Quotes from Simon Kuper

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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