Jürgen Klopp’s departure holds lessons for leaders everywhere

Simon Kuper in The FT

In an era short on admired leaders, Jürgen Klopp has been a rare role model. The German football manager, who announced on Friday that he is resigning at the end of this season after nine years at Liverpool, offers numerous lessons for his counterparts in business and politics. 

First, he turned himself into the embodiment of the institution he led. He always presented himself not as a mere technocrat but as somebody who loved Liverpool FC. Having joined the club as an outsider, he worked to understand what it meant to everyone involved in it. In his hugs and emotional sprints along the touchline (and sometimes into the field), the giant with football’s most joyous smile expressed the feelings of every Liverpool fan. 

When the club won its first English league title in 30 years in 2020, he said, “I never could have thought it would feel like this, I had no idea,” and cried. He told Liverpool’s supporters: “It is a joy to do it for you.” He probably wasn’t faking it, giving that he has kept up the act practically daily since 2015. He understands that the whole point of professional football is shared communal emotion. 

Second, he treated his players and staff as humans, not as mere instruments for his own success. When one staff member was unaware that full-back Andy Robertson would soon become a father for the first time, Klopp asked: “How can you not know that? That is the biggest thing in his life now.” 

Klopp wanted to know everything about his players — “who they are, what they believe in, how they’ve reached this point, what drives them, what awaits them when they depart training.” And he meant it: “I don’t pretend I’m interested, I am interested.” 

Klopp is often praised as a motivator, but in fact few top-class footballers need motivation. His man-management was more sophisticated than that. His understanding of people helped him find the right words in clear, simple and cliché-free English, his second language. In 2019, after a 3-0 defeat in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final at Barcelona, he bounded smiling into Liverpool’s deflated changing-room shouting, “Boys, boys, boys! We are not the best team in the world. Now you know that. Maybe they are! Who cares? We can still beat the best team in the world. Let’s go again.” Before the return leg at Anfield, he told his players: “Just try. If we can do it, wonderful. If not, then fail in the most beautiful way.” 

He was lifting his men while also lifting the pressure: he gave them permission to fail. Instead, in perhaps the most breathtaking match of his tenure, they won 4-0, and went on to clinch the Champions League. His Liverpool lost two other Champions League finals. With a touch more luck, their achievement could have been generational. But even at the leanest moments, all the constituencies that make up a club — owner, players, staff, fans, media — wanted him around. Klopp made ruthless decisions without making enemies. 

Another leadership lesson: he could delegate. A football manager today is less autocrat than chief executive, overseeing a staff of dozens. Klopp provided the guiding vision, of a pressing game played at frenzied pace: “It is not serenity football, it is fighting football — that is what I like . . . Rainy day, heavy pitch, everybody is dirty in the face and they go home and can’t play football for the next four weeks.” 

He left most of the detail to specialists. For years he outsourced much of his training and match tactics to his assistant, Željko Buvač, whom Klopp called “the brain” of his coaching team. 

Klopp was so obviously the leader, an Alpha male blessed with empathy, that he felt secure enough to listen to others and admit error. In 2017, when Liverpool needed a striker, the club’s data analysts lobbied him to sign the Egyptian Mo Salah. Klopp preferred the German forward Julian Brandt. It took time, but eventually Klopp was persuaded to buy Salah. The Egyptian became arguably Liverpool’s most important player. Klopp later apologised to the analysts for his mistake. 

In a profession that attracts many megalomaniacs and then places them under inhuman stress, he was rare in never taking himself too seriously. He had views outside football — for leftwing politics, against Brexit — but he rejected the temptation to cast himself as a universal leader. When Covid-19 was spreading in early 2020, and a journalist fished for his views, he said experts should speak, not “people with no knowledge, like me . . . I don’t understand politics, coronavirus . . . I wear a baseball cap and have a bad shave.” 

His last leadership lesson: leave at the right time, with dignity. Today he explained his resignation: “I came here as a normal guy. I am still a normal guy, I just don’t live a normal life for too long now. And I don’t want to wait until I am too old to have a normal life, and I need, at least, to give it a try.” 

He also admitted fallibility, with a typically well-chosen metaphor: “I am a proper sports car, not the best one, but a pretty good one, can still drive 160, 170, 180 miles per hour, but I am the only one who sees the tank needle is going down.” It was a message to every failed leader currently clinging grimly to power.

Hypocrisy's Penalty Corner

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn


THERE’S been severe criticism, primarily in the Western media, of the gross exploitation of migrant workers in Qatar’s bid to host football’s World Cup that began in Doha last week. There’s more than a grain of truth in the accusation, and there’s dollops of hypocrisy about it.

FIFA President Gianni Infantino brought it out nicely by calling out the Western media’s double standards in what is tantamount to shedding crocodile tears for the exploited workers.

The CNN, unsurprisingly, slammed Infantino’s anger, and quoted human rights groups as describing his comments as “crass” and an “insult” to migrant workers. Why is Infantino convinced that the Western media wallows in its own arrogance?

It is nobody’s secret that migrant workers in the Gulf are paid a pittance, which becomes more deplorable when compared to the enormous riches they help produce. As is evident, the workers’ exploitation is not specific to Qatar’s hosting of a football tournament, but a deeper malaise in which Western greed mocks its moral sermons.

As their earnings with hard labour abroad fetch them more than what they would get at home, the workers become unwitting partners in their own abuse. This has been the unwritten law around the generation of wealth in oil-rich Gulf countries, though their rulers are not alone in the exploitative venture.

Western colluders, nearly all of them champions of human rights, have used the oil extracted with cheap labour that plies Gulf economies, to control the world order. The West and the Gulf states have both benefited directly from dirt cheap workforce sourced from countries like India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the far away Philippines.

Making it considerably worse is the sullen cutthroat competition that has prevailed for decades between workers of different countries, thereby undercutting each other’s bargaining power. The bruising competition is not unknown to their respective governments that benefit enormously from the remittances from an exploited workforce. The disregard for work conditions is not only related to the Gulf workers, of course, but also migrant labour at home. In the case of India, we witnessed the criminal apathy they experienced in the Covid-19 emergency.

Asian women workers in the Gulf face quantifiably worse conditions. An added challenge they face is of sexual exploitation. Cheap labour imported from South Asia, therefore, answers to the overused though still germane term — Western imperialism. Infantino was spot on. Pity the self-absorbed Western press booed him down.

