The beautiful game
The World Cup post
My first men’s football World Cup memories are from 1982. We used to live in a district town couple of hours north of Dhaka, and my grandfather would stay up watching the games on our 12 inch black and white TV. For some reason, I thought the tournament was being held in Dhaka. When I asked someone if we could go to Dhaka to watch the final, they laughed, which I thought was quite rude.
We had moved to Dhaka by 1986. We used to wait for the school bus in Farmgate. I have vivid memories of senior bhaiyas arguing about the referee calls of the previous night and the coaching choices of the next. I had a bet with a mama that he would shout us in Sheraton if Brazil had beaten France. I was supposed to squat 100 times while touching my ears had Brazil lost. Tie breaker isn’t a loss. Oh there were also many, many arguments about whether one of the French shots should have counted.
Of course, I remember Maradona.
I was old enough to be allowed to watch some of the 1990 matches at a friend’s house, clearly adding a new dimension to the event. But I didn’t understand the Argentina-Brazil obsession in Dhaka then. And I don’t understand it now.
The 12-year old was saddened to see Japan lose in the tie-breaker, reminding me of that 1986 match.
I supported Brazil. But this was mainly because I was surrounded by a bunch of Abahoni supporters who all supported Argentina, and I was a Mohammedan guy. I was in Dhaka when Brazil won the cup in 2002, but it definitely wasn’t as big a deal as it might have been in 1986.
These days, I start with the underdog, but shamelessly switch to the favourite if they prove too strong.
I find it easier to enjoy the beauty of the game — dribbles, passes, and shots, but also the tackles and clearances — without being emotionally invested in a team. I suspect I am quite unusual that way.
Okay, maybe I don’t have a team I am emotionally attached to. What about analytical attachment — that is, whom do I predict to win the Cup?
Macroeconomists have an abysmal record when it comes to forecasting. As late as September 2008 —when the Lehman Brothers collapsed —consensus among the economists at the Wall Street and City of London was that no major economy would fall into recession in 2009. As late as a year ago, consensus in all major central banks was that inflation would go away by itself. And their success rate isn’t so much better when it comes to World Cup.
For example, Goldman Sachs gave Brazil a 50 percent chance of winning in 2014, nearly double of what was implied by the betting markets.
Why were the Goldman Sachs boffins so much more bullish on Brazil? The bankers predicted the score of every match based on a regression analysis that used the results of every official match played between 1960 and 2014 (about 14,000 observations). Their model also accounted for factors such as home ground and home continent advantages.
Now, even the best regression analysis is only right on average. And the chances of getting it right, on average, increases with longer form league formats that involve a large number of matches. In that format, the so-called ‘fundamental’ factors —as reflected in past performance— dominates. That’s why, if Brazil were to play, say, Australia a dozen times, we could be very confident that Australia would be thrashed, on average.
But the World Cup isn’t like a long season of league matches. Particularly in the knock out stage of the Cup, a team may win or lose on some random events such as a referee mistake or a total and collective nervous breakdown that produces a 1-6 thrashing. And that kind of randomness can’t, by definition, be modelled.
Modelling football is particularly difficult because of the very nature of the game. It is that nature that, quite often, may yield results that seemingly appear contrary to the run of the play — a side playing much ‘better’ seem to lose by a single goal from the other side. Does this sort of thing appear to be more common in football than in other sports?
Tyler Cowen, the American polymath, has a theory about football:
the rules of the game are simple, but a lot of complex interactions result from this simple set of rules;
it is hard to quantify what is a ‘good’ play (that is, the data cannot tell you which complex interaction is better), and a lot depends on intuition that are typically developed at an early age.
I am intellecutally attracted to empiricism — using ugly data to slay beautiful hypotheses, this is the scientific process. The beautiful game may just be the stuff of metaphysics. One can argue that with an average that is three standard deviations above the mean of all batsmen, Bradman is the greatest. One simply cannot argue for Pele or Maradona that objectively.
The general unpredictably, together with the fact that so many more countries play it than rugby, cricket or hockey, would suggest that many more teams will be successful at the World Cup football than in other sports. For example, there are about half a dozen countries (at most, being charitable to some weaker teams) that make the pool of potential winners in cricket. This is also the case in rugby and hockey.
And yet, the pool of finalists, no matter what the sport is, is actually quite small. Nine countries have made the final of men’s football final in my life time. This compares with seven in cricket, five in rugby, and seven in hockey.
Okay, what about club football?
Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal between them have won all but three English premiere league seasons since its inception in 1992-93. AC Milan, Juventus and Internazionale between them have won the Italian Serie A all but twice in these years. Barcelona, Real Madrid, Atletico Madrid and Valencia between them won the Spanish league all but once in that period. If you know nothing about football but predict that one of these teams will win the next league, you will have a pretty good chance of being right.
Compare this with American sports. Over a dozen teams have won the Superbowl in the past three decades. You may not know anything about baseball, but you still probably have heard of the New York Yankees. The Yankees have won the World Series only five times since 1992. Over a dozen teams have won the World Series in that time. The most iconic sport team of the 1990s must be the Chicago Bulls under Michael Jordan. But even the Bulls won only five NBA titles since 1992, and a dozen teams have won the championship in that time.
