Any mathematician would say it's absurd to expect England to win the World Cup.
"England wins two-thirds of its matches. To be precise, from 1970 to 2007 England played 411, won 217, tied 120, and lost 74. If we treat a tie as half a win, this translates into a winning percentage of 67.4 percent. If we then break this into seven equal periods of just under four years each, England's winning percentage has never fallen below 62 percent of risen above 70 percent. In other words, the team's performance is very constant." P:12
"If you had to locate the middle-class European dream anywhere, it would be in Lyon. It's a town the size of Oakland, about two-thirds of the way down France, nestled between rivers just west of the Alps. On a warm January afternoon, drinking coffee outside i the 18th century Place Bellecour where the buildings are as pretty as the women, you think: nice. Here's a wealthy town where you can have a good job, nice weather, and a big house near the mountains.
Lyon also has some of the best restaurants in Europe, known locally as bouchons, or "corks". Even at the town's soccer stadium you can have a wonderful three-course pregame meal consisting largely of intestines or head cheese, unless you prefer to eat at local boy Paul Bocuse's brasserie across the road and totter into the grounds just before kickoff. And then you can watch some of the best soccer in Europe, too.
Until about 2000 Lyon was known as the birthplace of cinema and nouvelle cuisine, but not as a soccer town. It was just too bourgeois. If for some reason you wanted soccer, you drove thirty-five miles down the highway to gritty proletarian Saint-Etienne. In 1987, Olympique Lyon, or "OL", or "les Gones" (the Kids), was playing in France's second division on an annual budget of about $3 million. It was any old backwater provincial club in Europe. Today it rules French soccer, and proclaims that is is only a matter of time before it wins the Champions League. Its ascent is in large part a story of the international transfer market. Better than any other club in Europe today, Lyon has worked out how to play the market.
In 1987 Jean-Michel Aulas, a local software entrepreneur with the stark, grooved features of a Roman emperor, became club president. Aulas had played fairly good handball as a young man and had a season ticket at OL.
"I didn't know the world of soccer well," he admits over a bottle of "OL" mineral water in his office beside the stadium (which he aims to tear down and replace with a bigger one). Had he expected the transformation that he [b]rought? "No."
Aulas set out to improve the club step by step. "We tried to abstract the factor 'time,'" he explains. "Each year we fix as an aim to have sporting progress, and progress of our financial resources. It's like a cyclist riding: you can overtake the people in front of you." Others in France prefer to liken Aulas to "un bulldozer."
In 1987 even the local Lyonnias didn't care much about les Gones. You could live in Lyon without knowing that soccer existed. The club barely had a personality, whereas Saint-Etienne were the "miners' club" that had suffered tragic defeats on great European nights in the 1970s. Saint-Etienne's president at the time said that when it came to soccer, Lyon was a suburb of Saint-Etienne, a remark that still rankles. At one derby after Lyon's domination began, les Gones' fans unfurled a banner that told the Saint-Etienne supporters: "We invented cinema when your fathers were dying in the mines."
Aulas appointed local boy Raymond Domenech as his first coach. In Domnech's first season, OL finished top of the second division without losing a game. Right after that it qualified for Europe. Aulas says, "At a stroke the credibility was total. The project was en route."
It turned out that the second city in France, even if it was a bit bourgeois, was just hungry enough for a decent soccer club. The Lyonnais were willing to buy match tickets if things went well, but if things went badly, they weren't immediately waving white handkerchiefs in the stands and demanding that the president or manager or half the team be gotten rid of. Not did the French press track the club's doings hour by hour. It's much easier to build for the long term in a place like that in a "soccer city" like Marseille or Newcastle. Moreover, players were happy to move to a town that is hardly a hardship posting. Almost nothing they get into in Lyon makes it into the gossip press. Another of Lyon's advantages: the locals have money. "It allowed us to have not just a 'popular clientele,' but also a 'business clientele,'" says Aulas.
Talking about money is something of a taboo in France. It is considered a grubby and private topic. Socially, you're never supposed to ask anyone a question that might reveal how much somebody has. Soccer, to most French fans, is not supposed to be about money. They find the notion of a well-run soccer club humorless, practically american.
