Englishman for the England job?

After Steve McCLaren, who next? The debate about foreign coaches has started again, with Arsene Wenger saying that it should be an Englishman for the England job. Perhaps he just wants to keep the spotlight off him, but does he have a point?

Of the UEFA teams - the teams in Europe - there are 54 teams in total, with 19 foreign coaches, 33 domestic and 2 jobs pending (Republic of Ireland being the other).

So, with over a third (35%) of coaches being foriegn, is England being naive to think that post-Sven, England should be managed by an Englishman? Notably, the countries that are currently seen as the "powerhouses" of Europe - France, Italy, Germany - are managed by domestic, not foreign coaches. Smaller countries tend to have foreign managers - Liechenstein, Moldova, Cyprus and Albania are in the 19. Perhaps an English manager isn't a terrible idea, it just needs to be a better manager.

Telegraph need a primer in pofit and loss

Interesting piece in the Telegraph. Apparently if England don't make it into Euro 2008, it wouldn't just mean a summer off from all that football nonsense and Steve McClaren out of a job:

According to one study, by the Centre for Economic and Business Research, based on an examination of the impact of the 2006 World Cup and Euro 2004, the effect of non-qualification could be as much as £1 billion.

Sadly, the basis for this huge figure is hard to dissect, as the report isn't on their website. But the Telegraph summarises some of the main points. The impact would be in advertising revenues, drink sales and betting - as much as £300m was spent in advertising during the 2006 World Cup, and Euro 2008 would give pubs etc a £285m boost.

So where's the loss? Can't see it yet. All we are looking at here is expected increases that might happen. As far as I remember, that's not a loss. It's a fall in expected profits. Profit warnings aren't much fun, but they are different to a loss. In each area money will still be spent: advertisers will display adverts in the matches, they will just be charged less; people will still go to the pub to watch France vs Portugal, they just won't drink as much; people will still bet.

In short - money will be made, just not as much. If I promise to give you £100 for getting an A in an exam, but £50 for a B or less, if you get a B you've still made money.

But "less money will be made if England lose" isn't such a good headline, is it?

Import - but no talk of export

I have just got back from Paris, and a fine journey it is too from the new St Pancras. But as we took a taxi through the Hausmann boulevards, I couldn't help thinking of French football and radio, and it struck a nerve about the English game.

The Premiership foreign players debate rumbles on and on. The Sunday Times had a good synthesis of the arguments, but as nostalgic old players chip in, no real solution is apparent apart from quotas as a means of making the England team competitive.

Hang on. Quotas? As in restrictions? Aside from being against European employment law and therefore pointless, when do quotas work?

And here is where France comes in. France are the most successful European team of recent years. And French music, in general, sucks. Stay with me here.

Quotas haven't helped French music. Radio stations in France must play Francophone music as 40% of their music. And the effect has been patchy. French music stars such as Air and MC Solaar haven't flourished because of this quota system, they have emerged despite it. All quotas have done is encourage flabby imitations of US and English acts. Quotas are nonsense.

And French football? The team during its most successful period had players scattered across leagues in Europe. Home-grown talent, yes. Unable to fashion a team because they are in different leagues? No.

In England we should worry more about whether young players are developing properly and have facilities, rather than the composition of our league. If a generation of young English kids grow up wanting to be Cesc Fabregas or Christiano Ronaldo, then fine.

Also, why aren't we encouraging our players to play abroad, in Spain, Germany or Italy? It's worked for France and Brazil.

It is also highly unlikely that English players will not flourish in the Premiership. The weather, language and culture are in their favour. But put the idea of quotas to bed forever. It's a legal and economic non-starter.

P.S. The headline scare-story: At the start of the Premiership in 1992, just 10 players in the starting lineups for the first weekend were foreign. Of the 220 players who started Premier League matches last weekend, only 77 were English.

And, lest we forget, in 1992, England won the European championship, due to all the English talent at home. Oh, that's right. They didn't qualify. Whoops.

Manflation

"Chelsea are furious". Really? Why? Sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe points out that their wage bill is huge, but gets a few figures wrong.