Sham outrage over a Gulf country hosting the World Cup is just one aspect of hypocrisy. A larger problem remains rooted in an undiscussed bias.

Moscow and Beijing in particular have been the Western media’s leading quarries from time immemorial. The boycott of the Moscow Olympics over the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan was dressed up as a moral proposition, which it might have been but for the forked tongue at play. That numerous Olympic contests went ahead undeterred in Western cities despite their illegal wars or support for dictators everywhere was never called out. What the West did with China, however, bordered on distilled criminality.

I was visiting Beijing in September 1993 with prime minister Narasimha Rao’s media team. The streets were lined with colourful buntings and slogans, which one mistook for a grand welcome for the visiting Indian leader. As it turned out the enthusiasm was all about Beijing’s bid to host the 2000 Olympics. It was fortunate Rao arrived on Sept 6 and could sign with Li Peng a landmark agreement for “peace and tranquility” on the Sino-Indian borders. Barely two week later, China would collapse into collective depression after Sydney snatched the 2000 Olympics from Beijing’s clasp. Western perfidy was at work again.

As it happened, other than Sydney and Beijing three other cities were also in the running — Manchester, Berlin and Istanbul — but, as The New York Times noted: “No country placed its prestige more on the line than China.” When the count began, China led the field with a clear margin over Sydney. Then the familiar mischief came into play.

Beijing led after each of the first three rounds, but was unable to win the required majority of the 89 voting members. One voter did not cast a ballot in the final two rounds. After the third round, in which Manchester won 11 votes, Beijing still led Sydney by 40 to 37 ballots. “But, confirming predictions that many Western delegates were eager to block Beijing’s bid, eight of Manchester’s votes went to Sydney and only three to the Chinese capital,” NYT reported. Human rights was cited as the cause. Hypocritically, that concern disappeared out of sight and Beijing hosted a grand Summer Olympics in 2008.

Football is a mesmerising game to watch. Its movements are comparable to musical notes of a riveting symphony. Above all, it’s a sport that cannot be easily fudged with. But its backstage in our era of the lucre stinks of pervasive corruption.

Anger in Beijing burst into the open when it was revealed in January 1999 that Australia’s Olympic Committee president John Coates promised two International Olympic Committee members $35,000 each for their national Olympic committees the night before the vote, which gave the games to Sydney by 45 votes to 43.

The Daily Mail described the “usual equanimity” with which Juan Antonio Samaranch, the then Spanish IOC president, tried to diminish the scam. The allegations against nine of the 10 IOC members accused of graft “have scant foundation and the remaining one has hardly done anything wrong”.

“In a speech to his countrymen,” recalled the Mail, “he blamed the press for ‘overreacting’ to the underhand tactics, including the hire of prostitutes, employed by Salt Lake City to host the next Winter Olympics.” Samaranch sidestepped any reference to the tactics employed by Sydney to stage the Millennium Summer Games.

This reality should never be obscured by other outrages, including the abominable working conditions of Asian workers in Qatar.

Management lessons from the next World Cup winners

On December 18th the winners of the football World Cup in Qatar will lift the famous golden trophy. Several rituals will then unfold. The final entry will be made on fans’ wall charts. Pundits will share their lists of players of the tournament. In the victors’ home country, cars will clog the streets and drivers will lean on their horns. And in the days that follow, leadership coaches will post drivel about the secrets to be learned from the successful manager. 

But why wait till the end of the World Cup to find out how Hansi Flick of Germany, Didier Deschamps of France or whoever actually wins did it? Why even hang around for the start of the tournament on November 20th? Before a whistle has been blown and a ball has been kicked, here is your cut-out-and-keep guide to what bosses everywhere can learn from the winning manager (wm). All you have to do is delete anything that doesn’t quite fit the narrative.

Team spirit. The wm instilled a tight bond among the team by showing them unwavering support/creating an atmosphere of fear. He was known for putting his arms around the shoulders/hands around the necks of underperforming players. His oxytocin-releasing bearhugs/scarlet-faced rages ensured that a group of elite performers relaxed/did not relax. “He showed us love/utter contempt and we all responded to that,” said a man in shorts from the winning team. The power of empathy/barely suppressed terror will surely not be lost on managers in the workplace.

Data. The wm obsessively immerses himself in data/does not know how to turn on a computer. In the build-up to each game he took each player through a detailed analysis of his opposite number/encouraged everyone to play table tennis. After the matches were over he watched videos of each game/Netflix. “He planned everything in minute detail/told us to just go out there and have fun,” said another happy man in shorts. In the office, as on the pitch, rigorous analysis/gut instinct is often the difference between success and failure.

Purpose. The choice of Qatar as a venue for the World Cup was mired in controversy from the start; questions have swirled about corruption, human rights and worker safety. The wm turned these concerns to his advantage/seemed totally unaware of them. He made it clear that the team were ambassadors for the sport/only there to win. His decision to always wear a rainbow-coloured wristband/refuse to answer any questions about the host country was incredibly astute. “He gave us a much-needed sense of purpose,” recalled one of his players. “Only an absolute cretin would have wondered what we were in Qatar to do,” said another.

Stars. The wm built his whole team around/eschewed the very idea of a star player. “A superstar like Neymar/Harry Maguire/someone else has to be given freedom to express himself/realise that the team comes first,” he said afterwards. Every organisation will have its own outstanding performers. The clear message from this World Cup is that they should sometimes/never be given special treatment.

There is an alternative way of thinking about the lessons for corporate managers from an event like the World Cup: there are none. First, the jobs are wholly different. Football managers don’t need to change strategy because the market is shifting (“we will use our excellence in the field of spherical objects to diversify into basketball”). Corporate bosses do not tend to get customer feedback from people making hand gestures in a crowd. Nor do their career prospects usually rely on the split-second decision-making of a bunch of talented 20-somethings.

Second, all leadership writing depends on the dubious premise that an entity was successful because a person was in charge, rather than while they were in charge. The “halo effect” is the name given to the tendency for a positive impression in one area to lead to a positive impression in another. But just as a high-flying firm does not necessarily signal a world-beating ceo, so a World Cup winners’ medal does not mean the manager was a genius.

