Soccernomics
why England loses, why Germany and Brazil win, and why the U.S., Japan, Australia, Turkey and even India are destined to become the kings of the world's most popular sport
by Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski · first published 2009
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Using insights and analogies from economics, statistics, psychology, and business to cast a new and entertaining light on how the game of soccer works, "Soccernomics" reveals the often surprisingly counterintuitive truths about the world's most popular game. An essential guide for the 2010 World Cup.
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A fascinating book to read as the World Cup nears: http://www.amazon.com/Soccernomics-Australia-Turkey-Iraq-Are...
on “England to win World Cup, says JPM quant model” ↗Excellent comment. Reminds me an idea from Soccernomics (a great book on soccer by economists who happen to love football), that a club manager is mainly a PR person and goes on to statistically prove that he has almost nothing to do with the teams performance…
on “How Satya Nadella Has Changed Microsoft In 3 Months” ↗Yes, Moneyball's exceptional. There's a great book about similar influences on soccer, called Soccernomics. :)
on “Baseball's dirty little secret is out – we decided to experiment” ↗England has an average team and only English don't agree with that. https://www.amazon.com/Soccernomics-England-Germany-Australi...
on “What makes a country good at football?” ↗The book Soccernomics [0], has a whole chapter dedicated to both the psychology and game theory of penalty kicks. Long story short: - Let's simplify to the options being: you kick either left or right - The goalie has to…
on “The Cat-and-Mouse Game of the Modern Penalty Kick” ↗The book Soccernomics touches on a similar point: how socioeconomic factors influence the pool of candidates for spending inordinate amounts of time training. In the case of the English national football club, the fact that…
on “Can a complete novice become a golf pro with 10,000 hours of practice?” ↗…tech industry because they are men, then using quotas will actually increase the merocrity. The problem is how do you calculate the true talent of people? My favorite "proof" of this comes from the book Soccernomics where they could show that black fotball (soccer for you americans) players where discriminated, because with all other equal the higher ratio of black players in a team would increase the succes of…
"Soccernomics" author predicted Turkey becoming much better at soccer competitions for those and other reasons, it hasn't materialized yet though.
on “Visualization of tweets during Champions League final” ↗…economic theory brought to life." Click on 'Read Full transcript'. In the audio, jump to 11m29s, where they talk to Stefan Szymanski, professor of economics at the University of Michigan and co-author of Soccernomics.
on “Why "Freakonomics" failed to transform economics” ↗Given the abandonment of olympic venues all the way round the world, I don't think this is a bad thing. There's a lot in the book Soccernomics about how the economic value promised by politicians lobbying for hosting things like this rarely pan out.
on “Is a 'slow' swimming pool impeding world records?” ↗…most EPL clubs - and EPL is the richest league in the World - have annual turnovers that would be dwarfed by some Series D startups. All the money goes on the field in player salaries. If you've read Soccernomics, you'll agree it should. That meant data teams often have small budgets, measured in the high 5-figure/low 6-figure region for kit, and not much more for analyst salaries. Digging around, I discovered…
on “Show HN: Soccer video analysis from your match videos” ↗