Sutcliffe told delegates at the FT Sports Industry Summit yesterday morning that Terry earns £150,000 a week, that Chelsea are "£250m in the red" and that United had increased ticket prices by 13%. Both clubs disputed his figures.

Yes, ManU have increased their ticket prices for a season ticket by 10.87%.

Hang on... 11 per cent isn't exactly in line with inflation. That hasn't been up to 11 per cent since, ooh, 1981. Why ManU fans put up with this I have no idea.

Killer instincts (but not for stats)

The Guardian is starting to get it's head around a few sport stats these days - aside from the spoof ones they run on the back page. To go with the Rugby World Cup opening weekend they ran a small piece that compared teams so-called Killer Instinct i.e the time spent in the opposition's 22 compared to the number of tries scored in the match. The results were:

20.6sec Australia (269s in Japan's 22, 13 tries scored)
23.6 New Zealand (260s in Italy's 22, 11 tries)
49 South Africa (392s in Samoa's 22, 8 tries)
68.8 Scotland (550s in Canada's 22, 8 tries)
135.3 England (406s in USA's 22, 3 tries)

While I admit that this shows that England played poorly, as a measure it is nonsense. A few quick observations:
1 - Scoring tries isn't everything. If your opponents persistently foul by being offside, a penalty may be all you can get from being in the 22. At least the team is scoring.
2- Teams can strike from anywhere on the pitch these days. Possession between the halfway line and 22 can become tries, penalties or drop goals. Being inside the 22 does not make it that much more likely that you will score - especially if you don't have the ball.
3- Camping out in your opponents 22 can be demoralising for them, and make it less likely they will score against you. So that's not such a bad thing.
4- This is ONE game. Run it across a whole tournament and you might get something meaningfull.

Brooking weighs in

The foreign football player in Britain debate continues - Sir Trevor Brooking has joined in, suggesting that it's a major concern for England's chances at the big tournaments.

Then the BBC used some stats to back it up.

76% of the starting XIs that played on the first weekend of the first Premier League season in 1992 were English, only 37% were English on the first weekend of this season

Only 10% (23 players) of the starting XIs in 1992 were from outside the UK, this season that number had increased to 56% (123)

Non-English players have scored 69% of Premier League goals so far this season - they have even scored two of the three own goals

Of the 118 goals scored so far, only nine have been scored by seven English strikers

According to the latest Deloitte figures for disclosed transfer fees, spending by Premier League clubs rose from £333m in 2006 to £531m in 2007

Half of that went to non-English clubs

Where do we start? Well, the first point is horrendously misleading. Starting XIs are not representative of clubs, given the squad system and rotation that most clubs use. If English players are in the squad, they will pick up ideas and techniques from their foreign teammates. Also, just the first weekend of the season? That's not a data set you can really justify. Why not look at the whole season? In fact all of the data used is cherry-picked and misleading.

"Half" (where's the percentage) of transfer fees going abroad? Well, if you are going to buy foreign players, that's where the money will go. Interestingly, that would suggest foreign players are being traded between English clubs, so once they are proven Premiership performers, they get sold on.

But the link is just not proved. Here's a scenario. In a league, domestic players count for less than 10%. In fact, it's just the International team plus a few others. The rest of the league is superstars - the rest of the world's best. What would this do for the domestic players? Make them worse? They are confronting the best that Brazil, Italy etc can throw at them every Saturday. Wouldn't that make them better players?

It just doesn't follow that English players are suffering. In effect, it should make the next league down more competitive, and improve the game across the country. Talent is now borderless in sport, business and art. You don't want to turn it away. These arguments are like the politician scoring cheap points by being anti-globalisation and trying to protect dead industry jobs. It's time that a bit of proper scientific (dare I say it - economic) vigour was applied to the situation.