Just one, Vittorio Pozzo of Italy, has ever successfully defended the World Cup title; only eight countries have ever lifted the trophy in the history of the tournament. Whoever ends up celebrating on December 18th, the pool of people available for selection, the role of luck and the quality of the competition will have mattered at least as much as the person at the top. That is one management lesson worth learning.

Never mind that the tournament hasn’t started yet writes Bartleby in The Economist

The art and science of picking winning teams

In a world of performance data, human judgment is more vital than ever, says former England cricket selector Ed Smith in the FT

The fast bowler Jofra Archer, a brilliant talent new to cricket’s world stage, stands at the top of his run-up, flicking a white cricket ball nonchalantly in his hand. With 30,000 fans in the ground already drunk on drama, and 1.6bn watching around the world, Archer knows what’s coming. The next five minutes, his next six balls — a “Super Over”, the final way to determine a tied cricket match — will decide whether England or New Zealand win the 2019 World Cup. 

“It’s so on a young man,” the TV commentator sighs about the decision to give the 24-year-old Archer the final act. “It’s a big call.” About a hundred yards to Archer’s right, I am watching on with my fellow England selector, as helpless as everyone else in the ground. 

Just before the tournament, right at the eleventh hour, the decision had been made to add Archer to England’s World Cup squad. There had been plenty of public debate about the decision — England, already the top-ranked team without Archer, had been preparing for the World Cup for four years, and a popular player had been dropped to make way for him. Why take the risk? 

Because Archer was exceptional. And we knew with an unusual degree of confidence that he was exceptional. Archer’s early career was unique because he’d played so much cricket in the Indian Premier League (IPL), where every match is televised. And every action in televised cricket leaves a clear data footprint — the precise speed, trajectory, bounce and revolutions of every ball bowled. This is exactly the kind of information decision-makers love to have — an X-ray of the match. And the data from the IPL was unequivocal: Archer not only merited a place in England’s 15-man squad, but also in the best XI. In fact, the data implied he’d be England’s best fast bowler. And he was, taking 20 wickets (an England record) in the tournament. 

But the data only gets you so far. The moments before the Super Over proved that, too. England’s captain, Eoin Morgan, stood alongside Archer — chatting lightly, relaxed, open, a hint of mischief — a moment to enjoy. It was a masterclass in defusing pressure. So what might have been a “big call” turned into an obvious decision — thanks in part to the way Morgan handled things. Archer got his decisions spot on, and England won the World Cup. 

Selection and decision-making are often framed in terms of “art versus science”, with the assumption that, in our digital age, “science” is increasingly marginalising the human factor. But making decisions — and this applies in any area, not just sport — demands weighing and reconciling different kinds of information, and drawing on differing types of intelligence. In the age of data, the question remains: where does the human dimension fit in? 

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The role of England’s chief cricket selector — which I held from 2018 to 2021 — stretches back to 1899. It was once seen as sport’s ultimate establishment position. A sober, grey worsted suit was woven into the job — folded Telegraph in one hand, black umbrella in the other. Cricket persisted with selectors — where football, for example, centralised power in the manager or head coach — partly because formal coaching arrived relatively late in cricket (England’s first head coach was appointed in 1986). Since then, cricket has mostly retained shared responsibility between selectors, coach and captain. 

After all, who is on the field — and here sport is like all industries — has the greatest bearing on winning and losing. That’s why the richest and most advanced sports teams — in football and American sports — have invested heavily in data-informed recruitment, seeking an edge in identifying talent. 

I was 40 when I became England selector; my co-selector, James Taylor, was 28. Our combined age was about the same as some individual England selectors from earlier decades. The impertinence of youth was compounded by the perception that our new selection system leant heavily on data and algorithms. Cricket is a conservative sport. Far from being reassuringly old-fashioned, the new selection panel was often dubbed “left field”. Innovation and tradition rubbed shoulders. That is, of course, a tricky balancing act, with risks on all sides, and while I did not know it at the time, that was probably the attraction. 

Was England cricket now trying to “Moneyball” its selection strategy? Many people thought so. But the analogy is problematic. Moneyball, Michael Lewis’s classic book about the Oakland A’s baseball team, is only partly about data, and significantly about price. One way that Oakland punched above their weight was by buying undervalued players and selling over-valued ones. But for a national sports team, of course, there is no transfer market. You can’t pit your wits against other teams by trading players with, say, the old rival, Australia. England cricket has its talent pool, and that’s that. 

But selectors can — and this is close to the heart of the matter in all professions — diverge from conventional wisdom about where they perceive value. And here, of course, better data is extremely helpful. If you can measure player impact more accurately, then you are getting nearer to identifying “talent that whispers”, not just “talent that shouts” (in the excellent phrasing of Rasmus Ankersen, who was co-director of football at Brentford before moving to Southampton). 

This is not to suggest that data holds all the answers (the theme of many recent sports books) and that human judgment is on the road to oblivion. Yes, sport is in the midst of a data revolution, and you’d be insane not to seek better information to inform decisions. But rather than using data instead of human intelligence, the challenge is using data in tandem with the human dimension. 

And here decisions in sport reflect decisions in life. “What the data says” is too often a convenient way of passing the buck. Better to come out in plain sight: it’s a judgment. 

Risk is the job 

“Creative solutions, please — but nothing that’s too clever by half!” This is a recurrent framing of what people ask for from decision-makers. Wanted: upside outcomes without downside risk. That is impossible. As soon as decisions diverge from consensus, they inevitably come with the threat of a downside. The American investor and thinker Howard Marks has written a superb series of memos on this theme, “Dare to be Great”. 

“By definition, non-consensus ideas that are popular . . . are an oxymoron,” Marks writes. “And in the course of trying to be different and better, they [investors] have to bear the risk of being different and worse.” 

This is the challenge facing strategists in sport. Whenever your decisions diverge from conventional wisdom, you clearly discern value that most people don’t see. So a degree of intellectual loneliness is a necessity. 

One of the most unconventional decisions England cricket made during my time was selecting three spinners and three all-rounders for the 2018 Test series against Sri Lanka. We won the series 3-0. For the next Test match, we also picked an unconventional mix of players in the West Indies and got smashed. “Too clever by half!” 

Perhaps we became more risk-averse after that moment — which I think was a mistake. Because if you stop diverging from consensus, then what are you doing? Someone who makes decisions which merely reflect the average of opinion is not adding any value. 

