Why england lose

Modern database management of season ticket holders might suggest some rather different figures. Elsewhere there is frequent resort to regression analysis — the mathematical modelling of data to take account of variables and produce interesting correlations. In theory this is quite sophisticated but it does depend on the quality of the data you put in.

Many of the England international analyses run from to rather than a more germane period. Regression analyses are very useful when they force you to think anew and to try to match the insight gained with real world experience. Sometimes they rightly discard the answers — Georgia is not the most over-achieving football nation. Cutting to the chase, or title, nor is England the most under-achieving nation.

England pretty much always punches at the right weight, given its experience in international football, its GDP and its population size.

These are the three critical, long-term determining factors — and why ultimately we must fear China, Japan, USA and surprisingly Iraq. If our game was more able to accommodate middle-class players and the England team able to sustain a higher level of fitness in the second half of major matches we might, it is argued, do even better.

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Pay using card ending in. By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Summary Why do England lose? Critic reviews " Why England Lose is an Arsene Wenger of a book - more thoughtful than most of its rivals and, by football standards, positively intellectual. Every page engages, entertains and challenges the lazy assumptions that still dominate football, not merely in its punditry, but all too often in the way that clubs are run.

More from the same Author The Football Men. What listeners say about Why England Lose Average customer ratings. Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews. Amazon reviews. Sort by:. Most Helpful Most Recent. Filter by:. All stars 5 star only 4 star only 3 star only 2 star only 1 star only. MR Better off reading it This book is brilliant, but the problem is it has a lot of tables that convert horribly to audio.

Gary Black Not just why England will lose! Phil Interesting but probably better in print Contains some interesting insights, though some already feel a bit outdated as was written when capello was in charge of England. Martin Freakonomics meets football I thought this was excellent.

Patrick Conway Full of interesting facts! Matthew Lever Horrendously unsuited to be an audio book I felt as thoughi was just listening to reams of numbers for vast large parts. Simon B Everything you thought you knew is wrong! Hector Chub Great analysis of the contemporary soccer world The authors are probably right, many soccer followers are also stat nuts and table lovers.

World Cups are eventually knock-out tournaments and knock-out competitions, especially since the introduction of penalty shoot-outs, depend a great deal on chance. Billy Beane never worried about Oakland's failure to win the World Series the knockout competition that rounds off the baseball season because that was too often a matter of luck; it was only over the regular league season of games that a small statistical advantage had the time to tell.

Kuper and Szymanski admit as much they even quote the relevant passage from Moneyball , so one finishes this chapter not with a sense that something curious has been explained by statistical analysis, but that the relevant statistical sample is simply too small to bear much explanation at all. In their desire to ape an approach that was developed to analyse the highly distinctive sport of baseball, Kuper and Szymanski seem to lose sight of what is distinctive about football.

They devote a chapter to explaining why the regular complaint that football has become too unequal ie the rich clubs always win is self-defeating, because inequality is part of football's appeal. But though this is true, they miss the most obvious reason for it. Unlike baseball indeed all other American sports , football is a low-scoring game that can end in a goalless draw. Every goal is an event, no matter how unequal the contest. Frankly, a Major League baseball game that ends is a bit of a bore, but a Premier League game that finishes lives on in the memory.

Equally, unlike baseball, football is not a sport that can easily be broken down into self-contained slices of action. It moves around the field in long, often chaotic sequences that, despite ProZone's best efforts, are very hard to capture on statistical spreadsheets.

The one part of the game that is clearly amenable to this sort of analysis is the penalty shoot-out and Kuper and Szymanski devote a chapter to it here. But it's pretty elementary stuff and the conclusion — that the best penalty-takers don't always shoot to their best side but randomise the sequence so as to keep the goalkeeper guessing — is hardly a tale of the unexpected.

Serious sabermetrics really does look like rocket science in comparison. There are still plenty of good things in this book. The best chapters are more conventional economics than freakonomics, explaining how and why money flows through the game, including an eye-popping account of how poorly the financial side of the sport is still managed by people with much more money than sense.

There are also some fascinating stories, of which the most tantalising is a brief account of the rise of Olympique Lyonnais from relative obscurity to total dominance of French football, under their innovative owner, Jean-Michel Aulas. The success of Lyon and Aulas is probably the closest football has to the story of Oakland and Billy Beane, but Kuper and Szymanski are so keen to touch base with everything that they don't give it the space it deserves.