Kuper Quotes

It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies.

Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.

Nerds don't know they're nerds. I know I'm a... well, I prefer to be called a dork, thank you.

Football is not merely a small business, it's also a bad one. Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.

Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity.

You don't have to be charming to be a fan among fans.

The club is not a business. It's a populist democracy.

Real Madrid would still only be the 120th largest company in Finland (a country with a population of just 5.4 million people, or about the same as Minnesota).

The wisdom of crowds fails when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough.

DONNA: Why do traditional organizing solutions and tools not work for them?

People are always complaining that American culture has conquered the world. In fact, British culture probably remains more dominant. This fading midsize island has kept a bizarre grip on the global imagination. It’s not only their sports that the Brits have exported. The world’s six best-selling novels of the past hundred years are all British: four Harry Potters, one Agatha Christie, and one J. R. R. Tolkien. The world’s best-selling band ever is the Beatles. And the sports league with the biggest global impact is surely the Premier League.

The fortress was fashioned by my hard work and I paid dearly in constructing it. It had to be hammered into a firm state and I was glad when the blood came. It was proof the walls were hardening. - The Burrow

The theory of the “wisdom of crowds” says that if you aggregate many different opinions from a diverse group of people, you are much more likely to arrive at the best opinion than if you just listen to one specialist.

the long delay, and the obvious reluctance of the United States to ratify the Genocide Convention” derived from “fear that it might be held responsible, retrospectively, for the annihilation of Indians in the United States, or its role in the slave trade, or its contemporary support for tyrannical governments engaging in mass murder.” Still, Kuper said he was delighted that at last the Americans had agreed to the terms of the Convention.

the Finnish financial analyst Matias Möttölä calculates that in terms of revenue, Real Madrid would still only be the 120th largest company in Finland (a country with a population of just 5.4 million people, or about the same as Minnesota).

Though most fans would probably deny it, a love of soccer is often intertwined with a love of numbers. There are the match results, the famous dates, and the special joy of sitting in a café with the newspaper on a Sunday morning "reading" the league table. Fantasy soccer leagues are, at bottom, numbers games. In this book we want to introduce new numbers and new ideas to soccer: numbers on suicides, on wage spending, on countries' populations, on passes and sprints, anything that helps to reveal new truths about the game.

He found that when the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team—once described as the national team of French Canada—got knocked out of the playoffs early between 1951 and 1992, Quebecois males aged fifteen to thirty-four became more likely to kill themselves. Robert Fernquist, a sociologist at the University of Central Missouri, went further. He studied thirty American metropolitan areas with professional sports teams from 1971 to 1990 and showed that fewer suicides occurred in cities whose teams made the playoffs more often. Routinely reaching the playoffs could reduce suicides by about twenty each year in a metropolitan area the size of Boston or Atlanta, said Fernquist. These saved lives were the converse of the mythical Brazilians throwing themselves off apartment blocks. Later, Fernquist investigated another link between sports and suicide: he looked at the suicide rate in American cities after a local sports team moved to another town. It turned out that some of the fans abandoned by their team killed themselves. This happened in New York in 1957 when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams left, in Cleveland in 1995–1996 when the Browns football team moved to Baltimore, and in Houston in 1997–1998 when the Oilers football team departed. In each case the suicide rate was 10 percent to 14 percent higher in the two months around the team’s departure than in the same months of the previous year. Each move probably helped prompt a handful of suicides. Fernquist wrote, “The sudden change brought about due to the geographic relocations of pro sports teams does appear to, at least for a short time, make highly identified fans drastically change the way they view the normative order in society.” Clearly none of these people killed themselves just because they lost their team. Rather, they were very troubled individuals for whom this sporting disappointment was too much to bear. Perhaps the most famous recent case of a man who found he could not live without sports was the Gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson. He shot himself in February 2005, four days after writing a note in black marker with the title, “Football Season Is Over”:

It’s sad to say, but it is much easier selling, for example, a crap Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican. The Brazilian gets across the image of happiness, party, carnival. Irrespective of talent, it is very seductive to have a Brazilian in your team.