It therefore irritates them that Aulas talks about it so unabashedly. He might have invented the word moneyball. Aulas's theme is that over time, the more money a club makes, the more matches it will win, and the more matches it wins, the more money it will make. In the short term you can lose a match, but in the long term there is a rationality even to soccer. (And to baseball. As Moneyball describes it, Beane believes that winning "is simply a matter of figuring out the odds, and exploiting the laws of probability.... To get worked up over plays, or even games, is as unproductive as a casino a manager worrying over the outcomes of individual pulls of the slot machines.")
Aulas thinks that rationality in soccer works more or less works more or less like this: If you buy good players for less than they are worth, you will win more games. You will then have more money to buy better players for less than they are worth. The better players will win you more matches, and that will attract more fans (and thus more money), because Aulas spotted early that most soccer fans everywhere are much more like shoppers than religious believers: if they can get a better experience somewhere new, they will go there. He told us, "We sold 110,000 replica shirts last season. This season we are already at 200,000. I think Olympique Lyon has become by far the most beloved club in France."
Polls suggest he is right: in Sport+Market's survey of European supporters in 2008, Lyon emerged as the country's most popular club just ahead of Olympique Marseille. This popularity was a new phenomenon. In 2002, when Lyon first became champion of France, the overriding French emotion toward the club had still been: "Whatever." The editor of France Football magazine complained around that time that when Lyon won the title, the magazine didn't sell. But from 2002 to 2008 the club won the title every year - the longest period of domination of any club in any of Europe's five biggest national leagues ever and many French fans began to care about it.
With more fans, Lyon makes more money. On match days now you can get a haircut at an official OL salon, drink an OL Beaujolias at an OL cafe, book your holiday at an OL travel agency, and take an OL taxi to the game - and many people do. Lyon uses that money to buy better players.
The club now survives the winter in the Champions League almost every season, which makes Lyon one of the sixteen best clubs in Europe. Aulas says it is only a matter of time before it wins the Champions League. "We know it will happen; we don't know when it will happen". It's a necessary step to achieve growth in merchandising."
The cup with the big ears would cap perhaps the most remarkable rise in soccer in history, And for all Aulas's "OL mineral water," what made it possible was the transfer market. On that warm winter's afternoon in Lyon, Aulas told us, "We will invest better than Chelsea, Arsenal, or Real Madrid. We will make different strategic choices. For instance, we won't try to have the best team on paper in terms of brand. We will have the best team relative to our investment." Here are Lyon's rules of the transfer market:
Use the wisdom of crowds. When Lyon is thinking of signing a player, a group of men sits down to debate the transfer. Aulas is there, and so is Bernard Lacombe, once a bull-like center forward for Lyon and France, and for most of the past twenty years the club's "technical director." Lacombe is known for having the best pair of eyes in French soccer. He coached Lyon from 1996 to 2000, but Aulas clearly figured out that if you have someone with his knack for spotting the right transfer, you want to keep him at the club forever rather than make his job contingent on four lost matches. The same went for Peter Taylor at Forest.
Whoever happens to be Lyon's head coach at the moment sits in on the meeting too, and so will for or five other coaches. "We have a group that gives its advice," Aulas explains. "In England the manager often does it alone. In France it's often the technical director."
Like Lyon, the Oakland A's sidelined their manager, too. Like Lyon, the A's understood that he was merely "a middle manager" obsessed with the very short term. The A's let him watch baseball's annual draft. They didn't let him say a word about it.
Lyon's method for choosing players is so obvious and smart that it's surprising all clubs don't use it. 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. For instance, if you ask a diverse crowd to guess the weight of an ox, the average of their guesses will be very nearly right. If you ask a diverse set of gamblers to be bet on, say, the outcome of presidential election, the average of their bets is likely to be right, too.