David Swensen, who headed the Yale endowment fund, said superior decision-making demanded “uninstitutional behaviour from institutions”. The same challenge exists inside sport. Every leading sports organisation is now a huge machine, and that brings its own dangers — diluting a sense of mission, the temptation to keep everyone happy, watering down good ideas and the rush to compromise. 

How can the bureaucracy fight against the risk-averse tendencies of bureaucracies? Even when you’re on the inside, can you retain an outsider’s sense of independence and boldness, before all the compromise gets priced in? That’s central to the task — and inevitably comes with tension. 

 ‘Accepting a negative metric’ 

“Whenever someone innovates in business or in life,” argues the former poker player Caspar Berry, “they almost inevitably do so by accepting a negative metric that other people are unwilling to accept.” 

When the NBA’s Houston Rockets began taking a higher proportion of (long-range) three-point shots, they were accepting the negative metric that they would miss more often. The pay-off was that shots they did convert came with a built-in premium. The trend was initially ridiculed — before being folded into orthodoxy. In 2015-16, only six out of 30 NBA teams took three-pointers in at least a third of their attempts. By 2020-21, 28 teams were doing it. 

Spain’s triumphant football team of 2008-12 sometimes lined up without a striker. Neglecting to select a specialist goalscorer brings risks — as pundits regularly reminded us by imploring Spain to pick a big strong lad up front to bang in the goals. In 2012, Spain preferred the extra midfielder — expanding creative opportunities, while tolerating the negative metric of not selecting a player focused exclusively on scoring. Spain won the final of the 2012 Euros 4-0, their third major title inside four years — revealing a shrewd trade-off. 

In England’s T20 cricket team, we moved towards an ultra-aggressive batting order, with star batsman Jos Buttler moving from the middle order to opening batsman. But didn’t England need Buttler at the end, when the game was on the line? Ideally, yes. But not if it meant restricting Buttler’s ability to shape the contest by keeping him out of the action until it might be too late. 

All these decisions were initially controversial, before they shifted the consensus and became part of a new orthodoxy. That journey is never smooth. So while innovation can draw on data-informed insights, it stands or falls on courage and resilience. There will always be bumps in the road; can you hold the line? Data might illuminate the solution. But it’s going to take personal conviction to get it done. 

Look for ‘Lego’ players 

The NBA player Shane Battier was dubbed “Lego” by his manager because when he was on the court “all the pieces start to fit together”. Battier’s individual stats were moderate, but the team’s overall performance improved. 

Ranked by the team’s win-loss ratio for games in which they played, the three “winningest” England players in the five-day Test matches when I was selector (in order) were Keaton Jennings, Sam Curran and Adil Rashid. All three players faced frequent media pressure about their individual place in the Test team; their contribution to overall success was often overlooked. 

Team success, of course, doesn’t and shouldn’t guarantee an individual’s selection indefinitely, whatever their form and confidence. But collective output should always be part of the mix in assessing an individual. The “Lego” concept is a useful reminder that the ultimate goal is team success. 

 “Choose the best player for every position,” argued Johan Cruyff, “and you’ll end up not with a strong XI, but with XI strong I’s.” Teams that punch above their weight — such as the Premier League football club Brentford FC — consistently recruit players who are undervalued. That skill can be separated into two distinct parts — not only ranking players better (“how good is ‘X’ relative to ‘Y’?”), but also identifying the team’s needs and how to meet them. The way things fit together can be as important as the pieces themselves. 

In assembling the overall puzzle, it helps to have a point of difference. In cricket, left-arm bowlers, for example, outperform their right-arm counter-parts (on average) because they benefit from being unusual. And even the right-arm bowlers in the team benefit, because opposition batsmen have to switch constantly between different angles of attack, increasing the likelihood of being caught off-balance. 

You’re going to have to think, not just compute 

On one level, there is nothing new to be said about the boundaries of rational decision-making. In 1936, the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott co-wrote a book about a systematic approach for betting on the Derby, A Guide to the Classics. (The title was a very Cambridge in-joke.) There is a limit, as Oakeshott wrote in another piece, “beyond which there are no precise rules for picking the winner, and . . . some intelligence (not supplied by the rules themselves) [is] necessary”. You’re going to have to think, not just compute. 

Nearly a century later, even after the explosion of a lucrative sports analytics industry, that is loosely the position of Daryl Morey, former general manager of the Houston Rockets, whose innovations have transformed the NBA (and who called Shane Battier “Lego”). “You have to figure out what the model is good and bad at,” Morey argues, “and what humans are good and bad at.” 

No system, in other words, is so good that it can survive without good judgment. You can’t box off a perfect process. Understanding the data can embolden better risk-taking, but it can’t absolve decision-makers from responsibility. 

In the best decision-makers I’ve observed, I’ve sensed they could live with uncertainty and yet still make good (or above-average) decisions. Conversely, an opposite type finds it hard to cope unless they “know for sure”. And yet this second group never can know — so their thinking gets sucked into trying to reduce anxiety rather than searching for better solutions. 

In most interesting aspects of life, there usually is no perfect or complete answer. And yet there is still better and worse. Wise people know this. But admitting it is in danger of falling victim to the craving for convenient certainty — including the expedient use of “what the data says”. Rationality should allow for healthy scepticism about how much can ever be completely known and understood. 

When I started as selector, the optimist in me wanted to believe we could harness data towards “optimising” England selection. In retrospect, I see more clearly that it will always be a highly human challenge founded, above all, on the primacy of judgment. Just as well, too. Because human value lies where things are most unquantifiable and most uncertain.

English football: why are there so few black people in senior positions?

Simon Kuper in The FT

Possibly the only English football club run mostly by black staff is Queens Park Rangers, in the Championship, the English game’s second tier. 

QPR’s director of football, Les Ferdinand, and technical director, Chris Ramsey, have spent their entire careers in the sport watching hiring discrimination persist almost everywhere else. Teams have knelt in protest against racism, but Ferdinand says, “I didn’t want to see people taking the knee. I just wanted to see action. I’m tired of all these gestures.”  

Now a newly founded group, the Black Footballers Partnership (BFP), argues that it is time to adopt compulsory hiring quotas for minorities. Voluntary measures have not worked, says its executive director, Delroy Corinaldi. 