Clubs are all about winning. National teams, however, have an additional function: to incarnate the nation.

you are brought face to face with the great question about the soccer coach: Does he really matter? It turns out that coaches or managers (call them what you like) simply don’t make that much difference.

But there isn’t much else most club managers can do to push their teams up the table. After all, players matter much more. As Johan Cruijff said when he was coaching Barcelona, “If your players are better than your opponents, 90 percent of the time you will win.” There cannot be many businesses where a manager would make such an extravagant claim. The chairman of General Motors does not say that the art of good management is simply hiring the best designers or the best production managers.

Arsenal hasn’t been a great soccer club lately, but it has been a good business. This is what a soccer club run as a business looks like: high ticket prices, little desire to win trophies, and respectable profits. If FFP takes force, and other big clubs end up being run like Arsenal rather than like Abramovich’s Chelsea, then we predict:        •   A fall in players’ wages        •   A fall in transfer fees, which would mean less money trickling down from big clubs to the rest        •   A rise in club profits, which would mean more money being taken out of the game by people like the Glazers

The things we once thought of as luxuries soon become necessities (although, by the same token, our sense of well-being would quickly adapt to losing half our income). What we care about is not our absolute wealth but our rung on the ladder. Ruut Veenhoven, a leading researcher of happiness, says, “When we have overtaken the Joneses, our reference drifts upward to the Smiths, and we feel unhappy again.

Stars of Recent World Cups, or European Championships Are Overvalued The worst time to buy a player is in the summer when he’s just done well at a big tournament. Everyone in the transfer market has seen how good the player is, but he is exhausted and quite likely sated with success.

Apparently the Germans had a database of 13,000 kicks.

It is one of the eternal stories that are told about soccer: when Brazil gets knocked out of a World Cup, Brazilians jump off apartment blocks. It can happen even when Brazil wins. One writer at the World Cup in Sweden in 1958 claims to have seen a Brazilian fan kill himself out of “sheer joy” after his team’s victory in the final. Janet Lever tells that story in Soccer Madness, her eye-opening study of Brazilian soccer culture published way back in 1983, when nobody (and certainly not female American social scientists) wrote books about soccer. Lever continues: Of course, Brazilians are not the only fans to kill themselves for their teams. In the 1966 World Cup a West German fatally shot himself when his television set broke down during the final game between his country and England. Nor have Americans escaped some bizarre ends. An often cited case is the Denver man who wrote a suicide note—”I have been a Broncos fan since the Broncos were first organized and I can’t stand their fumbling anymore”—and then shot himself. Even worse was the suicide of Amelia Bolaños. In June 1969 she was an eighteen-year-old El Salvadorean watching the Honduras–El Salvador game at home on TV. When Honduras scored the winner in the last minute, wrote the great Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, Bolaños “got up and ran to the desk which contained her father’s pistol in a drawer. She then shot herself in the heart.” Her funeral was televised. El Salvador’s president and ministers, and the country’s soccer team walked behind the flag-draped coffin. Within a month, Bolaños’s death would help prompt the “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras.

The viewing figures we saw earlier in this book suggest that sport is the most important communal activity in many people’s lives. Nearly a third of Americans watch the Super Bowl. However, European soccer is even more popular. In the Netherlands, possibly the European country that follows its national team most eagerly, three-quarters of the population watch Holland’s biggest soccer games. In many European countries, World Cups may now be the greatest shared events of any kind. To cap it all, World Cups mostly take place in June, the peak month for suicides in the Northern Hemisphere. How many Exleys have been saved from jumping off apartment buildings by international soccer tournaments, the world’s biggest sporting events?