Predicting the winner in an American league is pretty hard if you knew nothing about the sport. And learning something require effort. I’d hazard a guess that it is difficult to pick up a new sport after your 15th birthday. If you don’t know anything about basketball, rooting for the Bulls on the basis of Jordan’s name is no use as they haven’t made a final since 1998.
Perhaps this is why World Cup is so popular in Bangladesh — all you need to do is to root for Brazil or Argentina to have a good time.
So, why is football, despite the randomness, dominated by a few big names?
The answer, in one single word, is, socialism!
American sports have a draft system whereby incoming young talent do not get to choose who they play for but must go to the team that drafts them. And by and large, the draft order is determined in inverse order of the previous season’s standings — that is, the worst teams get to pick first. Plus, in most American leagues, there is a salary cap that limits the total team spending as well as how much a team can pay an individual. Neither condition holds in European football leagues, allowing, in effect, the bigger teams to outbid everyone else.
America as the bastion of socialism? Yes, indeed. And there is more to this.
Think about Marx’s predictions about capitalism. Marx said that capitalism would collapse because competition will give way to monopoly. Of course, this prediction has not come to pass. There are two reasons why competition has not led to monopoly in most markets. First, most markets have firm entry as well as firm exit in the long run. That is, people enter a market when they see existing firms earning lots of profit. Secondly, there is technological progress, which opens up all sorts of new products and markets. Both factors work to prevent monopoly in the longer run.
However, in the context of a sports league, clearly neither of these can happen. There can only be so many clubs, and rules of the game change slowly, if at all.
So Marx’s prediction of competition giving way to monopoly may well come true in an unregulated league. To prevent this from happening, you need outside intervention, you need redistribution, you need, for the lack of a better word, socialism!
Therefore, football-lovers of the world, unite!
Let the international unite the human race.
Okay, okay, I get carried away.
American sport may be socialist, but socialism has had little success in America. Indeed, the Anglophone countries, in general, have always been far more liberal —in the English sense of the word —than continental Europe. And football does not mean the same thing around the English speaking world. Even in England, ‘football codes’ other than soccer still fill stadiums. In fact, England already won a ‘football’ World Cup in 2003.
Why is it that no single football code has dominated the entire Anglophone world the way football (that is, soccer) has come to dominate Europe and its former colonies?
Could it be that the multitude of football codes in Anglophone countries is linked to the deeply ingrained liberalism/libertarianism of these societies? Countries where a single football code came to dominate, typically by the second quarter of the last century, were also countries that flirted with establishing a strong totalitarian state based on a dominant ethnic group or ideology or religion.
The point is made most starkly when we look at two antipodean lands. Blessed with bounty of nature, Argentina and Australia were both among the richest countries a century ago. Both countries were hit hard in the aftermath of the Great War and the Great Depression. One turned to a semi-fascist populism and bouts of military regimes, the other remained a liberal democracy throughout. One suffered and economic crisis every decade or so, the other is still among the richest of all countries. One is football-crazy, the other is sports-mad, but has no national code as such.
Australia and America are out of the World Cup, but England may still have a chance. If it wins, it will be the first liberal democracy to have won the World Cup in my lifetime—France, Germany, Spain, and Italy being more of social democracies, and Brazil of the 1990s being a country still transitioning to democracy.
So, what kind of political system is best at winning the World Cup?
That’s what Franklin Foer explored, finding: fascist countries beat communist teams; military juntas beat fascists; social democracies beat military juntas; European Union members are likely to do well; former communist countries do better now than they did under red flags; colonizers tend to do better than the colonized; oil rich countries don’t do well; and neo-liberal economic reform doesn’t help.
Foer also had a caveat: The political reality most likely to produce a Jules Rimet trophy (sic) at any given moment in history: whatever form of government has taken up residence in Brasilia that week.
A left-of-centre government has taken up residence in that city. So, Brazil it is then?
I am just a humble economist. What do I know?
As a liberal democrat, perhaps I should support the Dutch. But I also note that of the countries that have made it to the final eight, the Brazillian polity seems to have been the most successful in striving towards liberal democracy against tremendous odds. I mean, even their right wing populist conceded an election after he lost it.
Ah, mixing politics and sports. Well, what does a liberal democrat think about an absolute monarchy with patently illiberal curb on civil and economic liberties hosting the cup?
My short answer is — on balance, this seems to have improved things in Qatar with respect to, say, labour rights. A slightly longer answer is that many personal freedoms we take for granted in the West didn’t become widespread overnight, and other societies need to find their own path towards liberalism. A detailed answer, I guess, will have to wait for another post.
Okay, enough fudging, what’s my prediction?
I think we are looking at Brazil-France final. And France had prevailed not just in 1986, but also in 1998 and 2006.
But whoever wins, watching football with my 12 year old son has already made it the best tournament ever.
This post draws on material that I wrote in 2006 and 2010 for other blogs, and a piece that was published in the Dhaka Tribune in 2014.
Further reading, and watching
Many activists, NGOs and trade unions believe Qatar 2022 can be used to shine a light on myriad human rights abuses
Simon Kuper, 11 Nov 2022
But the joy of hosting the World Cup in an oil and property boom will not last unless productivity improves
Ruchir Sharma, 21 Nov 2022
See if you can spot the controversy.
And it’s our World Cup too.