The BFP has commissioned a report from Stefan Szymanski (economics professor at the University of Michigan, and my co-author on the book Soccernomics) to document apparent discrimination in coaching, executive and scouting jobs. 

It is a dogma of football that these roles must be filled by ex-players — but only, it seems, by white ones. Last year 43 per cent of players in the Premier League were black, yet black people held “only 4.4 per cent of managerial positions, usually taken by former players” and 1.6 per cent of “executive, leadership and ownership positions”, writes Szymanski. 

Today 14 per cent of holders of the highest coaching badge in England, the Uefa Pro Licence, are black, but they too confront prejudice. Looking ahead, the paucity of black scouts and junior coaches is keeping the pipeline for bigger jobs overwhelmingly white. Corinaldi hopes that current black footballers will follow England’s forward Raheem Sterling in calling for more off-field representation. 

There have been 28 black managers in the English game since the Football League was founded in 1888, calculates Corinaldi. As for the Premier League, which has had 11 black managers in 30 years, he says: “Sam Allardyce [an ex-England manager] has had nearly as many roles as the whole black population.” The situation is similar in women’s football, says former England international Anita Asante. 

Ramsey, who entered coaching in the late 1980s, when he says “there were literally no black coaches”, reflects: “There’s always a dream that you’re going to make the highest level, so naively you coach believing that your talent will get you there, but very early on I realised that wasn’t going to happen.”  

Reluctant to hire 

He says discrimination in hiring is always unspoken: “People hide behind politically correct language. They will take a knee, and say, ‘I’m all for it’. You’re just never really seen as able to do the job. And then people sometimes employ people less qualified than you. Plenty of white managers have failed, and I just want to have the opportunity to be as bad as them, and to be given an opportunity again. You don’t want to have to be better just because you’re black.” 

When Ferdinand’s glittering playing career ended, he worried that studying for his coaching badges might “waste five years of my life”, given that the white men running clubs were reluctant to hire even famous black ex-players such as John Barnes and Paul Ince. In Ferdinand’s first seven years on the market, he was offered one managerial job. “People tend to employ what looks, sounds and acts like them,” he shrugs. Yet he says he isn’t angry: “Anger’s not the right word, because that’s unfortunately how they see a lot of young black men, as angry.” 

He suspects QPR hired him in part because its then co-chair, the Malaysian Tony Fernandes, is a person of colour. After the two men met and began talking, recalls Ferdinand, “he said, ‘Why are you not doing this job [management] in football?’ I said, ‘Because I’ve not been given the opportunity.’ The conversations went from there. Had he not been a person of colour, I perhaps wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to him in the way that I did.” 

Szymanski can identify only two black owners in English football, both at small clubs: Ben Robinson of Burton Albion, and Ryan Giggs, co-owner of Salford City. 

Szymanski believes discrimination persists for managerial jobs in part because football managers have little impact on team performance — much less than is commonly thought. He calculates that over 10 seasons, the average correlation between a club’s wage bill for players and its league position exceeds 90 per cent. If the quality of players determines results almost by itself, then managers are relatively insignificant, and so clubs can continue to hire the stereotype manager — a white male ex-player aged between 35 and 55 — without harming their on-field performance. 

For about 20 years, English football has launched various fruitless attempts to address discrimination. Ramsey recalls the Football Association — the national governing body — inviting black ex-players to “observe” training sessions. He marvels: “You’re talking about qualified people with full badges standing and watching people train. And most of them have been in the game longer than the people they’re watching.” 

Modest though that initiative was, Ferdinand recalls warning FA officials: “A certain amount of people at St George’s Park [the FA’s National Football Centre], when you tell them this is the initiative, their eyes will be rolling and thinking, ‘Here we go, we’re doing something for them again, we’re trying to give them another opportunity.’ What those people don’t realise is: we don’t get opportunities.”  

Rooney Rule 

After the NFL of American gridiron football introduced the Rooney Rule in 2003, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for job openings, the English ex-player Ricky Hill presented the idea to the League Managers Association. Ramsey recalls, “Everyone said, ‘God, this is brilliant’.” Yet only in the 2016/2017 season did 10 smaller English clubs even pilot the Rooney Rule. Ramsey says: “We are expected to accept as minority coaches that these things take a long time. I have seen this train move along so slowly that it’s ridiculous.” He mourns the black managerial careers lost in the wait. 

In 2019 the Rooney Rule was made mandatory in the three lower tiers of English professional football, though not in the Premier League or anywhere else in Europe. Clubs had to interview at least one black, Asian or minority ethnic (Bame) candidate (if any applied) for all first team managerial, coaching and youth development roles. Why didn’t the rule noticeably increase minority hiring? Ferdinand replies, “Because there’s nobody being held accountable to it. What is the Rooney Rule? You give someone the opportunity to come through the door and talk.” Moreover, English football’s version of the rule has a significant loophole: clubs are exempt if they interview only one candidate, typically someone found through the white old boys’ network. 

Nor has the Rooney Rule made much difference in the NFL. In 2020, 57.5 per cent of the league’s players were black, but today only two out of 32 head coaches are, while one other identifies as multiracial. This month, the former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL and three clubs, accusing them of racist and discriminatory practices. He and other black coaches report being called for sham interviews for jobs that have already been filled, as teams tick the Rooney Rule’s boxes. 

Voluntary diversity targets 

In 2020 England’s FA adopted a voluntary “Football Leadership Diversity Code”. Only about half of English professional clubs signed it. They committed to achieving percentage targets for Bame people among new hires: 15 per cent for senior leadership and team operations positions, and 25 per cent for men’s coaching — “a discrepancy in goals that itself reflects the problem”, comments Szymanski. Clubs were further allowed to water down these targets “based on local demographics”. 

The FA said: “The FA is deeply committed to ensuring the diversity of those playing and coaching within English football is truly reflective of our modern society. 

“We’re focused on increasing the number of, and ongoing support for, coaches who have been historically under-represented in the game. This includes a bursary programme for the Uefa qualifications required to coach in academy and senior professional football.” 

A report last November showed mixed results. Many clubs had missed the code’s targets, with several Premier League clubs reporting zero diversity hires. On the other hand, more than 20 per cent of new hires in men’s football were of Bame origin, which was at least well above historical hiring rates. 

