Will UEFA cancel Euro 2048? Will anybody care?

I was surfing the web late the other night and stumbled on an interesting article in the New York Times. Entitled No Babies?, it is a lengthy and fascinating look at demographic trends in Europe. There was no mention of football or any other sport. Instead, the article’s author examined the reasons for low European birth rates and offered a rather unsettling suggestion of what the continent might be like in coming decades. (Think of a depopulated place that resembles a theme park, like Venice). Yesterday morning, after the first critical sips of coffee had worked their magic, a serious question popped into my head: Does this mean that European football will be irrelevant by mid-century?

It’s fairly well-known that Europe’s birth rate has declined drastically in the past fifteen years or so. But compared to the replacement birth rate of 2.1 children per woman, the current Italian and Spanish rates of 1.3 are especially low. In some parts of Italy, it hovers around 1.0, a rate that is deemed “pathological.” And it’s not just Italy and Spain. Birth rates throughout eastern and southern Europe are equally low. Dutch and Scandanavian birth rates are somewhat higher, though at 1.7-1.8 they remain below replacement level. In Germany, well over a quarter of women born in 1960 have remained childless, far more than in any other European country. In fact, Germany’s population actually declines by around 100,000 per year and a very high percentage of German women believe that the optimal number of children is zero.

There are lots more statistics to mull over. In Spain only 22% of the population will be 24 or younger by 2025, compared to 42% in India. And Europe’s share of world population has been steadily declining: it was 12.5% in 1960, 7.2% today, and is projected to fall to 5% by 2050. A quick visit to Wikipedia (where else?), provides a basis for comparison. Argentina’s fertility rate is a healthy 2.4 children per woman, even though most Argentinians are of Italian and Spanish ancestry and its GDP is currently comparable to Poland’s. (Note, however, that the Argentinian rate is expected to decline to 2.09 for 2008). Other projected 2008 fertility rates: 2.10 for the US, 1.86 for Brazil, and 1.85 for both the UK and Ireland.

Let’s have some fun with idle speculation. The demographers remind us that the first place the population bust will be noticed is–obviously–on the playground. But what about the football pitch? Soccer skills can’t be learned, let alone perfected, in isolation. There may be some value in juggling a soccer ball, or practicing spot-kicks into an empty net. But it’s much better to practice with other kids. Isn’t that why the Europeans and South Americans and Africans–pretty much the rest of the world–are so much better at soccer than Americans? There are plenty of kids to play pick-up games with all day long, while our young players spend hours in the back of mom’s mini-van getting shuttled from one highly-structured practice to another. Will the disappearance of Europe’s children from streets and playgrounds mean that European player development will begin to resemble the American pattern?

The interaction of economic factors and cultural attitudes lies behind the collapsing European birth rate. Those families who take the plunge and produce a child tend to be wealthier. Do these families view football as a priority? I ask this because it has often been noted that in America the socioeconomic profile of the sport is very different from what it has historically been in the rest of the world. Here it’s a pastime of middle and upper-middle-class suburban children, whereas players in Europe and elsewhere are usually from less privileged backgrounds. If child-rearing in Europe ultimately becomes the sole province of the upper classes, will soccer practice be just another activity for busy kids, along with piano practice, swimming, tennis, and golf? Worse yet, might this demographic simply abandon football? A football career does seem to be incompatible with a European university education.

Football’s European roots and traditions are so deep that there will always be Spanish and Italian and German children who live for the sport. But will there be enough of them? Today, Europe’s presence in world football–both international competition and the prestige of its domestic leagues–is a commanding one. Its teams have won exactly half of the eighteen World Cup finals, with South American sides victorious in the other nine. Italy and (West) Germany lead the way among European teams with four and three World Cup titles, respectively. Three of the five most recent World Cups have been won by European teams.

But demographic changes work their way through society very slowly. The drastic decline in birth rates began in the 1990s, so for now we can only guess about the eventual effects of European depopulation on the world balance of power in football. Questions, questions…

Sad news to report, ladies…

But this morning’s Guardian tells us that Wayne Rooney is officially off the market. Don’t lose all hope, though, as William Hill are offering 5/1 odds that the blessed union will last five years or less.

Yes, it’s true. At 10:30 a.m. local time, Wayne & Colleen were married in Santa Margherita Ligure, on the Italian Riviera. The Guardian shares other fascinating details about the bridal couple with us, but I can summarize them for my time-pressed readers:

• Colleen’s gown was rumored to cost around 200,000 quid.
• The groom wore…brown…!?
• Though the newlyweds are but 22 years old, their romance is a long one.  Wayne, the hopeless romantic, proposed at age 17 in the parking lot of a BP station.
• Guests were asked to make donations to a children’s hospital in lieu of gifts. Well done, Wayne & Colleen.
• The marriage ceremony was performed in Italian. I shall refrain from any snarky insinuations that maybe Wayne might use this in court at some future date, claiming that he had no idea what he was getting himself into. Instead, I will admit that an Italian wedding certainly sets my heart aflutter.
• And yet those romantic images are spoiled by the knowledge that the couple have sold wedding details and pictures to OK! Magazine. This is of course de rigeur for celebrities these days…and yet…sigh…
• The reception is to be held in a gothic abbey high above Portofino.

