Reddit reviews Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the Us, Japan, Australia, Turkey - And Even Iraq - Are Destined
We found 8 Reddit comments about Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the Us, Japan, Australia, Turkey - And Even Iraq - Are Destined. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Simon Kuper is one of the best writers in football. Anybody who likes this should read The Football Men: Up Close with the Giants of the Modern Game, Soccernomics or Football Against The Enemy.
Also I hate when footballers are labelled idiots. It requires extreme intelligence to be a top class player. Not "book learning" intelligence or even basic common sense, but extreme intelligence nonetheless. It's no different to how a top tier Physics academic might not be able to book a hotel room online. They are brilliant in their field, bit sometimes dim in other areas.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soccernomics-Simon-Kuper/dp/0007457847
You should read this book.
I found soccernomics really interesting.
Inverting the pyramid is a must though for tactics.
I think the interesting bit is encapsulated in this image - specifically the dotted lines in the top half.
'mTTV' is the valuation of the team as compared to the median of the league - therefore, we can see that City had just about a mid-table squad up until 2008. (By mid-table I mean in terms of the team's cost, which these guys equate very closely to success.)
*How they work out the cost is quite complicated, I don't completely understand it, but they work in wages, "football inflation", and transfers, as well as the "usefulness" of players I believe.
Now in the earlier years of the Premiership you could win the league with maybe 2x the median. This was what circa late '90s Arsenal and Man United had, more-or-less - although the Invincibles were actually very low, I think 1.66x the median. Nowadays, to win the league you need 3x or 4x.
So, we can clearly see the stratification into a top 3 of Mancs + Mancs + Chelsea, and the chasing pack of Arsenal, Spurs, Liverpool.
So basically the guy is saying Arsenal need to invest quite a bit to break back into that new top 3. (Duh I hear you say, as that's what the title is.)
Disclaimer: I haven't actually read the article, I just looked at the image, but I've read [Pay As You Play](http://transferpriceindex.com/), [Why England Lose/Soccernomics*](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soccernomics-Simon-Kuper/dp/0007457847/) and also some of this writer's other articles - I quite like his stuff actually but I don't pretend to understand the specifics, just the main gist of it.
Edit - another interesting thing with that graph - it seems like beyond a certain point, the mTTV seems to be a diminishing quality - otherwise, Chelsea would have walked the league every season since 2004. Or perhaps, it's a huge credit to what Ferguson has achieved (you would have expected him to be runner-up much more often).
You should read this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0007457847?pc_redir=1407687343&robot_redir=1
It disagrees with you that stats mean less in soccer than american sports. It is an insightful read and I recommend giving it a chance.
It's a book. Here you go!
> I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from
This book.