Do clubs take the code seriously? Ferdinand smiles ironically: “From day one I didn’t take it seriously. Because it’s a voluntary code. What’s the repercussions if you don’t follow the voluntary code? No one will say anything, no one will do anything about it.”  

The BFP and the League Managers Association have called for the code’s targets to be made compulsory. Ferdinand cites the example of countries that set mandatory quotas for women on corporate boards of listed companies. 

Asante says it takes minorities in positions of power to understand the problems of minorities. “If you are a majority in any group, when are you ever thinking about the needs of others?” Corinaldi adds: “When you have a monoculture in any boardroom, you only know what you know, and it tends to be the same stories you heard growing up.” He predicts that once football has more black directors and senior executives, they will hire more diversely. 

The BFP’s model for English football is the National Basketball Association in the US, a 30-team league with 14 African-American head coaches. For now, that feels like a distant utopia. Ramsey warns: “If there is no revolutionary action, we’ll be having this same conversation in 10 years’ time.” And he remembers saying exactly those words 10 years ago.

No surprise Leeds lost to Manchester United, just look at the wage bills

Although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult

Manchester United’s Fred celebrates celebrates after completing Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds. Photograph: Jon Super/AP
 

Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian

The easy thing is to blame the manager. It has become football’s default response to any crisis. A team hits a poor run or loses a big game: get rid of the manager. As Alex Ferguson said as many as 14 years ago, we live in “a mocking culture” and reality television has fostered the idea people should be voted off with great regularity (that he was trying to defend Steve McClaren’s reign as England manager should not undermine the wider point).

Managers are expendable. Rejigging squads takes time and money and huge amounts of effort in terms of research and recruitment, whereas anybody can look at who is doing well in Portugal or Greece or the Championship and spy a potential messiah. Then there are the structural factors, the underlying economic issues it is often preferable to ignore because to acknowledge them is to accept how little agency the people we shout about every week really have in football. 

That point reared its head after Manchester United’s 5-1 victory over Leeds on Saturday. There was plenty to discuss: are Leeds overreliant on Kalvin Phillips, who was absent? Why does Marcelo Bielsa’s version of pressing so often lead to heavy defeats? Can Mason Greenwood’s movement allow Ole Gunnar Solskjær to field Paul Pogba and Bruno Fernandes without sacrificing a holding midfielder and, if it does, what does that mean for Marcus Rashford?

Yet there was a weird strand of coverage that insisted Solskjær had somehow outwitted Bielsa, even in some quarters that Bielsa needed to be replaced if Leeds are to kick on. (They finished ninth last season with 59 points, the highest points total by a promoted club for two decades). A Bielsa meltdown is possible; they do happen and he has never managed a fourth season at a club. There should be some concern that, like last season, Leeds lost by four goals at Old Trafford, insufficient lessons were learned, even if Bielsa said this was a better performance. But fundamentally, Manchester United’s wage bill is five times that of Leeds. 

Everton, who finished a place below Leeds last season, had a wage bill three times bigger. Of last season’s Premier League, only West Brom and Sheffield United had wage bills lower than that of Leeds. To have finished ninth is an extraordinary achievement and nobody should think to slip back three or four places this season would be a failure. Modern football is starkly stratified and although teams can often defy financial logic for a time, to move up a tier is incredibly difficult.

There is still a tendency to talk of a Big Six in English football and while it is true six clubs last season had a weekly wage bill in excess of £2.5m, it is also true that within that grouping there are three with clear advantages: Manchester City (who had kept their wage bill relatively low, although if they do add Harry Kane to Jack Grealish that would clearly change) and Chelsea because their funding is not reliant on footballing success, and Manchester United because of the legacy that has allowed them to attach their name to a preposterous range of products across the globe.
Mikel Arteta is struggling to revive Arsenal. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian
Liverpool can perhaps challenge for the title this season, but their wage spending is 74% of that of United. That they were as good as they were in the two seasons before last was remarkable, but last season showed how vulnerable a team like Liverpool can be to a couple of injuries. Similarly, Leicester’s two fifth-place finishes with the eighth-highest wage bill are a striking achievement, their decline towards the end of the past two seasons less the result of them bottling it or any sort of psychological failure than of the limitations of their squad being exposed.

Which brings us to the other two members of the Big Six: Arsenal and Tottenham. Spurs’ last game at White Hart Lane, in 2017, brought a 2-1 win over Manchester United that guaranteed they finished second. Since when Spurs have bought Davinson Sánchez, Lucas Moura, Serge Aurier, Fernando Llorente, Juan Foyth, Tanguy Ndombele, Steven Bergwijn, Ryan Sessegnon, Giovani Lo Celso, Cristian Romero and Bryan Gil, while United have bought, among others, Alexis Sánchez, Victor Lindelöf, Nemanja Matic, Romelu Lukaku, Fred, Daniel James, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Bruno Fernandes, Harry Maguire, Donny van de Beek, Raphaël Varane and Jadon Sancho. Money may not be everything in football, but it does help.

The irony of the situation is that it was investment in the infrastructure that should allow Spurs to generate additional revenues and better develop their own talent (much cheaper than buying it) that led to the lack of investment in players largely responsible for the staleness resulting in Mauricio Pochettino’s departure. That Daniel Levy compounded the problem by appointing José Mourinho – acting like a big club as though to jolt them to the next level – should not obscure the fact that until that point he had pursued a ruthless and successful economic logic.

Arsenal had gone through a similar process the previous decade, investing heavily in a new stadium at the expense of the squad, only to discover that by the time it was ready the financial environment had changed and the petro-fuelled era had begun. It was easy after the timid performance against Brentford on Friday to blame Mikel Arteta and ask why he gets such an easy ride. For all that Arsenal have finished the past two seasons relatively well, that criticism will only increase if there are not signs the tanker is being turned round. But the gulf to the top of the table is vast and a desperation to bridge that has contributed to a bizarre transfer policy.

That does not mean managers are beyond reproach and limp displays like Arsenal’s deserve criticism. But equally we should probably remember that where a side finishes in the league has far more to do with economic strata than any of the individuals involved.