Isn’t a 10:30 a.m. wedding a tad early? Do you think it’s because Wayne was eager to get the formalities over with so that he and his bride could rush off to a romantic, secluded hideaway in time to watch the  Germany-Croatia and Poland-Austria matches?

Seriously, best wishes to Wayne & Colleen.

EPL Wages Revisited: Fun with Statistics, Part II

Soccer Orb’s resident statistician, Steve, shared an interesting bit of research with us a couple of days ago (See Premiership Ratings: Biggest Bang for the Buck from June 6). I’m going to swim into some dangerous waters and interpret his findings with my quasi-layperson’s eyes.

His model was simple, but very revealing. Using EPL wage data from the 2006-7 season, he built a model that, in words, looks something like this:

For each of the twenty clubs, the total number of points earned in Premier League matches is a function of the total (player) wages paid by the club for that season.

In other words, how much of any given club’s success can be explained by the quality of its roster? “Quality” cannot be perfectly measured by a number, but a player’s salary is the proxy variable that Steve used, mostly because wages were a major factor in the recent Deloitte report of the financial condition of European football.

Steve’s results were quite strong, given that he was trying to learn how much one factor–wages–explained team success. Also, he was forced to use a small sample–twenty observations, confined to just one league. It would be great to have this data over a period of five or so years, and to have the numbers not just for the EPL but also for La Liga, Serie A, and the Bundesliga. Steve, the cheapskate, wasn’t willing to cough up £600 for this year’s full report.

According to his model, about two-thirds of the variation in a team’s points could be explained by the variation in the wages that it paid to its players. It is important to understand that, although wages are a powerful predictor of team success, they’re not the only predictor. One-third of the variation in team points is due to other factors besides wages, factors that were not included in this model. Why weren’t they included? Because Steve wanted to isolate the effect of wages, since they were given a lot of attention by the Deloitte analysts.

If you look at his graph (again, it’s in the post before this one), you’ll see the strong positive relationship between salaries and Premiership points. To be more precise, each £1 million pound increase in salaries changes the season’s point total by .46.

Steve noted that Manchester United’s point total for the season was actually seventeen points higher than the simple wage model predicted. I immediately jumped on this as evidence of the “Sir Alex Ferguson” effect. His long experience and eye for youthful, underpriced talent contributed to his ability to get more points out of his players, regardless of their quality as proxied by salaries.

What about Chelsea? If you look at Steve’s graph, you’ll see that its data point lies below the regression line. (Insert gloating smirk-face here). That is, given the considerable amount by which the Chelsea roster lightened Abramovich’s checkbook, the team finished the season with fewer points than the model predicted. Why? Well, you tell me. What variables would help to improve the explanatory power of the model? No matter what you come up with, it’s clear that Jose Mourinho & Co. didn’t manage their costly resources very well.

Models like this are a good starting point in helping to isolate the factors associated with a club’s success. But you have to remember that the analyst is always constrained by the data that are available. It would have been great to have had several years’ worth of data so that a time-series analysis could be performed. Then you “build a more dynamic model,” according to Steve. For example, you could measure the extent to which last years’ success influences the current year’s salaries, (because a good year means more money from shirt sales, or whatever), which as we’ve seen has a big impact on the current year’s success.

Many thanks to Steve for putting his statistical expertise to work on salary-performance relationship. (I won’t thank him too much because I know that he’d gladly spend all his waking hours doing sports stats analysis instead of that options volatility stuff).

A final word: fortunately, no model can completely explain success on the pitch. As someone who followed baseball and (American) football first, to my eyes soccer is inherently difficult to quantify. I hope it stays that way. Soccer’s beauty would be diminished if all of its mysteries were revealed through regression analysis.

And now it’s time for Germany-Poland. Then, a few hours on my knees praying that Argentina beats us by no more than three or four goals…

Premiership Ratings: Biggest Bang for the Buck

We’ve all seen the recent figures on wages in the Premiership, but which clubs get the most for their money?  Here in the States we’d ask who’s getting the best “bang for the buck”.  In England, I don’t know what they’d call it.  Quality for the quid?  Points for the pound?  Woot for the wedge?  Anyway, I found the most recent player payroll figures by club for the 2006-07 season.  I then matched these salary numbers up with the clubs’ point totals from that season’s league play.  You might argue that cup tournaments should have a chance to add to that productivity number, but it’s cleaner to ignore it rather than to obsess over how much to weight those non-league matches.  Simple point totals offer decent comparability across clubs.

As most anyone would guess, there’s a strong positive relationship between success and payroll. The plot below shows this:

What to me is more interesting, though, is to look at the clubs that appear far above and far below the fitted line.  A regression through all 20 observations shows the best fitting straight-line relationship between wages and points.  A club that had more points than its wage level alone would have predicted would appear above the line.  This is a measure of how effective they were in turning wages into results.  Clubs that aren’t so efficient will appear below the line.

