Why England Lose & Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained

My slowness in getting round to reading Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s Why England Lose & Other Curious Football Phenomena Explained is illustrated by the fact that an updated edition is now available, going under the name Soccernomics.

That name was also used for the American edition of the original book, understandably removing the ‘England’ reference but also a recognition of the success of Freakonomics in popularising the analysis of statistics for social studies, for this book has done the same for football: take lots of data, apply statistical analysis, present in plain English and destroy cherished myths. Job done.

That also makes the book appealing to three different (potentially overlapping) audiences: anyone interested in seeing what the impact of the number crunchers turning up is on a field’s conventional wisdom; casual football fans who want to understand a little more a sport they occasionally catch; and die-hard fans willing to discover that a large chunk of what they were sure they knew isn’t actually true.

For me as an occasional Arsenal fan (see Chapter 11 to discover how intermittent, soft fans like myself are numerous – even though the rhetoric of football writing is all about die-hard fans), the sections about how rarely big money transfers pay off – and so why Arsene Wenger is very reluctant to make new signings – were particularly instructive. It’s an interesting parallel with studies of mergers in the corporate world: splurging cash on new acquisitions has a pretty poor record in both areas of life; eschewing the flash dramatic action and instead going for organic growth and improvement may lack the drama but more than makes up for itself in cost-effective routes to success.