Clough and Taylor at least were a crowd of two. However, the typical decision-making model in English soccer is not "wisdom of crowds," but short-term dictatorship. At most clubs the manager is treated as a sort of divinely inspired monarch who gets to decide every thing until he is sacked. Then the next manager clears out his predecessor's signing at a discount. Lyon, notes a rival French club president with envy, never has expensive signing rotting on the bench. It never has revolutions at all. It understands that the coach is only a "temp". OL won its seven consecutive titles with four different couches. P:69
"A big secret is of a successful club is stability, " explains Hembert over coffee in Paris. "In Lyon, the stability is not with the coach, but with the sports director, Lacombe." P:69
Another Lyon rule: the best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties. Aulas says, "We buy young players with potential who are considered the best in their country, between twenty and twenty-two years old." It's almost as if he had read Moneyball. P:69
Only a handful of world-class players in each generation, most of them creators - Pele, Maradona, Wayne Rooney - reach the top before they are eighteen. Most players get there considerably later. You can be confident of their potential only when they are more mature.
Lyon always tries to avoid playing a premium for a star player's "name". Here, again, it is lucky to be a club from a quite town. Its placid supporters and local media don't demand stars. P:70
Happy is the club that has no need for heroes. Lyon was free to buy young unknowns like Michael Essien or Mahamadou Diarra just because they were good. And unknowns accept modest salaries. According to the French sports newspaper L'Equipe, in the 2007-2008 season Lyon spent only 31 percent of its budget on players pay. The average in the English Premiere League was about double that. P:71
Here are few more Lyon secrets: First, try not to buy center forwards. Center forwards are the most overpriced position in the transfer market. Second, help your foreign signings relocate. .... "They don't select players just for their quality but for their ability to adapt. I can't see Lyon recruiting an Anelka or a Ronaldinho." Says a former president of a rival French club. Finally, sell any player if another club offers more than he is worth... Like Clough and Taylor, and like Billy Beane, Lyon never gets sentimental about players. In the club's annual accounts, it books each player for a certain transfer value. P:72
Lyon knows that sooner of later its best players will attract somebody else's attention. Because the club expects to sell them, it replaces them even before they go. This avoids a transition period or a panic purchase after the player's departure. Aulas explains, "We will replace the player in the squad six months or a year before. So when Michael Essien goes [to Chelsea for $43 million], we already have a certain number of players who are ready to replace him. Then, when the opportunity to buy Tiago arises, for 25 percent of the price of Essien, you take him." P:72
AS a free service to clubs, here are the twelve main secrets of the transfer market in full:
A new manager wastes money on transfers, don't let him.
Use the wisdom of the crowds.
Stars of recent World Cups or European championships are overvalued; ignore them.
Certain nationalities are over valued.
Older players are overvalued.
Center forwards are overvalued, goalkeepers are undervalued.
Gentlemen prefer blonds: identify and abandon "sight based prejudices."
The best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties.
Sell any other player when another club offers more than he is worth.
Replace the best players even before you sell them.
Buy players with personal problems. and then help them deal with their problems.
Help your players relocate. P:73
" A team of economists, led by Holger Preuss from the University of Mainz, decided to work out how much "new" money visitors to the World Cup actually spent. In the old days, when boosters estimated economic bonanzas, they simply multiplied the number of seats in stadiums by some imaginary spending number (counting meals, hotels, and transportation as well as tickets) to produce an enormous hypothetical sum.
The problem with this method, as serious economists pointed out, is that not every visitor to an event really injects extra spending into the economy. Preuss's team surveyed a large sample of visitors to the World Cup and found that only about one-fifth were foreigners who had traveled to Germany specifically for the soccer. More than half the "visitors" were in fact Germans. For the most part these Germans would have been in Germany anyway, and had there been no World Cup they would presumably have spent their money on other forms of entertainment (such as going to the movies or restaurants). If they spent money at the World Cup, they spent less elsewhere in the German economy, which largely offsets any economic benefit from the soccer. Of course, some Germans who might otherwise have been spending their money in Spanish bars stayed home for the soccer. However, their spending was probably offset by other Germans who went abroad precisely in order to avoid the madness of the World Cup.
The remaining foreign visitors to the World Cup - about a quarter of all visitors - were either "time switchers," who would have come to Germany anyway at some point and simply timed their visit to coincide with the World Cup, or foreigners who would have been in Germany during the World Cup anyway and just decided to go along and see what all the fuss was about. Preuss's team called this last category "casuals."