Not surprisingly, all the demoted teams last year fell below the line.  Another notable underachiever was Newcastle.  Money alone doesn’t alleviate boredom, eh Kev?  On the other side of the “quality for the quid” spectrum is Man U.  They had a whopping 17 points more than their wage level would have suggested.  Others that did well by this metric were Spurs, Everton, Bolton and Reading.  For the Royals, mean reversion kicked in this year, but that’s another story.

Chelsea is an interesting case.  If you squint at the data the right way, you might see a kind of leveling off in Points at higher Wages.  If a curved line were fit instead, with Chelsea influencing the fall-off, we’d be showing diminishing marginal productivity.  (Does this make you nostalgic for your days in economics, Susan?)  NO, answers Susan.

Anyway, even just this simple analysis seems revealing.  Of course, I’m predisposed to anything that makes Man U look good.

Guest statistician:  Steve

Soccer, as Wall Street sees it

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal included not one, but two pieces of football-related reporting. And you won’t find either one on the sports page, either. (Yes, there is a sports page in every Friday’s Weekend Journal ).

I’ll give you three guesses at what I find objectionable in Culture Clash: Soccer Fans, Art Elite Butt Heads. This fascinating story describes how Basel, Switzerland is coping with the nearly simultaneous influx of football supporters for Euro 2008 and visitors for “the world’s most prestigious contemporary art fair.” The latter include the sort of people who are prepared to pay $600,000 for a sculpture that’s comprised of numerous small rooms, each decorated with political images.

Dear readers, you’re no doubt seething with indignation, as was I. Something is wrong with the world when honest, hard-working supporters of the Swiss and Czech national teams must share Basel with denizens of art snobbatoria from around the globe. But would you believe that the WSJ has a different take on this? They’ve quoted a New York art advisor who claims that “soccer hooligans drove our room rates through the roof.” Curiously, she believes that “This has ‘Christopher Guest movie’ written all over it.”

Does she mean a film like Best in Show? And the art people are like the high-strung, status-conscious couple whose weimeraner attacked one of the judges? (You really must see this film, if you haven’t already).

We see a photo of a wild-eyed, flag-waving man and boy juxtaposed next to an elegant couple standing in front of a no doubt significant piece of modern art. Most of the article is spent describing the art crowd’s dismay, but the author did apparently speak to one footy supporter. He is a social worker who counsels “troublesome soccer fans.” Really, I’m not making this up.

In Soccer Players Drain Coffers,
Steve McGrath takes a look at a recent Deloitte report on wages, revenues, and profitability in European football. (The full article is not available online without a subscription. If you have access to the print version, please see page C2 of the WSJ, May 30, 2008).

There’s nothing offensive about this story, unless you’re a Chelsea fan. During the 2006-7 season, Chelsea paid 132.8 million pounds in player salaries to Arsenal’s 89.7 million and Manchester United’s 92.3 million. I suppose Chelsea did win two trophies in 2007 (the Carling Cup counts, right?) and United only won the Premiership. The Journal said nothing about this, noting only that neither London club has won the Champions League.

Other interesting facts: John Terry was the highest-paid player in the Premiership in 2006-7, Premier League salaries as whole are 75% higher than those in La Liga, and Bundesliga operating profits of 250 million euros exceeded those of the Premiership (141 million euros), for the first time ever. As a percentage of revenue, player salaries at top clubs are at record levels (63%). High salaries lead the clubs to take on debt and raise ticket prices…etc., etc. You won’t catch me wringing my hands over any of this, though. When fans stop buying tickets and watching televised matches, the salary spiral will stop.

There’s supposed to be no such thing as bad publicity, but I think that the tiresome, offensive tone of the Culture Clash article far outweighs the Journal’s neutral coverage of European club football finances. The former, after all, occupied a prominent front-page position in Friday’s popular Weekend Journal and “Soccer Players Drain Coffers” was placed on page two of the Money & Investing section.

That probably wasn’t obscure enough for John Terry, though. The Journal still had room to run the now-famous photo of him seated on the rain-soaked pitch after that critical missed penalty in last week’s Champions League final.

The Shame of Being an American…

…and listening to our national anthem being tortured by a singer who stretched every syllable to include twenty more notes than Francis Scott Key ever intended. More to the point, wouldn’t it have been just a bit more sly and fun if she’d sung “My Country Tis of Thee” instead of The Star-Spangled Banner?

Sung to the same melody as God Save the Queen:

My country,’ tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing;
land where my fathers died,
land of the pilgrims’ pride,
from every mountainside let freedom ring!

I wanted to include a recording of this atrocity to share with those readers who were fortunate enough to have fast-forwarded their recording past all the pre-game stuff. I couldn’t find one, so I suppose even YouTube has standards.

It’s bad enough that we are forced to listen to this wretched American Idol-style garbage before games on our own turf. But to hear it in Wembley…

I was saved from total mortification by the sight of David Beckham. That reminded me that at least England bears full responsibility for The Spice Girls.

And if the national anthem weren’t a bad enough omen, the rest of the night was doomed as soon as I saw that Josh Wolff and Eddie Johnson were starting up top. I know it’s a friendly, but don’t you usually at least try to be competitive in these things?

And now we get to play Spain, and…gulp…Argentina.