eight of the Premier League's 20 clubs. Their advantage: generations of brand-building. Manchester United is arguably the world's most popular club largely because Manchester was the first industrial city.
Almost all of Europe's best football cities were once new industrial centres. Clubs grew bigger here than in capitals or towns with entrenched hierarchies. That's why no team from Paris, London or Berlin has won the Champions League.
In most leading European football cities, the industrial migrants arrived in a whoosh in the late nineteenth century. Munich had 100,000 inhabitants in 1852, and five times as many in 1901. Barcelona's population trebled in the same period to 533,000.
The second stage of the football boom in these cities happened in the 1950s and 1960s. During Italy's postwar "economic miracle", flocks of poor southern peasants travelled north. Many ended up in Turin making cars for Fiat and became fans of the local team, Juventus.
In all these cities the industrial revolution ended, often painfully. But besides the empty docks and factory buildings, the other legacy of the era was beloved football clubs.
These were the cities with the fewest long-standing hierarchies, the weakest ties between people and place. Here, there were emotional gaps to fill. Contrast these cities with traditionally upper-class towns. In England, Oxford, Cambridge, Cheltenham, Canterbury and York have more than 100,000 inhabitants each. Yet between them they have just one team in the Football League. In places with settled hierarchies, people did not need football to root themselves.
The great exception to the rule is Real Madrid, a giant club from a capital city. Real built its brand in the 1950s, during Franco's fascist regime. Dictators divert resources to the capital. The boost that Real got under Franco has lasted until now, like the boost that Barcelona got from frenzied industrialisation.
Paris and London, Europe's giants, will eventually win the Champions League. Then they will dominate all aspects of life in their countries.
simonkuper-ft@hotmail.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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Why England Lose & Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained
Review by Paddy Harverson
Published: August 3 2009 05:22 | Last updated: August 3 2009 05:22
Why England Lose & Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained
By Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski
HarperSport £15.99 352 pages
FT Bookshop price: £12.79
Many years ago I bumped into Michel Platini, the French midfielder, in a Brussels hotel corridor. In my best schoolboy French I wished him good luck in the big game, an offering which the curly-haired maestro greeted with predictable disdain.
Today, Platini is less curly-haired, and is perhaps best known as the English Premier League’s biggest critic. As president of UEFA, Platini believes the rich “Big Four” English clubs are ruining the sport with cash-fuelled successes on the field that make football boringly predictable.
Most observers assume that all sensible football fans agree with him. The last 14 Premiership titles have been won by either Manchester United (9 wins), Arsenal (3) or Chelsea (2). In that time only Liverpool – the final member of the Big Four – has seriously challenged the title. This dominance is dull and is putting fans off the game, or so the argument goes.
This, of course, is nonsense. I say “of course” because I’ve read Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s new book Why England Lose & Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained. It demolishes Platini’s theory and many other soccer shibboleths by applying the rigorous logic of statistical analytics and mathematical theorem to questions such as “Are penalties unfair?” and “Which country in the world loves football the most?”
So, ask Kuper and Szymanski, if predictable results bored fans, why don’t more of them go to matches where the outcome of the result is uncertain? Using the original idea of actually studying attendance figures, the duo prove that fans prefer unbalanced leagues. Why? Unbalanced leagues give you David v Goliath contests, which fans love; dominant teams have charismatic stars playing attractive football, which is inherently popular; and most fans either support the big clubs or hate them with a passion.
The authors’ analysis is much more complicated, but it gives a flavour of the clear-headed thinking that makes the book such an enjoyable read. It is also educational. I now know how to use “combinatorics” when figuring out England’s chances of qualifying for the World Cup (a realistically unexciting 63 per cent). I’ve learned about “the availability heuristic” and why some clubs sign lots of blond footballers (because their blond hair makes them stand out in games to watching scouts). And, the next time I’m down the pub after the game, I will be able to explain how Zipf’s Law will soon consign to history’s dustbin the remarkable fact that no team from any of Europe’s seven largest cities has ever won the European Cup.
The book is not just a collection of analytics. It is well argued too. Szymanski, an economist, knows his stuff, and Kuper, a born contrarian and FT sports writer, is incapable of cliché. It also contains some great stories and previously unknown nuggets, such as how Brazil won the 2002 World Cup with a one-handed goalkeeper, or why Manchester United beat Chelsea on penalties in the 2008 Champions League final. (The answer: because Nicolas Anelka a) decided not to listen to the advice of a Basque economist, and b) failed to understand the nuances of game theory.)
As for the central question as to why England hasn’t won the World Cup for 43 years, the truth of the matter is reassuringly simple. We are as good, or as bad, as we should be. And if you believe Kuper and Szymanski, we won’t have a decent chance of winning the World Cup until we actually host it.
If there is one flaw in the book, it is the failure to examine the impact on results of good coaching. But, perhaps, the authors skip over this because the answer lies beyond the realm of statistical analysis.
Paddy Harverson is a former communications director at Manchester United
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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