The voice of "home-bred" sport

Hugh McIlvanney writes in today's Sunday Times:

Year by year, almost day by day, it becomes more difficult to talk of Premier League clubs’ involvement in the Champions League as an English challenge. The term will be even less likely to trip off the tongue if David Dein’s association with a Russian steel magnate, Alisher Usmanov, ultimately puts Arsenal at the mercy of another foreign takeover. Of our big European contenders this season, Liverpool and Manchester United are owned by Americans and Chelsea are, of course, already Russian-ruled.

Now it seems that Arsenal may establish an east-west balance of power. None of the four has an English manager and only a small percentage of their players are home-bred. All this may not mean much to most people but it happens to sadden me.

It might sadden Hugh, but it's hardly realistic. Once the major clubs listed on the stock exchange, they were always liable to any investor from any country taking them over. To suggest that they should remain in British hands with British managers is to misunderstand the point of the market. That's the deal - you raise capital through selling shares, you can't decide who buys them. Does Hugh mind that the Sunday Times is owned by an Australian? Why should having British players be so important?

The only argument I can see is that is depletes the pool of players for the England team, as there are fewer opportunities at the top domestic level. But this is not an argument that bears scrutiny. All is suggests is that English players don't "travel well" and play for clubs abroad. Which is true, but not universal - two recent examples of Beckham and Heargreaves have played for foreign clubs while maintaining a England place.

Also, you want English players to play with the best from other countries, to familiarise themselves with techniques, to de-mistify, and to challenge. The influx of foreign players has coincided with a so-called golden generation - a crop of English players that are superb. They just don't perform well for England.

To compare with other structures, lots of companies are staffed by people not "home-bred" (isn't everyone bred at home?). Banks are full of people from all over the world. My department at work has employees from France, Australia, China and Switzerland. To suggest a football club should operate on a different basis is narrow-minded at best, jingoistic at worst. Many journalists and commentators try to remind us that football is all about the fans. If the fans are happy to consume the product, whether the players were raised in Africa, Europe or elsewhere, why should we care? Plus it extends the marketing of the Premiership abroad, generating more revenue for the game. Unless we don't want fans from abroad - wouldn't that be saddening...?

Wimbledon's key numbers

Federer for five in a row? Too obvious. Women to get equal prize money? Interesting, but too late. (I've dealt with that before - they shouldn't, but it's complicated).

The numbers the Guardian is interested in is still a perennial. Where does all the money go?

David Conn looks at the some of the numbers, and there's an underlying discontent in the fact that debentures fund the championships' redevelopment of courts and so on. Referring to debenture seats, he notes:

A total of 2,300 were sold, raising £46m and occupying 16% of the seats, with a further 8% reserved for corporate hospitality packages. Ritchie defends the championships from accusations of exclusivity...

I presume his argument is that "real" fans don't buy debentures. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many debenture tickets are owned by real fans. Just not all, and it upsets many debenture holders when the corporate non-fans ruin it for everyone else.

Anyway, those numbers in the Guardian:

£25,544,765
Surplus made by Wimbledon in 2006

£11,282,710
Total prize money this year

3,100,000
People expected to play tennis at least once this year

500,000
People expected to keep playing regularly

£23,150
Cost of a Centre Court debenture for one seat for 2006-2010

18,000
Tennis courts in the UK, mostly 'in a state of disrepair', according to the LTA's own report

If this seems so bad, think about the number of people who join a gym and then stop going. And the amount of money in football academies.

A little perspective on tennis is needed. Better public courts are needed, but it's a cultural shift that is required as much as the money. Tennis is not seen as a sport to get out of poverty, like it is in some European countries, and was for the Williams sisters. It's still a middle-class hobby in the UK, so the urgency just isn't there. The numbers quoted by the Guardian only tell half the story.

Henry on his way

As Arsenal have sold Thierry Henry, many papers mention his scoring record of 226 goals in 369 matches for the club, including 42 in 84 in Europe. His style of play gets the headlines, but his scoring rate is hugely impressive - he also has 40 goals for France in 92 matches. These stack up against any comparitive player you choose. For example, Alan Shearer scored more Premiership goals (260), but in more matches (441) - a rate of 0.58 compared to Henry's 174 in 254 - 0.68 goals per game.