The European Super League is the perfect metaphor for global capitalism

From elite football to tech giants, our lives are increasingly governed by ‘free’ markets that turn out to be rigged writes Larry Elliott in The Guardian

‘The organisers of the ESL have taken textbook free-market capitalism and turned it on its head.’ Graffiti showing the Juventus president, Andrea Agnelli, near the headquarters of the Italian Football Federation in Rome. Photograph: Filippo Monteforte/AFP/Getty Images


Back in the days of the Soviet Union, it was common to hear people on the left criticise the Kremlin for pursuing the wrong kind of socialism. There was nothing wrong with the theory, they said, rather the warped form of it conducted behind the iron curtain. 

The same argument has surfaced this week amid the furious response to the now-aborted plans to form a European Super League for 20 football clubs, only this time from the right. Free-market purists say they hate the idea because it is the wrong form of capitalism.

They are both right and wrong about that. Free-market capitalism is supposed to work through competition, which means no barriers to entry for new, innovative products. In football’s case, that would be a go-ahead small club with a manager trying radical new training methods and fielding a crop of players it had nurtured itself or invested in through the transfer market. The league-winning Derby County and Nottingham Forest teams developed by Brian Clough in the 1970s would be an example of this.

Supporters of free-market capitalism say that the system can tolerate inequality provided there is the opportunity to better yourself. They are opposed to cartels and firms that use their market power to protect themselves from smaller and nimbler rivals. Nor do they like rentier capitalism, which is where people can make large returns from assets they happen to own but without doing anything themselves.

The organisers of the ESL have taken textbook free-market capitalism and turned it on its head. Having 15 of the 20 places guaranteed for the founder members represents a colossal barrier to entry and clearly stifles competition. There is not much chance of “creative destruction” if an elite group of clubs can entrench their position by trousering the bulk of the TV receipts that their matches will generate. Owners of the clubs are classic rentier capitalists.

Where the free-market critics of the ESL are wrong is in thinking the ESL is some sort of aberration, a one-off deviation from established practice, rather than a metaphor for what global capitalism has become: an edifice built on piles of debt where the owners of businesses say they love competition but do everything they can to avoid it. Just as the top European clubs have feeder teams that they can exploit for new talent, so the US tech giants have been busy buying up anything that looks like providing competition. It is why Google has bought a slew of rival online advertising vendors and why Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp.

For those who want to understand how the economics of football have changed, a good starting point is The Glory Game, a book Hunter Davies wrote about his life behind the scenes with Tottenham Hotspur, one of the wannabe members of the ESL, in the 1971-72 season. (Full disclosure: I am a Spurs season ticket holder.)

Davies’s book devotes a chapter to the directors of Spurs in the early 1970s, who were all lifelong supporters of the club and who received no payment for their services. They lived in Enfield, not in the Bahamas, which is where the current owner, Joe Lewis, resides as a tax exile. These were not radical men. They could not conceive of there ever being women on the board; they opposed advertising inside the ground and were only just coming round to the idea of a club shop to sell official Spurs merchandise. They were conservative in all senses of the word.

In the intervening half century, the men who made their money out of nuts and bolts and waste paper firms in north London have been replaced by oligarchs and hedge funds. TV, barely mentioned in the Glory Game, has arrived with its billions of pounds in revenue. Facilities have improved and the players are fitter, stronger and much better paid than those of the early 1970s. In very few sectors of modern Britain can it be said that the workers receive the full fruits of their labours: the Premier League is one of them.

Even so, the model is not really working and would have worked even less well had the ESL come about. And it goes a lot deeper than greed, something that can hardly be said to be new to football.

No question, greed is part of the story, because for some clubs the prospect of sharing an initial €3.5bn (£3bn) pot of money was just too tempting given their debts, but there was also a problem with the product on offer.

Some of the competitive verve has already been sucked out of football thanks to the concentration of wealth. In the 1970s, there was far more chance of a less prosperous club having their moment of glory: not only did Derby and Forest win the league, but Sunderland, Southampton and Ipswich won the FA Cup. Fans can accept the despair of defeat if they can occasionally hope for the thrill of victory, but the ESL was essentially a way for an elite to insulate itself against the risk of failure.

By presenting their half-baked idea in the way they did, the ESL clubs committed one of capitalism’s cardinal sins: they damaged their own brand. Companies – especially those that rely on loyalty to their product – do that at their peril, not least because it forces politicians to respond. Supporters have power and so do governments, if they choose to exercise it.

The ESL has demonstrated that global capitalism operates on the basis of rigged markets not free markets, and those running the show are only interested in entrenching existing inequalities. It was a truly bad idea, but by providing a lesson in economics to millions of fans it may have performed a public service.

My predictions for 2018

1. Britain will do well in the negotiations this year. The final agreement will be a soft Brexit which the Remainers desire. There will be some restrictions on the free movement of people, something which the EU could have given to David Cameron to avoid all these complications.

2. Vijay Mallya will be extradited to India, he will remain unconvicted,  yet he will have to cool his heels at Tihar Hotel for some time to show that the government will take action against powerful businessmen.

3. Like Anil Ambani, the A listers with huge Non Performing Assets will carry out some debt restructuring. However they will not be named and shamed nor will they be rid of their business ownership.

4. England will win the Football World Cup.

5. Corbyn will not become Prime Minister as the Tory Party will do enough to stay together.

6. China's CPEC will run into bigger problems.

7. The Pakistan military will initiate peace proceedings with India.

Who pays for Manchester City’s beautiful game?

Nick Cohen in The Guardian



Even though I come from the red side of Manchester, I want Manchester City to win every game they play now. Hoping City fail is like hoping a great singer’s voice cracks or prima ballerina’s tendons tear. Journalists have written and broadcast millions of words about the intensity of Manchester City’s game and the beauty of its movement. You watch and gasp as each perfect pass finds its man and each impossible move becomes possible after all.

Everything that can be said should have been said. But here are words you never hear on the BBC or Sky and hear only rarely from the best sports writers. Manchester City’s success is built on the labour extracted by the rulers of a modern feudal state. Sheikh Mansour, its owner, is the half-brother of Sheikh Khalifa, the absolute monarch of the United Arab Emirates: an accident of birth that has given him a mountain of cash and Manchester City the Premier League’s best players.

