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Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey--and Even Iraq--Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World's Most Popular Sport |  | Authors: Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski
Publisher: Nation Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 7673
Media: Paperback
Edition: Original
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 1568584253
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.334
EAN: 9781568584256
ASIN: 1568584253
Publication Date: October 27, 2009
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Product Description
Why do England lose? Why does Scotland suck? Why doesn’t America dominate the sport internationally...and why do the Germans play with such an efficient but robotic style? These are questions every soccer aficionado has asked. Soccernomics answers them. Using insights and analogies from economics, statistics, psychology, and business to cast a new and entertaining light on how the game works, Soccernomics reveals the often surprisingly counterintuitive truths about soccer. An essential guide for the 2010 World Cup, Soccernomics is a new way of looking at the world’s most popular game.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 27
 Brings conventional soccer wisdom to the level of flat-earth theories July 24, 2010
M. E. Llorens (Miami FL)
This book totally changes the way you look at and think about football-soccer. It takes an armful of misconceptions and prejudices about the sport and subjects them to the cold analytical regard of economics and statistics. If that doesn't sound like fun, you're wrong. Is England really underperforming when it crashes out at the quarterfinal or semifinal stage? Does a team's loss really provoke suicides or is it possible that the game actually prevents a few? Why don't major European capitals win more Champions' Leagues? Why are major clubs like Man U and Barcelona located in industrial capitals? Does hosting tournaments really bring economic bonanzas to the host nation?
Having lived in Great Britain, I kept coming back to it again and again to it watching the "us against them" frenzy in the British media prior to the England-Germany match in South Africa. And after the match itself, I read the self-flagellating post-mortems about why English football is in decadence (lack of a winter break was one suggestion) with a slightly smug smile. The book is filled with other enlightening tidbits such as how the transfer market usually overpays for center forwards (Ibrahimovic's passage from Inter to Barcelona being a case in point) and confirms other facts you always suspected (direct correlation between the size of a team's payroll and performance in league tables). But singling out specific conclusions does not do it justice, because the pleasure consists in following the authors as they dissect conventional wisdom. Listening to soccer commentary after reading this book feels a little like reading Creationist tracts after Darwin. Will some of its light pierce the darker corners of sports journalism? Alas, probably not, but at the very least the book simply makes it more pleasant to think about the beautiful game.
Interesting and engaging though slightly flawed July 14, 2010
C. Marshall (South Florida)
If you've read "Freakonomics" or any of Malcolm Gladwell's books, Soccernomics makes for an interesting read. Many of the quirky statistical correlations and regressions of Freakonomics are applied to the Beautiful Game. Likewise, some of the observations that typically appear in a Gladwell book makes Soccernomics engaging. Will it help a newcomer to soccer understand the beautiful game? Probably not. But if you're interested in economics and statistics applied to soccer, the game and the numbers make a bit more sense. Some of the assertions didn't fully hold water for me but it was fully entertaining. Soccernomics made me refer to You Tube several times, helped me understand (in part) why an African team may still be away off from making a serious run at the Finals and explained why the Three Lions continually disappoint.
 Lot of Soccer, No Modern Economics July 13, 2010
Ettore Panetti (Stockholm, Sweden)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
In my opinion, this book's main point is that the higher the salaries paid to players, the better the results of the teams.
This reflects two minuses: first of all, the authors do not explain which kind of theory they have in mind when they run regressions and talk about results. They seem to think of salaries as a way to give incentives to players to play better football. Economic theory says that the principal (i.e. football clubs) needs to give incentives to agents (i.e. players) when she cannot observe their effort, but only the final results of their actions. I think the application of this paradigm to football is questionable (players' effort is so observable that we have "Fantasy Football"). We may think that players have some private information about their own "type" (i.e., individual talent), but again that is not explained, and again we may argue that talent is observable ex-post, as well as effort. Moreover, I can easily think of models that say a different story: for example, we may argue that players, as the only agents who can win matches, extract rents from clubs in the form of higher salaries. Therefore, the better the results, the higher players' bargaining power (also because of better external opportunities in terms of offers from other teams), hence the higher their salaries.