Henry cost £10.5m from Juventus in 1999, and is being sold at 29 for £16m - an impressive return. Arsene Wenger has a knack of pulling off brilliant deals. Nicolas Anelka cost £0.5m in 1996, and was sold 3 years later to Real Madrid for £22.3m.

Whatever happens, the stats show that Henry is a great player who will be missed, but Wenger is a shrewd manager who knows a good bit of business when he sees it.

Clocking up the miles with Beckham and the Ren sisters

(c) The Guardain. Click for full size image.

David Beckham looks likely to pull off the strange feat of playing for LA Galaxy AND England. If so, his itinerary next season is pretty full, and involves a lot of flying. The guardian did a nice graphic to show this alongside a story that Alexi Lalas of LA Galaxy would "drive him to the airport". Here it is.



50,302 miles. Sounds a lot, right? That's some carbon footprint right there. But then another story caught my eye. Another sport, different situation, but the Ren sisters may well be the next big thing in tennis, if their potential is fulfilled. In this interesting piece in the Telegraph that compares them to the Williams sisters, it states that "the girls require 30,000 miles of chauffeuring each year just to get to training and tournaments".

Beckham - 50,000 miles.
Two girls on the junior tennis circuit - 30,000 miles. And you can bet that it's not first class travel plus entourage.

England and the Champions League

The Guardian picked up on an interesting data story yesterday, highlighting the research by the financial advisors Grant Thornton that only 16 English players have appeared in the Champions League final in its 15 year history. Not enough, you might think, but then only 3 English clubs have got to the final (ManU 1999, Liverpool 2005, 2007, Arsenal 2006). What this research really points out is that English players don't "travel". Very few of our top players move to clubs abroad, and Premiership clubs are cash-rich so can import players from all over the world.

If you look at the French team, almost all of their players are in foreign leagues. However, in the last World Cup, Italy had a squad 100% based in their domestic league. Even England had Beckham (Real Madrid) and Hargreaves (Bayern Munich) playing abroad. And Italian clubs and players have dominated the Champions League

Here's the table:

Top ten countries who have supplied the most players in Champions League finals             
              No. of finalists   % of overall    total Population
1    Italy     90                 21.95%          58.15m
2    Spain     56                 13.66%          40.45m
3    France    41                 10%             63.71m
=    Germany   41                 10%             82.4m
5    Holland   36                 8.78%           16.57m
6    Brazil    24                 5.85%           190.01m
7    England   16                 3.90%           50.43m
8    Portugal  15                 3.66%           10.64m
=    Argentina 15                 3.66%           40.30m
10   Croatia   9                  2.20%           4.49m
Source: Grant Thornton, CIA World Factbook

Lesson: buy Italian players. Or an Italian club.

FinkTank

I've run a bit of number crunching on that Time Fink Tank piece. You can read it here.

Interestingly, one comment made on the Times website points out exactly one of the anomalies highlighted by my work.

Have the authors checked whether the scores for all the team members together are consistent with the team’s position in the league? For example, Bolton were seventh in the league but their top two players are ranked 64th and 134th. That doesn’t sound like it tallies to me. Something like that might give a cross check to the validity of the approach.

Keith, Dubai

Exactly.

Serbian tennis - the new BIG thing

So. You look at the French Open draw, and think - aside from Federer-Nadal, where are the other contenders coming from? Answer: Serbia.

The semis draw is:
Roger Federer SUI (1)
vs
Nikolay Davydenko RUS (4)

Novak Djokovic SRB (6)
vs
Rafael Nadal ESP (2)

and in the women:


Justine Henin BEL (1)
vs
Jelena Jankovic SRB (4)

Ana Ivanovic SRB (7)
vs.
Maria Sharapova RUS (2)

Let's be honest - no-one is seriously considering an all-Serbian trophy haul, or anything other than a Fed-Nad final. But it's interesting how some countries catch the tennis vibe, and people talk of a wave of players. Not long ago it was the Spanish men. Then the Russian women. I'm going to take a closer look at some of the data on this, but my instinct is that there is no formula as such. It's a mixture of training partners coming to the boil at the same time, supporting each other, and a whole lot of luck.

