UF Exclusive: Q & A With ‘Soccer Men’ Author Simon Kuper (PART II)

As promised: The second (and final!) installment of our wide-ranging interview with Soccer Men author Simon Kuper. You can find the first part here.

Just. Incredibly. Bad. Luck. Or not?

Unprofessional Foul: There is a chapter when you go through the tropes that run across the current English stars’ autobiographies. It is very funny and definitely one of the highlights of the book.  My question, then: Do you think the new generation — Wilshere and Jones and the like — do you think that group, that age group, has taken anything from knowing these stories, maybe even by reading those books? Do you they’ll be different.. or that it’s just going to be more of the same?

Simon Kuper: Well, that’s not the wrong model. That’s seen as the right model. If you look at Carra and Gerrard and Cole and Lampard and Rooney, you say, “Those guys are at the top of the English game. They are the guys I should emulate. They’re not doing anything wrong.”

UF: England haven’t won anything in a very long time and it seems to me that in place of having a special team to talk about, they… their exceptionalism is not in their soccer, but in their losing. There’s no banality in an England defeat. It’s always feels special and exciting. Do you, having lived in and reported from so many places, see anything in that? Or is it just an English tabloid construction?

Kuper: In Soccernomics we talk about how it’s wrong to say England under-perform. They actually overachieve given they’re not a very big country and a lot of other countries have the same amount of experience. So they do just fine.

But it’s true that there’s this weird expectation — about “coming home” and the songs and “we invented the game, so we should be best.”

The defeat is always in some ways a shock, but it’s also a ritual. It’s this very, sort of, comforting ritual. Like all rituals it carries you through your life and marks the passage of the years and part of this ritual is that the defeat is always seen as freakish, just incredible bad luck.  So in 2010, it was Lampard’s goal. Just increeeeedible bad luck. Whereas, of course, all teams suffer from bad luck and bad refereeing decisions.  Often it’s penalties which are the incredible bad luck, or Beckham gets sent off and it’s incredible bad luck.

But it’s also partly the idea that foreigners cheat, which is a very ancient English trope. And there”s also the idea that all that could stand between “us” and our rightful destiny is massive bad luck, while you also get this national inquest and a sort of self-loathing that comes out.

UF: Switching over a bit now to economics.. and Samuel Eto’o. He’s with Anzhi Makhachkala [in the Russian Premier League]. He’s flying in and out of Dagestan in the Caucusus every weekend with his manager roberto carlos, who you profile in the book. And Carlos was certainly passed around Europe a bit during his playing days… but I just find it interesting that people are offended that someone like Eto’o, who’s still really at the top of his game — not young, but not old either — they’re offended that he would leave them. Do you see this as a kind of paternalistic thing we still have, this shock he would prefer more money to a place in our “poetic memory”?

Kuper: It comes down to what I what I talk about in the book, which is that players see soccer as a profession and fans expect them to see it more as an amateur pursuit, that it’s about love and passion: the same values a fan has. And so there’s always a disappointment when a player leaves a club where he’s seen as being where he belongs and that he’s supposed to love.

In Eto’o's case, there is a sort of disbelief that, if it’s not about passion then it should at least be about love of the game and performance and achieving. And obviously if you go from Inter Milan to a Russian club in the provinces it’s not about that, it’s just about money. Actually, in most professions, people are not motivated only by money so it is a slightly unusual decision. In football as well and so Anzhi have found it quite hard to attract big players other than him.

But I understand it for two reasons. One: He has reached that age where there are very few big clubs that will sign a striker aged 29 and over and he’s about 30, so he has reached the age where, realistically, the game was up. I did this analysis of players’ ages and Didier Drogba was the only striker aged over 31 playing in the first team for a big European club last year. The other thing is that if you are an African player, and all players have to support their families, but [if you're an African player] you’re often supporting dozens if not hundreds of people.

UF: How do you see the eurozone crisis affecting the future of European club football? Could it make for a more powerful Champions League, which might almost be counter-intuitive given the problem with shared currency… or do you see the FAs taking on protectionist policies to try and legislate foreign money and foreign debt out of their leagues?

Fan club idea: "Iniesta's Indignados"

Kuper: I think soccer has a set-up that works for it. You have mostly strong national leagues and you have a European competition. I don’t think people want any more European competition than that. The English, the Spanish, even the Dutch clubs, they like playing their own games, as well. There’s a lot of tradition there.

Now, nobody knows how the euro crisis could pan out, but one possibility is that if euro breaks up, then Germany gets an immensely strong currency. The euro is made weak by Greece and Italy. If Germany got that currency, and Holland too, but Germany is the significant one, then [the Germans'] ability to buy foreign players would be hugely increased. Germany is the biggest economy in Europe and they have the biggest soccer crowds. They’re hampered a bit financially by having less TV rights money, but I could see that one upshot of the euro crisis would be that Germany really assumes its rightful place as the richest European league. Spain and Italy would be crippled if their currency leaves the euro and they have to devalue massively.

UF: Let’s talk about Moneyball. When my Liverpool fan friends say that by selling Fernando Torres for £50 million and buying Suarez and Carroll with the profit, that Liverpool was playing “Moneyball”…  it drives me crazy. Overpaying for Andy Carroll is not “Moneyball.” Rather, it’s what Arsene Wenger does which is closer.