"Time switchers" and "casuals" would have added little to spending because even without the World Cup they would have spent their money in Germany. Preuss's team asked their respondents detailed questions about their spending plans. They concluded that the World Cup generated spending by visitors of 2.8 billion Euros. That was negligible beside the Paris Hiltonisque of 1,000 billion Euros - plus spent annually by consumers in Germany. It was also much less than the German state spent preparing for the tournament. Remarkably, more than a third of that visitor income came from people who never got inside a stadium but merely watched the game on big screens in public places. In short, even the World Cup was barely a hiccup in the German economy.
Almost all research shows the same thing: hosting sports tournaments doesn't increase the number of tourists, or of full-time jobs, or total economic growth." P:242-244
"... That left us with data for five hosts. Admittedly, this is a small sample, but in all five host countries, happiness rose after the tournament, even following for all the other effects that influence happiness the year after the tournament than they had the year before, and they reported more happiness in the autumn surveys (that is, after the tournament) than in the spring surveys (held before the tournament).
The jump in happiness was quite large. Citizens of wealthy countries like the Netherlands or France would need to make hundreds of dollars more a month to experience a similar leap. One way to express this is that the average person gains twice as much happiness from hosting a soccer tournament as from having higher education. The effect can also be likened to an unexpected increase in income that takes someone from the bottom half of the income distribution to the middle of the top half. It's not quite winning the lottery, but very satisfying nonetheless. If you calculate this for an entire nation, then the leap of happiness from hosting can easily be worth a few billion dollars....
It turns out that hosting doesn't make you rich, but it does make you happy. This bags a question. If countries want to host soccer tournaments (and American cities want to host major league teams) as part of their pursuit of happiness, why don't they just say so? Why bother clothing their arguments in bogus economics? " Page:248-249
"One reason poor countries do badly in sports - and one reason they are poor - is that they tend to be less "networked," less connected to other countries, than rich ones. It is hard for them just to find out the latest best practice on how to play a sport." P:269
"To win at sports, you need to find, develop, and nurture talent. Doing that requires money, know-how, and some kind of administrative infrastructure. Few African countries have enough of any." P:270
"England wins two-thirds of its matches. To be precise, from 1970 to 2007 England played 411, won 217, tied 120, and lost 74. If we treat a tie as half a win, this translates into a winning percentage of 67.4 percent. If we then break this into seven equal periods of just under four years each, England's winning percentage has never fallen below 62 percent of risen above 70 percent. In other words, the team's performance is very constant." P:12
"If you had to locate the middle-class European dream anywhere, it would be in Lyon. It's a town the size of Oakland, about two-thirds of the way down France, nestled between rivers just west of the Alps. On a warm January afternoon, drinking coffee outside i the 18th century Place Bellecour where the buildings are as pretty as the women, you think: nice. Here's a wealthy town where you can have a good job, nice weather, and a big house near the mountains.
Lyon also has some of the best restaurants in Europe, known locally as bouchons, or "corks". Even at the town's soccer stadium you can have a wonderful three-course pregame meal consisting largely of intestines or head cheese, unless you prefer to eat at local boy Paul Bocuse's brasserie across the road and totter into the grounds just before kickoff. And then you can watch some of the best soccer in Europe, too.
Until about 2000 Lyon was known as the birthplace of cinema and nouvelle cuisine, but not as a soccer town. It was just too bourgeois. If for some reason you wanted soccer, you drove thirty-five miles down the highway to gritty proletarian Saint-Etienne. In 1987, Olympique Lyon, or "OL", or "les Gones" (the Kids), was playing in France's second division on an annual budget of about $3 million. It was any old backwater provincial club in Europe. Today it rules French soccer, and proclaims that is is only a matter of time before it wins the Champions League. Its ascent is in large part a story of the international transfer market. Better than any other club in Europe today, Lyon has worked out how to play the market.
In 1987 Jean-Michel Aulas, a local software entrepreneur with the stark, grooved features of a Roman emperor, became club president. Aulas had played fairly good handball as a young man and had a season ticket at OL.
"I didn't know the world of soccer well," he admits over a bottle of "OL" mineral water in his office beside the stadium (which he aims to tear down and replace with a bigger one). Had he expected the transformation that he [b]rought? "No."
