Q. & A. With Simon Kuper, Author of ‘Soccernomics’

The British author Simon Kuper was born in Uganda in 1969 and grew up in London and Leiden, the Netherlands. He is currently a Paris-based sports columnist for The Financial Times. His book “Football Against the Enemy” won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year award for 1994. He is also the author of “Ajax, the Dutch, the War.” His most recent book, “Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey — Even Iraq — Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport,” written with the economist Stefan Syzmanski, was published in the United States in early November.

The book has just been published in the U.S. after having been published in England in August. What has the reaction been like over there?

Mostly good, the ration of good to bad reviews is probably 4-to-1 in England. In the U.S. the initial response has been more positive. That may not last. In England everyone thinks they know it already and that it’s their job to set author right. Americans are more literate on the economics than Europeans. They recognize that economics makes things go.

In a snippet, what is the heart of the matter in the book?

The heart of the matter is that the thinking in soccer is outdated, backward and tradition-based. It needs a fresh look based on data. There’s a new global map, with countries like the U.S. and Japan already rising. And they will continue to rise at the expense of Europe as knowledge gets disbursed. And it’s happening very quickly.

One example from the book: I went to conference of professional locators in Rome and it got me thinking how silly some things are in football, where the only real resource is the players. Clubs spend enormous amounts of money to buy and transport then and then just drop them don’t do anything to help them adapt. How are they going to fit in Middlesbrough or Madrid? Most teams just say get on with it. It’s military-based. In the game there’s an admiration for military people, in Britain it goes back to 1945. The game is rooted in a male working class that is strong. And the model is a soldier who doesn’t complain, a warrior.

So a player moves with his family and if his wife is not happy it’s hard for him to be happy. In soccer women have specific roles that shouldn’t be mentioned as a factor in performance on the field. If the wife is not happy it is irrelevant to the club. That is an example of traditional nondata-based thinking.

Several times in the book you mention Bill James and the book “Moneyball.” How much of a relationship do you see between the obsession with statistics in baseball and the situation in soccer?

I only read “Moneyball” after I began the book. When I read it yes, of course, the specifics are different — there is more data in baseball. But if you produce more data in soccer you get interesting insights, although the process is different.

What James does for me is he looks at sport from outside, like studying burlap in Des Moines. He gets rid of the mystique, and looks at things in a cold way compared with a traditionally male, unquestioning uneducated, unthinking approach. The importance of data in soccer has been underestimated. You need to get rid of the mystique and look at it in a cold way. There’s a reason the Oakland A’s don’t let their managers make picks in the amateur draft. The coach/manager is a middle manager, not concerned with the long term.

In soccer there aren’t so many data. I had an interesting meeting in 2008 with Arsène Wenger. He has great faith in numbers and sits in his office reading data all clubs get from match performances. Is there a way to quantify whether a player who runs the most is the better player? Does it matter? He said it does matter because if your central midfielder is running 12 kilometers and the other guy is only running 10 it becomes apparent in the last 10 minutes of the match when the guy doing less run suddenly pops up in the opposition’s penalty area unmarked. If you’re running those extra kilometers, perhaps you don’t have anything left. It is measurable and important. The World of data in soccer hs been unestimated and hasn’t been collected. All clubs have data from matches, but the clubs don’t really know what to do with it. They’re not statisticians, that’s what Stefan found out by talking to a couple of clubs, one big, one middling.

We’re now in process of setting up a consultancy because some clubs have come to both of us asking questions. They seem to think we can do a better job on some things. For example, Ajax spent 16 million euros on a Serbian winger. We would have told them not to do it, it’s crazy, because he’s a teenager and, as we say in book, development is difficult to predict, attackers overvalued, and the guy who made the decision, Marco van Basten, doesn’t understand what money means. To him he said to us that it was only a number. But to us that’s the fallacy of letting the coach make the decision about spending a club’s money. The process is wrong.

Even when you do have a sporting director, which is normal in Germany, he lives and dies as quickly as the coach. He brings in one in player who doesn’t pan out and then he’s sacked. To us, the Lyon model is better. Bernard Lacombe is not not just the sporting director, decisions are the responsibility of a group of people, out of the public eye. It’s the wisdom of crowds. We all know that so many players, after a coach is sacked, are discarded by the next guy who wants to build his own team. It’s a massive waste.

You’re obviously a big proponent of Lyon’s approach in France. What has made it so special?

I live in France and it’s so astonishing because Lyon came from nowhere. It won the league seven years running, doing something nobody in any of five European leagues has done. It’s like the Cleveland Indians winning the World Series seven years running. What are they doing here? It’s the wisdom of crowds, it’s about a long-term strategy. Plus the team is in a relatively a small town where it doesn’t have to worry about a lot of attention.

Early on they recognized a problem with adaptation. They acknowledged, as they became interested in Brazilian players, that they needed a multicultural approach and they looked for people who where not interested in named players, but 20- to 22-year-olds, who would be easier to manage. They thought hard about what type of player they wanted.

So they have perfected the notion of buying low and selling high?

Yes. They realized that they have to be ruthless and don’t say he’s our man, he’s our star. The only clubs can say that are Manchester United and Real Madrid because your star is always tempted to leave. With Lyon, they know players will leave, so they have to be realistic. So, O.K., the guy will leave, but only for the right price. The strategy, like with guys like Karim Benzema or Michael Essien, is to keep saying he can’t leave to get the max. Talk up the price, then sell. By the time the player is sold Lyon already knows who the replacement is. That’s the kind of lack of sentiment that most clubs don’t have.