Joiner’s article “On Buckeyes, Gators, Super Bowl Sunday, and the Miracle on Ice” makes a strong case that it’s not the winning that counts but the taking part—the shared experience. It is true that he found fewer suicides in Columbus, Ohio, and Gainesville, Florida, in the years when the local college football teams did well. But Joiner argues that this is because fans of winning teams “pull together” more: they wear the team shirt more often, watch games together in bars, talk about the team, and so on, much as happens in a European country while the national team is playing in a World Cup. The “pulling together” saves people from suicide, not the winning. Proof of this is that Joiner found fewer suicides in the US on Super Bowl Sundays than on other Sundays at that time of year, even though few of the Americans who watch the Super Bowl are passionate supporters of either team. What they get from the day’s parties is a sense of belonging. That is the lifesaver. In Europe today, there may be nothing that brings a society together like a World Cup with your team in it. For once, almost everyone in the country is watching the same TV programs and talking about them at work the next day, just as Europeans used to do thirty years ago before they got cable TV. Part of the point of watching a World Cup is that almost everyone else is watching, too. Isolated people—the types at most risk of suicide—are suddenly welcomed into the national conversation. They

With every player there is a moment when his value is higher than the price. The key is to get that timing right.

One day, the ringmaster's eye fell upon the cage and he asked: "Why?" this perfectly good spot should be left standing there unused. Nobody knew, until one man remembered about the hunger artist. "Are you still fasting?" "Forgive me, everybody. "I've always wanted you to admire my fasting. "But you shouldn't admire it. Because I have to fast. I can't help it." "And why can't you help it?" "Because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had, I should have stuffed myself life you or anyone else." Those were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the firm conviction that he was still continuing to fast. And they buried the hunger artist, straw and all. - A Hunger Artist

They put a young panther into the cage. The food he liked was brought to him without hesitation. He seemed not even to miss his freedom. The joy of life streamed from his throat with such ardent passion that for the onlookers it was not easy to stand the shock of it. But they braced themselves, crowded around the cage, and did not ever want to move away.

Besides casual onlookers there were also permanent watchers. This was merely a formality: the artist would never swallow the smallest morsel of food. No one could possible watch the hunger artist continuously, therefore he was bound to be the sole spectator completely satisfied with his own fast. Such suspicions, anyhow, were a necessary accompaniment to the profession of fasting. Yet for other reasons he was never content. For he alone knew how easy it was to fast. Experience had proven that the interest of the public could be sustained for about forty days. But after that their enthusiasm began to wane. So on that day the cage was opened. Two doctors entered to measure the results of the fast, and two young ladies were selected for the honor of helping the hunger artist in a small table, on which was spread a carefully chosen meal. And at this moment the artist always turned stubborn. Why should he be cheated of the fame he would get for fasting longer, breaking his own record as the greatest hunger artist of all time? - A Hunger Artist

Was there something else? I don’t really want to talk.” “I know,” Kuper said. “I like that about you. But sometimes we can need something even though we don’t want it.

I’m not sure I understand,” Vara said, growing a little exasperated. “What current? You mean this river?” “No, Vara,” Kuper said. “Not water currents. Currents in life. There are forces everywhere outside our control, determining the directions we take, or trying to.

Взять, например, «Манчестер Юнайтед» — наверняка тысячи фанатов по всему миру и знать не знают, что Манчестер — это такой город в Англии.

Do you remember being at school and picking sides for a game of football? We do this at Liverpool for the five-a-sides. Diouf was ‘last pick’ within a few weeks.

Every international at Lyon is untransferable. Until the offer surpasses by far the amount we had expected.

Still, even after the black winger John Barnes scored his solo goal to beat Brazil in Rio in 1984, the Football Association’s chairman was harangued by England fans on the flight back home: “You fucking wanker, you prefer sambos to us.

A club like Bayern Munich, which shuns debt, is in fact missing a trick. Bayern could easily borrow a few hundred million dollars to make itself invincible against human opposition on the long term.

hosting sports events doesn’t make you rich.

His doubts recall Benford’s Law, a theory about the frequency with which digits will appear in data. One implication of this law is that datasets with lots of zeroes at the end often turn out to be fraudulent.

If you’re good at providing schools for everyone, as most democracies are, then you are probably also good at providing good soccer fields and coaches for everyone.

The average player has the ball for only 53.4 seconds every game (according to Chris Carling, the English performance analyst at Lille in France) so any player’s main job is to occupy the right positions for the other eighty-nine minutes and 6.6 seconds.