Aulas set out to improve the club step by step. "We tried to abstract the factor 'time,'" he explains. "Each year we fix as an aim to have sporting progress, and progress of our financial resources. It's like a cyclist riding: you can overtake the people in front of you." Others in France prefer to liken Aulas to "un bulldozer."
In 1987 even the local Lyonnias didn't care much about les Gones. You could live in Lyon without knowing that soccer existed. The club barely had a personality, whereas Saint-Etienne were the "miners' club" that had suffered tragic defeats on great European nights in the 1970s. Saint-Etienne's president at the time said that when it came to soccer, Lyon was a suburb of Saint-Etienne, a remark that still rankles. At one derby after Lyon's domination began, les Gones' fans unfurled a banner that told the Saint-Etienne supporters: "We invented cinema when your fathers were dying in the mines."
Aulas appointed local boy Raymond Domenech as his first coach. In Domnech's first season, OL finished top of the second division without losing a game. Right after that it qualified for Europe. Aulas says, "At a stroke the credibility was total. The project was en route."
It turned out that the second city in France, even if it was a bit bourgeois, was just hungry enough for a decent soccer club. The Lyonnais were willing to buy match tickets if things went well, but if things went badly, they weren't immediately waving white handkerchiefs in the stands and demanding that the president or manager or half the team be gotten rid of. Not did the French press track the club's doings hour by hour. It's much easier to build for the long term in a place like that in a "soccer city" like Marseille or Newcastle. Moreover, players were happy to move to a town that is hardly a hardship posting. Almost nothing they get into in Lyon makes it into the gossip press. Another of Lyon's advantages: the locals have money. "It allowed us to have not just a 'popular clientele,' but also a 'business clientele,'" says Aulas.
Talking about money is something of a taboo in France. It is considered a grubby and private topic. Socially, you're never supposed to ask anyone a question that might reveal how much somebody has. Soccer, to most French fans, is not supposed to be about money. They find the notion of a well-run soccer club humorless, practically american.
It therefore irritates them that Aulas talks about it so unabashedly. He might have invented the word moneyball. Aulas's theme is that over time, the more money a club makes, the more matches it will win, and the more matches it wins, the more money it will make. In the short term you can lose a match, but in the long term there is a rationality even to soccer. (And to baseball. As Moneyball describes it, Beane believes that winning "is simply a matter of figuring out the odds, and exploiting the laws of probability.... To get worked up over plays, or even games, is as unproductive as a casino a manager worrying over the outcomes of individual pulls of the slot machines.")
Aulas thinks that rationality in soccer works more or less works more or less like this: If you buy good players for less than they are worth, you will win more games. You will then have more money to buy better players for less than they are worth. The better players will win you more matches, and that will attract more fans (and thus more money), because Aulas spotted early that most soccer fans everywhere are much more like shoppers than religious believers: if they can get a better experience somewhere new, they will go there. He told us, "We sold 110,000 replica shirts last season. This season we are already at 200,000. I think Olympique Lyon has become by far the most beloved club in France."
Polls suggest he is right: in Sport+Market's survey of European supporters in 2008, Lyon emerged as the country's most popular club just ahead of Olympique Marseille. This popularity was a new phenomenon. In 2002, when Lyon first became champion of France, the overriding French emotion toward the club had still been: "Whatever." The editor of France Football magazine complained around that time that when Lyon won the title, the magazine didn't sell. But from 2002 to 2008 the club won the title every year - the longest period of domination of any club in any of Europe's five biggest national leagues ever and many French fans began to care about it.
With more fans, Lyon makes more money. On match days now you can get a haircut at an official OL salon, drink an OL Beaujolias at an OL cafe, book your holiday at an OL travel agency, and take an OL taxi to the game - and many people do. Lyon uses that money to buy better players.
The club now survives the winter in the Champions League almost every season, which makes Lyon one of the sixteen best clubs in Europe. Aulas says it is only a matter of time before it wins the Champions League. "We know it will happen; we don't know when it will happen". It's a necessary step to achieve growth in merchandising."
