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A review by salexander7341
Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski
1.0
1. It isn't insightful.
Almost nothing in this book is insightful. If you like Freakonomics because it poses fascinating questions, or at least uses statistics to suggest weird possibilities, this book is not for you. Most of the topics covered in the book are your typical soccer discussions, like "Why doesn't England win the World Cup" and why are so many great players from poor backgrounds. The problem is, the authors regularly take a trip around the world to answer a question they actually answer in about 2 paragraphs at the end of the chapter like it is some great wisdom. Take for instance the intersection of poverty and later sporting success. This chapter starts by suggesting that poverty has little to do with it, because if you grew up in a poor neighborhood in Paris then you are not actually that poor. They imply that they will reveal some other factor, something you have
not considered, that will explain this. So the book proceeds by creating a throughly arbitrary system of points based on international success in various sports that shows us that, surprise, rich countries are good at sports, which also holds true per capita. Then, in the last two pages, they tell you that Malcolm Gladwell [fantastic author] answered this question to their satisfaction decades ago, and everything they told you was not really anything new. Poverty does create the result we see.
To explain, these players in a Paris neighborhood experience relative poverty, or lack of resources compared to those around you. In impoverished countries, people more commonly experience "absolute poverty," or the lack of basic necessities. These are both social problems, but they are not the same thing. The worst part of all of this is that I just explained the information better than they do. Their 20 page chapter could be reduced to a few sentences without even their involvement.
This is how each chapter generally takes place.
2. It's ten years old.
This is a simple problem, and not the authors' fault. Reading this book now is akin to reading early sabermetrics and being surprised at what you learn. The concepts discussed in this book have permeated the discussion of the sport to the degree that this book feels largely elementary in the present day. Again, it is not the authors' fault that their book did not age well, but it is important to know if you are considering reading it.
3. The casual treatment of statistics.
The authors' present each chapter as some question answered by an interesting application of statistics. Frequently, while the questions may disappoint in their lack of ingenuity (see 1), the statistics do suggest interesting possibilities. The problems arise because anyone with a above-casual familiarity with statistics (or a deep interest in the game and paying attention) with see immediate problems. Whole statistical conceptions will ignore easy improvements. An entire chapter hinging on "Which country most outperforms their demographic stats in world football?" falls apart about a paragraph in when you wonder why they haven't considered using Elo ratings to measure the level of competition. At first, we get straight win-loss comparisons, which the author's acknowledge is not very insightful. By the end of their "improvements," we get to an idea best summarized as: "Only European teams play good opponents most of the time so it is impossible to tell outside of Europe." Except we can, with Elo (which existed 10 years ago).
This book had me regularly wondering why they were ignoring a major flaw or improvement in their model, especially once they would behave as if the problem was unsolvable. They would see the error, but could not fathom ways to fix it (in one case, remembering that standard deviations exist would have made some information more useful). At some times, the book indicated gross misreadings of the data they presented (or at the very least, they explained it so poorly as to be indistinguishable for misunderstanding their data). At other times, obvious variables were omitted that would have better explained the data, or real-life factors that should inform the analysis were dismissed as irrelevant.
In summary, if you want to read a book that is just a rehash of other, better, books (usually directly quoted in the chapters), this book is for you. If you want to read a book that is out of date by 10 years and may have been out of date at publishing, this book is for you. If you want to wonder how two professionals could have thought so little about the statistics or how the world works to inform their analysis, this book is for you.
It wasn't for me.