In “Soccernomics” you also touch on the matter of what I’ll call damaged players. Guys who may have reputations for bad attitudes, perhaps a drug problem. Why do you think they’re worth taking a chance on?

That’s also part of the military ideal in which a good player is one who obeys. I had another experience … I was with Guus Hiddink and he was talking with joy about working with difficult players. He realized it was one of his strengths. He spends time thinking about how to get the best out of players like Romário at PSV, for example. And I think he used a degree of psychology most coaches don’t aspire to. They want the disciplined players on the field, but anything outside they reject. And that’s a problem for soccer because the job of coach attracts meglomaniacs and disciplinarians. Hiddink is more like a good talent manager or a theatre director. Most coaches are not.

On and off the field then it is the behavior in the group that seems to matter and a lot of coaches talk down to these so-called difficult players and say they don’t want them on their team. Kind of the Mourinho approach of not liking stars with egos. If you take that approach you’re ruling out a lot of talent. Hiddink says he likes guys that use their talent to perform on a big day. The Joe Namath-type ego, players who have a certain cockiness about them.

In Korea in 2002, Hiddink actually needed a bit of that, because of the nature of the culture there.It was famously said in German football that a good solider is also a good footballer. That idea has exists in English soccer and American football and is detrimental, this kind of unquestioned obedience.

When talking about the future of the game, you mentioned India. How and why?

I would agree that it might take a while longer, but I think they will also come on board. They couldn’t underperform any worse. They have some basic things given their population and I expect them to qualify in the next 20 years. I don’t think it’s a daring prediction. Their experience, income and population all are shooting up. They don’t have that much experience, but can get it quickly. After all, it’s hard for Germany or England to significantly increase their own level of experience.

The other thing they need to do, which I think the U.S. has failed to do and is why it hasn’t done better internationally, is to import Western knowledge. Some people take the view that the U.S. needs an American coach. I don’t think that’s correct. The best coaching week in and week out is in Western Europe, and the U.S. needs to adopt the best practices. And if you want to win, send all your best players to play in Europe and hire all your coaches from Europe.

I think the single thing the U.S. can do to improve soccer is when a European club comes to buy a player they should say yes yes yes. I know that would hurt M.L.S., but M.L.S. is not American soccer, it is one small part.

When I was working on “Soccer Against the Enemy” I was in Santa Barbara and took part in a group interview with Bora Milutinovic. I asked him what style the U.S. had and he said all these national styles are not what you want. He said that the best soccer is the same everywhere, that you have to incorporate all different elements. Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, it’s all pretty much the same game. The big national differences have really shrunk. The U.S. doesn’t need a European or Brazilian style, it needs an international style. Sure, Brazilian players are better, but they start younger and they have the best technique. The best way of playing is a collective style.

The 2002 World Cup was revolutionary. South Korea and Turkey in the semifinals, the U.S. within a missed hand-ball call of getting to the semis. The Europeans’ home ground was taken away. The U.S. did well in the Confederations Cup. But for all the predictions about the rise of Africa, that’s not likely. Income, population and experience. Africa is nowhere on the first two and it’s only one thing to go and hire a coach. Poverty stops them. It’s one thing to hire a coach. You can have the population, like Nigeria, but you don’t have the income.

You write much in the book about the perception of England as underachievers internationally, asserting that, in fact, England punches a bit above its weight. How so?

I really think the biggest thing is that there’s this media-driven hysteria around the team. The performance is always about the same. Under Capello there has been an upward turn. England’s reticence about importing the best European know-how has been redressed this year. There’s been an upswing in England, but generally what’s a far bigger factor is national hysteria.

There is a belief they will win the World Cup now. But our analysis shows that when they’re not playing the World Cup in England they win very, very few World Cup games. There’s a despondent population at large, but now there’s a belief that after winning six or seven World Cup qualifying matches against small sides that England will now fulfill its destiny to win. It is ludicrous.

All that said, to our surprise, England does better than one would expect based on population, gross domestic product and experience. In England we have a pretty good soccer country, but there’s a belief that because it invented the game it should be winning the World Cup. That was 150 years ago. Now it’s irrelevant. We actually do pretty well. But for England to do any better it has got to get into the soccer network.

Be even more like Holland, which has only 15 million people, but might be the best soccer country on earth per capita. In Holland when there’s something new about the game they’re aware of it and adopt it. But there are just so many England managers who barely watch the World Cup believing there is nothing to learn.

In the book’s title, you predict an eventual World Cup breakthrough by one of the lesser soccer countries like the U.S., Japan, Australia or Turkey. Will it happen in South Africa?

The World Cup is a random even where after six or seven games anyone could win. Wenger points out that in a league any team can be leading the table after one month, because it’s such a short sample period. Argentina has won two World Cup, Holland none, but it easily have been the other way around. It’s really a fool’s business to try and to call it. But I think there will continue to be an upward trend among the marginal countries like South Korea, Japan, Australia and the U.S. Everyone is looking to the core countries, and trying to learn from them. But I think the core countries are losing their lead and I would expect at least one outsider to make it to the semis.