Soccernomics

The average player only has the ball for two minutes every game, so his main job is to occupy the right positions for the other 88 minutes.

If you want to regenerate a poor neighbourhood, regenerate it. Build nice houses and a train line. If you want an Olympic pool and a warm-up track, build them. You could build pools and tracks all across London and it would still be cheaper than hosting the Olympics. The only good reason to host an Olympics is that it makes people happy.

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.

Knowledge is no use if people in power won’t use it.

The new manager rarely causes the pendulum to swing. He’s just the beneficiary of the swing.

Televised press conferences have probably done more than anything else to create the modern myth of the omnipotent manager.

Whereas players are almost always employed because the club thinks they help win matches, that doesn’t go for managers. Popular ex-players often get the job because they are easily accepted by fans, media, players and sponsors. They are hired as much for who they are as for what they can do.

But the point of a football club isn’t to have nice accounts – after all, the clubs with horrible accounts survive too. The point of a football club is to win trophies.

Football clubs need to know what they are. They shouldn’t kid themselves that they are BBA Aviation. Rather, they are like the British Museum: public-spirited organisations that aim to serve the community while remaining reasonably solvent. It sounds like a modest goal, but few of them achieve even that.

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.

All this might sound obvious, but the usual attitude in football is, ‘We paid a lot of money for you, now get on with it,’ as if mental illness, addictions or homesickness should not exist above a certain level of income.

Football clubs need to make fewer transfers. They buy too many Dioufs.

Though most fans would probably deny it, a love of football is often intertwined with a love of numbers.

На самом деле, мир зарабатывает на футболе куда больше, чем индустрия футбола сама для себя.

«Машиной можно управлять и без приборной панели, не имея какой бы то ни было информации, и такое положение вещей мы наблюдаем в футболе. Здесь есть классные водители и классные машины, но с приборной панелью ездить было бы чуть-чуть проще. Ума не приложу, отчего же народ не желает иметь больше информации». Лично мы — желаем.