The cup with the big ears would cap perhaps the most remarkable rise in soccer in history, And for all Aulas's "OL mineral water," what made it possible was the transfer market. On that warm winter's afternoon in Lyon, Aulas told us, "We will invest better than Chelsea, Arsenal, or Real Madrid. We will make different strategic choices. For instance, we won't try to have the best team on paper in terms of brand. We will have the best team relative to our investment." Here are Lyon's rules of the transfer market:
Use the wisdom of crowds. When Lyon is thinking of signing a player, a group of men sits down to debate the transfer. Aulas is there, and so is Bernard Lacombe, once a bull-like center forward for Lyon and France, and for most of the past twenty years the club's "technical director." Lacombe is known for having the best pair of eyes in French soccer. He coached Lyon from 1996 to 2000, but Aulas clearly figured out that if you have someone with his knack for spotting the right transfer, you want to keep him at the club forever rather than make his job contingent on four lost matches. The same went for Peter Taylor at Forest.
Whoever happens to be Lyon's head coach at the moment sits in on the meeting too, and so will for or five other coaches. "We have a group that gives its advice," Aulas explains. "In England the manager often does it alone. In France it's often the technical director."
Like Lyon, the Oakland A's sidelined their manager, too. Like Lyon, the A's understood that he was merely "a middle manager" obsessed with the very short term. The A's let him watch baseball's annual draft. They didn't let him say a word about it.
Lyon's method for choosing players is so obvious and smart that it's surprising all clubs don't use it. 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. For instance, if you ask a diverse crowd to guess the weight of an ox, the average of their guesses will be very nearly right. If you ask a diverse set of gamblers to be bet on, say, the outcome of presidential election, the average of their bets is likely to be right, too.
Clough and Taylor at least were a crowd of two. However, the typical decision-making model in English soccer is not "wisdom of crowds," but short-term dictatorship. At most clubs the manager is treated as a sort of divinely inspired monarch who gets to decide every thing until he is sacked. Then the next manager clears out his predecessor's signing at a discount. Lyon, notes a rival French club president with envy, never has expensive signing rotting on the bench. It never has revolutions at all. It understands that the coach is only a "temp". OL won its seven consecutive titles with four different couches. P:69
"A big secret is of a successful club is stability, " explains Hembert over coffee in Paris. "In Lyon, the stability is not with the coach, but with the sports director, Lacombe." P:69
Another Lyon rule: the best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties. Aulas says, "We buy young players with potential who are considered the best in their country, between twenty and twenty-two years old." It's almost as if he had read Moneyball. P:69
Only a handful of world-class players in each generation, most of them creators - Pele, Maradona, Wayne Rooney - reach the top before they are eighteen. Most players get there considerably later. You can be confident of their potential only when they are more mature.
Lyon always tries to avoid playing a premium for a star player's "name". Here, again, it is lucky to be a club from a quite town. Its placid supporters and local media don't demand stars. P:70
Happy is the club that has no need for heroes. Lyon was free to buy young unknowns like Michael Essien or Mahamadou Diarra just because they were good. And unknowns accept modest salaries. According to the French sports newspaper L'Equipe, in the 2007-2008 season Lyon spent only 31 percent of its budget on players pay. The average in the English Premiere League was about double that. P:71
Here are few more Lyon secrets: First, try not to buy center forwards. Center forwards are the most overpriced position in the transfer market. Second, help your foreign signings relocate. .... "They don't select players just for their quality but for their ability to adapt. I can't see Lyon recruiting an Anelka or a Ronaldinho." Says a former president of a rival French club. Finally, sell any player if another club offers more than he is worth... Like Clough and Taylor, and like Billy Beane, Lyon never gets sentimental about players. In the club's annual accounts, it books each player for a certain transfer value. P:72
Lyon knows that sooner of later its best players will attract somebody else's attention. Because the club expects to sell them, it replaces them even before they go. This avoids a transition period or a panic purchase after the player's departure. Aulas explains, "We will replace the player in the squad six months or a year before. So when Michael Essien goes [to Chelsea for $43 million], we already have a certain number of players who are ready to replace him. Then, when the opportunity to buy Tiago arises, for 25 percent of the price of Essien, you take him." P:72
AS a free service to clubs, here are the twelve main secrets of the transfer market in full:
A new manager wastes money on transfers, don't let him.