Kuper: Billy Beane would say that “Moneyball” is not buying small players, “Moneyball” is getting the best value for money. So you can get the best value if you buy Torres for 50 million, but really you believe he’s worth 70 million. You’re getting really good value for money. Now, Torres is obviously not worth more than they paid. But Wayne Rooney, for example: He cost £30 million or something like that. He’s obviously worth more than that because they bought him when he was 18, so Billy Beane would say that’s “Moneyball”: You buy a player who is undervalued.

In Rooney’s case, although everyone saw he was brilliant, they discounted this a bit because he was so young. They thought, “Well, we’re not sure.” So “Moneyball” is not buying cheap players, it’s buying players for less than they are worth. And yes, Wenger has always done that.

I think with the Liverpool situation, you also have to see it as being a crisis moment. It’s partly that [Sporting Director Damien] Comolli was trying to play “Moneyball,” but it’s contextual. Torres walks into the office and says, “I want to leave” and when that happens there’s not much a club can do. You can’t say, “well, we’re gonna tie you down here and make you stay here even though you hate being here.” You see with Tevez, that doesn’t really produce great outcomes. So they find that Chelsea is willing to pay this crazy sum for him [and it's crazy] because Torres is already about 26 and so as a striker he’s well into the second half of his peak.  And then Chelsea are overpaying for him and Liverpool have this huge sum of money and they need a striker, because if you’re Liverpool you can’t go four months without a center forward. The fans just won’t put up with it. (TLL note: I wish people thought this way about Spurs supporters. We went a full season without a striker, still only have one good one on loan, but no one seems to see it as a “crisis.”)

This is why let teams let under-contract players leave

So they work out that Andy Carroll and Luis Suarez are what they need and they use stats to value those players, in part, so that’s “Moneyball.”  Remember, the whole word knows that Liverpool have £50 million and so Ajax and certainly Newcastle ask for more money than Carroll was worth. So I think liverpool knew they were overpaying for Carroll. It wasn’t stupid. They knew. But the thing is that you have to have a striker. And John Henry had bought the club cheap so he didn’t mind paying a bit more. Anyway, Torres had gotten so much money [Henry] had a bit of money to play with. So I think it’s that Liverpool is a combination of “Moneyball” and also the facts and circumstances of the moment.

UF: Off your point about Torres, as an American sports fan, it’s hard for me to fathom that a player under contract — in a guaranteed contract, not like in American football when they can cut you at any time and almost no expense — that you can just walk into the manager’s office and say “I want to leave” and that’s OK… that it is accepted that it is not acceptable to keep around an unhappy player. Where does that come from?

Kuper: You’re comparing it to American sports, so it’s hard for me to comment on that. But if I really want to leave the Financial Times, I say, “Look, I have a much better situation somewhere else and they’re paying me more money and it’s where I want to be.” It’s not really normal for a normal employer to insist on keeping you against your will. And, in fact, I could then go to court, certainly in some countries — I couldn’t say this is true everywhere — and say “I am being offered a better work situation with more money and my employer is impeding my freedom of movement.” So the freedom of movement for American sports players is probably quite impeded. And it used to be in soccer, too. But soccer has now moved more toward society’s norm, when you as an employee have a very high ability to move. I think in most professions you go into the boss and say “I’m leaving” and they give you a three months’ waiting period and then you leave.

UF: I support a club with a captain named Ledley King. Everyone has known for years that he has no cartilage in his knees. In fact, there’s a Spurs fan site called Cartilage Free Captain. Now, I’m not a doctor but I follow enough different sports to know about this condition and about microfracture surgery, because it seems almost every American athlete with that kind of problem has that particular procedure or something like it. Yet it’s never discussed with King. Is it that in Europe, or England in particular, that the sports medicine is a little bit behind? I feel like, in the States, King would have had this surgery five years ago and be playing more now.

Kuper: I’m not sure that’s true, that [European sports medicine] is behind. I think it’s pretty sophisticated and certainly Billy Beane has said that in the training-fitness-conditioning side of things, soccer is in advance of baseball. I also get the sense it’s in advance of basketball. For example, basketball teams find it hard even to get data on how fit a player is, or to bring him in for check-ups, and they find it hard to impose fitness regimes on their players. Basketball teams don’t know how many kilometers a player runs during the game.

So I think soccer is pretty sophisticated. I’m not a doctor so i cant say what King needs but I do think that if this operation were a good option, it would have been considered. And players do go to Vail, Colo.,to get operated on by a surgeon there. There’s a lot of exchange with the U.S. Medicine is an international business. (TLL note: The surgeon to whom Kuper refers is most likely Dr. Richard Steadman, a knee specialist based in Vail. Steadman created the procedure known as “microfracture” in the late 1980s. Since then, he’s operated on dozens of pro athletes. This year, he treated Owen Hargreaves, whose knees the doctor reportedly described as the worst he’d seen in 35 years of practice. Steadman did a number of operations (it’s not clear if microfracture was among them) and today Hargreaves, signed with Manchester City, is rehabbing and even making the odd appearance in the first team. The midfielder had spent the previous four years with Manchester United and never been referred to Dr. Steadman or any American knee specialist of note.)

UF: Do you believe that soccer had a Golden Era and, if given the opportunity, what time would you go back to to watch or support a particular team?

Kuper: For me it would be Holland in the Seventies. That’s the country I support and that was the Golden Age.

UF: As a Dutchmen, certainly you have a theory: What happened in the Holland team hotel in 1974?

Kuper: Emmmm, there was some kind of party and I don’t know what happened but Cruyff’s wife got very suspicious.

UF: What is your favorite soccer book?

Kuper: I would say probably [Nick Hornby's] Fever Pitch.

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For more Kuper, buy Soccer Men and read his column at the Financial Times.