Aulas spotted early that most soccer fans everywhere are much more like shoppers than like religious believers: if they can get a better experience somewhere new, they will go there.

Because soccer 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.

Entrepreneurs who dip into soccer also keep making the same mistakes. They buy clubs promising to run them “like a business” and disappear a few seasons later amid the same public derision as the previous owners.

in business doing nothing is often the hardest thing. (And not just in business. Harold Macmillan, prime minister during the Cuban missile crisis, mused then ‘on the frightful desire to do something, with the knowledge that not to do anything was prob. the right answer’.)

being large and rich helps a country win matches, but having a long soccer history helps a lot more.

am a worthwhile person; my character flaws are no better or worse than anyone else’s.

He once said that before he was thirty, he had done everything on instinct. After thirty he began to understand why he did the things he did.

Basilevitch persuaded Cruyff to let him invest his hard-earned money in a variety of ventures, the most disastrous of which was a pig farm.70 Looking back in 2015, the victim laughed at himself: “Who could imagine that Johan Cruyff had gone into pig-rearing? I ended up saying to myself, ‘Ditch the pigs. Your thing is football.’ ”71

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If he had merely balanced his transfer budget in that period, let alone made a profit as Wenger did, he could have raised his team’s salaries by $36 million a year.

If things go wrong, they simply don’t repay their debt, the old directors walk away, and new ones come in promising to sweep up the mess

In most industries, a bad business goes bankrupt, but soccer clubs almost never do. No matter how much money they waste, someone will always bail them out. This is what is known in finance as “moral hazard”: when you know you will be saved no matter how much money you lose, you are free to lose money.

Clubs know they cannot operate without opponents, and so unlike in most businesses, the collapse of a rival is not cause for celebration.

If you work for a soccer 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 soccer industry distrusted education.

The beauty of FIFA’s business is that it’s a monopoly. There is only one World Cup (nobody has ever credibly attempted to start a rival event) and only one global soccer association.

In the US, for instance, a former member of Congress will lobby Congress for whatever company or country will pay him; meanwhile in a poor country, a politician pockets an illegal bribe.

In 2017, three academics—Christian Deutscher, Eugen Dimant, and Brad Humphreys—caused uproar in the German parliament when they published a working paper claiming to have statistical evidence that there were irregular betting patterns associated with two Bundesliga referees officiating between 2011 and 2015.

For some of Europe’s indebted clubs, match fixing is part of the business plan.

For instance, you need an ethics unit that can investigate wrongdoing and is not under the president’s control—which would imply a big change from the Blatter-era FIFA.

Not many universities, opera houses, or aid agencies say no to sugar daddies. We think European soccer needs these people.

Part of the manager’s job is to act as scapegoat, shielding his club’s owners from blame.

The problem, says Anderson, is that managers tend to remember the most memorable events of a match rather than the most important ones.

I’m getting a few “special blonds” as well, Judith. So, we know that your primary area of expertise is working with individuals who are challenged by chronic disorganization. Can you tell us more about how you got into this business?

The new globalized sports fan will happily snub his local domestic league.

Experience as a player can help you just in one situation: I can understand what the players are thinking. But the job is different. You have to study to be a manager.

The problem is that there is a lot of 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.

In men’s soccer, the new manager is not only invariably male but also almost always white, with a conservative haircut, between thirty-five and sixty years old, and a former professional player. Clubs know that if they choose someone with that profile, then even if the appointment turns out to be terrible they won’t be blamed too much, because at least they will have failed in the traditional way.

He hadn’t played, so if there really was some kind of mystical knowledge you gained from playing, he wouldn’t know. Usually he would back down.

There is no evidence that having been a good player (or being white and of conservative appearance) is an advantage for a soccer manager.

Taken overall, a good career as a player predicted neither success nor failure as a manager. The two jobs just didn’t seem to have much to do with each other.

Arrigo Sacchi, a terrible player turned great manager of Milan, phrased it, “You don’t need to have been a horse to be a jockey.