Use the wisdom of the crowds.
Stars of recent World Cups or European championships are overvalued; ignore them.
Certain nationalities are over valued.
Older players are overvalued.
Center forwards are overvalued, goalkeepers are undervalued.
Gentlemen prefer blonds: identify and abandon "sight based prejudices."
The best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties.
Sell any other player when another club offers more than he is worth.
Replace the best players even before you sell them.
Buy players with personal problems. and then help them deal with their problems.
Help your players relocate. P:73
" A team of economists, led by Holger Preuss from the University of Mainz, decided to work out how much "new" money visitors to the World Cup actually spent. In the old days, when boosters estimated economic bonanzas, they simply multiplied the number of seats in stadiums by some imaginary spending number (counting meals, hotels, and transportation as well as tickets) to produce an enormous hypothetical sum.
The problem with this method, as serious economists pointed out, is that not every visitor to an event really injects extra spending into the economy. Preuss's team surveyed a large sample of visitors to the World Cup and found that only about one-fifth were foreigners who had traveled to Germany specifically for the soccer. More than half the "visitors" were in fact Germans. For the most part these Germans would have been in Germany anyway, and had there been no World Cup they would presumably have spent their money on other forms of entertainment (such as going to the movies or restaurants). If they spent money at the World Cup, they spent less elsewhere in the German economy, which largely offsets any economic benefit from the soccer. Of course, some Germans who might otherwise have been spending their money in Spanish bars stayed home for the soccer. However, their spending was probably offset by other Germans who went abroad precisely in order to avoid the madness of the World Cup.
The remaining foreign visitors to the World Cup - about a quarter of all visitors - were either "time switchers," who would have come to Germany anyway at some point and simply timed their visit to coincide with the World Cup, or foreigners who would have been in Germany during the World Cup anyway and just decided to go along and see what all the fuss was about. Preuss's team called this last category "casuals."
"Time switchers" and "casuals" would have added little to spending because even without the World Cup they would have spent their money in Germany. Preuss's team asked their respondents detailed questions about their spending plans. They concluded that the World Cup generated spending by visitors of 2.8 billion Euros. That was negligible beside the Paris Hiltonisque of 1,000 billion Euros - plus spent annually by consumers in Germany. It was also much less than the German state spent preparing for the tournament. Remarkably, more than a third of that visitor income came from people who never got inside a stadium but merely watched the game on big screens in public places. In short, even the World Cup was barely a hiccup in the German economy.
Almost all research shows the same thing: hosting sports tournaments doesn't increase the number of tourists, or of full-time jobs, or total economic growth." P:242-244
"... That left us with data for five hosts. Admittedly, this is a small sample, but in all five host countries, happiness rose after the tournament, even following for all the other effects that influence happiness the year after the tournament than they had the year before, and they reported more happiness in the autumn surveys (that is, after the tournament) than in the spring surveys (held before the tournament).
The jump in happiness was quite large. Citizens of wealthy countries like the Netherlands or France would need to make hundreds of dollars more a month to experience a similar leap. One way to express this is that the average person gains twice as much happiness from hosting a soccer tournament as from having higher education. The effect can also be likened to an unexpected increase in income that takes someone from the bottom half of the income distribution to the middle of the top half. It's not quite winning the lottery, but very satisfying nonetheless. If you calculate this for an entire nation, then the leap of happiness from hosting can easily be worth a few billion dollars....
It turns out that hosting doesn't make you rich, but it does make you happy. This bags a question. If countries want to host soccer tournaments (and American cities want to host major league teams) as part of their pursuit of happiness, why don't they just say so? Why bother clothing their arguments in bogus economics? " Page:248-249
"One reason poor countries do badly in sports - and one reason they are poor - is that they tend to be less "networked," less connected to other countries, than rich ones. It is hard for them just to find out the latest best practice on how to play a sport." P:269
"To win at sports, you need to find, develop, and nurture talent. Doing that requires money, know-how, and some kind of administrative infrastructure. Few African countries have enough of any." P:270