The second minus is related to the empirical analysis: the fact that the econometric techniques used in the analysis are too basic, I'm afraid to say at "undergrad level". I'm curious to see if sport economists can find some natural experiments about football, or use regression discountinuity design to address more interesting questions in the future.
In conclusion, Freakonomics and Superfreakonomics, despite being as simple as this book, are definitely more grounded in modern Economic Theory. This book is just nice to read for non-economists.
 Kicking Around the World's Most 'Popular' Game July 6, 2010
Nicholas Nahat
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
For a person almost completely new to soccer, this book was a good introduction to the context of the game. The authors deftly interweave both the political and economic issues involved in both national and international play, for example explaining how soccer began in England and spread throughout the world as part of the British Empire's 'soft power' through the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. There is a good discussion of the export of soccer beyond just Europe, and its more recent penetration outside Europe and Latin America. Unsurprisingly, the main point is that success is a function of population, money, and experience.
The authors generally take a different approach to soccer in each chapter as a digression for analysis of the sport. For example, I found the discussion of whether hosting a major event like the World Cup is an economic benefit or not to be interesting because of a new angle I hadn't heard before: although little additional money actually flows to an area, which is the usual argument for the project, and may even be costly, the population is generally happier for having hosted the event. Yet, politicians are reluctant to frame a debate in terms of 'increasing happiness.' I also enjoyed the discussion of game theory and penalty kicks, how social cohesion from soccer prevents suicides, and the use of Zipf's law.
On the other hand, I found the argument that soccer was 'popular' in the United States unpersuasive, though it depends on how you define popular. Just because kids play alot of soccer, that doesn't make it a major sport in that country. It might be asking too much from a book so in love with the game, but economists should be at least somewhat objective: truth be told, a majority of the world doesn't care about soccer--talk of China is conspicuously absent. In fact, soccer is not the most popular sport in 7 of the 10 most populous countries. The World Cup could just as easily be called the Euro-Latin America Cup, based on who has won the event.
The least successful portions of the book are the ones which are almost purely speculative, but at least the authors acknowledge that their empirical data is shaky, like trying to assess which country 'loves' soccer most, or the best 'little' soccer country on Earth.
Although the authors make many references to the now-classic 'Moneyball', Soccernomics isn't the analog of that book. In Moneyball, one of the most interesting insights was popularizing the newer way of valuing baseball skills, with different statistical measures. Soccernomics doesn't do that. The best it does is make generally anecdotal recommendations: help foreign players relocate, use the 'wisdom of crowds,' or acquire transfers in their early 20s. It doesn't suggest a method like on base percentage did in Moneyball to suggest which transfers might be undervalued. For example, what statistics might Manchester United have used to determine that Diego Forlan, who had feet of clay for England and earned the nickname Diego Forlorn in his disastrous spell with the team, would later become Europe's leading scorer, first with Villareal in 2005 and then with Atletico Madrid in 2009.
Soccernomics is a good introduction to the context of the world's most popular sport and boils down issues of interest to a general audience, but some of the details fray upon closer examination, and it doesn't completely live up to its promise.
Entertaining read, some interesting topics July 5, 2010
Rachel
Some of the chapters in the book are very intriguing I particularly liked the how the authors applied game theory to their discussion on penalty kicks. Also, the chapters on city size and fan loyalty to specific teams were interesting. However, some of the arguments seemed very far-fetching, such as game results curbing suicide rates and, to a lesser extent, determining which nation has the most enthusiastic fans.
The authors even stated that the data they found was not reliable and often lacking, yet did they still use it? I don't even know. Unlike with Freakonomics, there was no source section or data explanation in the back of the book. The only thing that was included was a selected bibliography.
Overall, I agree with the main argument of the book: that as soccer (like most industries) becomes more globalized, new non-European/Brazilian leaders will emerge. However, I would take most of the other arguments with a grain of salt.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 27
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