Fink big

Move over Opta. The Times yesterday launched Fink Tank, their unique rankings of football players in the Premiership. A heaven of statisics, I'm going to take a closer look later. First, a few observations:

1) Introducing the rankings with the line: "How did Fink Tank do it? We used a multivariate Poisson log-normal model. I hope you find that information helpful." was pretty off-putting. Only real serious mathmaticians care about running several Poisson distributions as a method of removing anomalies - if that's what it is...

2) The model works by identifying "the relationship between goals scored and every kick of the ball made by every player for every club". I presume this takes into account defending as well as attacking. But it mention tackles, pressure that indirectly relates to goals, or other parts of football. A more detailed methodology is needed.

3) It penalises players for lack of time on the pitch - which is strange, as some players are used deliberately as a "super-sub" or impact player, and their lack of pitch-time is a virtue.

Here is the methodology:

The Fink Tank Predictor provides forecasts and ranking systems for English and European club football, based on a statistical model of matches based on more than five years of football scores.

In looking at player rankings for this season, the phrase “time-adjusted points” means the number of points the player would have added to an average team in the full season, compared with an average replacement. The points are then adjusted to reflect the amount of time spent on the pitch – minimum 400 minutes.

I'll take a closer look in my longer, research blog later. Time to crunch a few numbers...

Big wins, big losses, big deal

Again, much is being made of the England win over the West Indies - England's 3rd biggest win, the Windies biggest ever loss. I feel alone in thinking - so what? It's a exceptionally poor Windies team, so it's hardly earth-shattering news. I prefered the record that it was the coldest temperature ever recorded at a test - 7 degress C. Welcome to England in May.

Many papers prefer to focus on the fact that Michael Vaughan has equalled Peter May's record for most test wins as England captain - in 7 fewer tests too. It's a good record to be sure, but paltry compared to other countries - he's still a long way behind Steve Waugh's 41 wins or Clive Lloyds 36.

Is England's batting really that great?

Maybe so...

The current series between England and the West Indies is looking very one-sided. Records are being set - or so the press would have us believe. In the first test, four England players scored centuries, which was the second time ever that had happened - for England (first time was 1938). Other countries have had 4x100 in an innings more recently than that, but never mind.

Don't get me wrong - it's good. But let's look at the bigger picture.

In the second test (still being played) England have racked up another massive total, with Kevin Pietersen hitting 226 - which every paper has reported is the highest England innings since Graham Gooch's 333 vs India in 1990. (What we should ask is why has it taken so long, given that every other major test nation has had at least one 270+ innings in the last 10 years...)

So are England such a good batting line-up? Or is this a weak set of West Indies bowlers?

The Windies best bowler is Corey Collymore, ranked 10 in the world. Their next bowlers are ranked 31, 38, 41, 43, 45 and 49 - and the 31st and 41st aren't playing. Collymore is not that great a bowler either, with 86 wickets in 27 tests at an average of 31. Nothing too scary there.

England in contrast have 4 batsmen in the top 15 in the world, with Pietersen at 3.

And the conclusion is... well, I hardly need to spell it out.

So when the papers make such a deal about the biggest score since X or most centuries in a series since Y, remember that a) it's a mismatch and b) it's always the biggest something since one date in the past. That's the way history goes.

Sven

Apparently Sven is the most successful England coach ever, according to the Sunday Times. I happily debunk this myth on my research blog, but it's worth bearing in mind for all those Manchester City fans who might get Mr Eriksson as their manager next season. This one has been as on and off as a relationship with, well, Sven. Apparently, he now will marry Nancy. Good luck to them both.

Sven is actually quite a good domestic manager, with quite a haul of trophies inlcuding the Serie A with Lazio. But is it worth hiring him given the inevitable publicity and saga? That's something even the best economist might find hard to measure...

Random Sven fact: Eriksson is so far the only manager who was won the Double (League and Cup in the same season), in three different countries: Sweden, Portugal and Italy. (Thanks Wikipedia)