Soccernomics Essay

The book Soccernomics, published by Stefan Szymanski and Simon Kuper in 2009 bring a fresh way of looking to global soccer. The book is like soccer edition of Moneyball for Baseball, as it is seen. A soccer writer and an economist, they apply principles of statistics, economics, psychology, and business to explain how the game is played on the world now. Main focuses of the book are English Premier League, insights of transfer market, comparison match data between over performing and under performing the teams and bad soccer clubs as business. At the beginning of book, the authors talk about English Soccer. To examine their big disappointment in their national team, they use a database of international soccer events and create a
Spending more money on transfers brings more productivity what they assert. In other words, big salaries can buy the scores. However, there is a contradiction in the book I guess. In the transfer market, small clubs like Ajax and Nottingham Forest have used their knowledge of the game and the transfer markets to take an advantage on the field. The idea of market efficiency is crucial. If there 's an advantage to be taken of in the market, everyone will seek that advantage as soon as possible, and it disappears. The best example of this Olympic Lyon team, they have dominated the French league for a long time in spite of limited resources. They have found stability and success not with short-term coaches, but with a long-term sporting director, Bernard Lacombe (p; 67). He is one of the best directors to acquire good players with low price such as Micheal Essien and Karem Benzema. Such as Benzema, he was bought for 200k euros and sold for 35 million euros to Real Madrid (transfermarkt.com). Nottingham Forest did same thing with Roy Keane. The key of this success is to avoid acquiring players after big international tournaments because of overpaying. Szymanski and Kuper say that transfers always play the biggest role in clubs’