Quotes from Simon Kuper

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.)