An absolute monarchy is merely a dictatorship decked in fine robes. The usual restrictions of free speech, a free press, the rule of law, an independent judiciary and democratic elections still apply in the Emirates federation of seven sultanates. Critics are as likely to disappear or be held without due process as they are in less glamorous destinations. The riches that supply Pep Guardiola’s £15m salary and ensure the £264m wage bill for the players is met on time do not just come from oil. The Emirate monarchies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia rely on a system of economic exploitation you struggle to find a precedent for.

In the UAE as a whole, only 13% of the population are full nationals. In the glittering tourist resort of Dubai, citizenship rises slightly to 15% and in the Abu Dhabi emirate to 20%, but everywhere a subclass of immigrants does the bulk of the work. The obvious comparison is with apartheid: Arab nationals sit at the top, white expats have some privileges, as the coloureds and Asians had in the last days of the South African regime, while the dirty work – from construction to cleaning – is done by despised immigrants from south Asia.

But comparisons with apartheid or the Israeli occupation of the West Bank or America’s old deep south miscarry because the Arab princelings import their working class rather than rule over subdued inhabitants. It’s like Spartans bringing in Helots. Or if images of stern Spartan militarists feel incongruous when imposed on the flabby bodies of Gulf aristocrats, Eloi importing Morlocks. Timid labour reforms are meant to have improved the lot of the serfs. In law, employers can no longer keep them in line with the threat of deportation to India or the Philippines if they do not please a capricious boss. In practice, absolute monarchies repress the lawyers and campaigners who might take up their cases. Now, as always, activists are silenced and workers fear the cost of speaking out.

You should be able to praise Manchester City’s football and condemn it owners. Or, if that is asking too much, you should at least be able to talk about its owners or mention the source of their wealth. If only in passing. If only the once. Instead, there is silence. With Mansour building a global consortium of clubs, Qataris owning Paris Saint-Germain and Emirate money poised to buy Newcastle United, rich dictatorial states are engaging in competitive conspicuous consumption. They are creating the world’s best clubs and may one day take them off into an oligarchs’ league. You are not “bringing politics into football” when you worry about Sheikh Mansour. You are recognising that the future of football is political.

The silence about the fate of the national game covers much of national life. Everywhere you look, you are struck by the arguments that are not being made.

Mainstream Conservatives refuse to join Tory rebels in speaking out against the dangers of Brexit. They like to boast that they are stable and commonsensical types, with no time for dangerous experiments. When confronted with the reckless nationalism of the Tory right, however, they prefer the safe option of keeping quiet until public opinion shifts. Many Labour MPs and leftwing journalists deplore Corbyn and the far left. I speak from experience when I say they talk with great eloquence in private, but will not utter a squeak of dissent in public until Corbyn’s popularity among party members falls. They, too, will speak out when, and only when, they can be certain that it is too late for speaking out to make a difference.

We think of ourselves as more liberated than our ancestors, but the same repressive mechanisms silence us. In the 18th and 19th centuries, few wanted to say that gorgeous stately homes and fine public buildings had been built because the British looted Indians and enslaved Africans. Today, it feels equally “inappropriate” – to use a modern word that stinks of Victorian prudery – to say that a beautiful football club has been built on the proceeds of exploitation.

Football supporters reserve their hatred for owners such as the Glazers, who bought Manchester United with borrowed money and siphoned off the club’s profits to pay down the debt. If billions are available to turn Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain into world-class clubs, the fans do not care where the money came from. Nor do neutrals who love football for its own sake. For them, it is as miserablist to talk about Manchester City’s owners on Match of the Day as to talk about the factory farming of turkeys at the Christmas lunch table.

Honest sports writers fear the accusation that they are joyless puritan nags whose sole pleasure is ruining the pleasure of others. In Britain’s vacuous politics, Conservatives fear accusations of ignoring the will of the people on Brexit. Labour MPs fear their activists rather than their voters. In both the Tory and Labour cases, the worst that can happen to MPs is deselection. Mail or Express journalists who came out against Brexit would, I imagine, risk their jobs or being moved on to a different story. But no leftwing paper would sack a columnist who criticised Corbyn. The worst they would endure is frosty words from line managers and twaddle on Twitter.

We do not live in Abu Dhabi. The police do not pick up dissidents. Jailers don’t torture them. Yet peer pressure and trivial fears are enough to suppress necessary arguments. If you do not yet have a New Year resolution, it’s worth resolving to treat both with the contempt they deserve.

Britain is no paragon of sporting virtue – let’s stop pretending otherwise

Mary Dejevsky in The Guardian

As the latest scandal involving the ex-England manager Sam Allardyce and questions over cyclists’ drug exemptions show, the UK plays no fairer than anyone else

It started on the Iffley Road running track in Oxford, with Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile. It continued with Chariots of Fire, the filmed version of the same, and it was reinforced in the national consciousness with London 2012, the glorious festival of sport that everyone thought was going to be a disaster, but wasn’t.

Along the way came England’s victory (over Germany) in the 1966 World Cup, whose anniversary has been celebrated this year with mawkish nostalgia. And when the medals kept on coming, in this year’s Olympics and the Paralympics in Rio, the self-image of the UK as a highly successful and, of course, squeaky clean sporting nation seemed secure.
That image has been thoroughly discredited this week with the departure, by mutual consent, of the new England football manager, Sam Allardyce, after a mere 67 days. He was the subject of a Panorama exposé 10 years ago – and even I, as a football ignoramus, had caught the drift – which helped to explain why this “obvious” candidate for the England job had never been offered it before.

But now there he was, on camera, courtesy of a classic journalistic sting (by the Daily Telegraph), setting out how the rules of the transfer market could be circumvented, and considering a nice little supplement to his salary.

Nor, it would appear, is he alone in regarding the Football Association’s rules as an inconvenience to be challenged rather than a standard to be upheld. At least eight more guardians of the supposedly “national” game, it is claimed, agree with Sam Allardyce that ethics are for others upright or unambitious enough to heed them. The real pros know different.
If dubious practices were unique to football, that would be one thing. After all, everyone knows – do they not? – that there is far too much money sloshing round in the game generally, not least in England’s Premier League – money that is taking ticket prices out of reach of ordinary families and stifling the growth of homegrown talent.

We also know about the rot that set in long ago at Fifa, the headquarters of international football, so it is hardly surprising if something putrid also contaminates national organisations – including, alas, our own.

But it is not just English football, is it? Football may be the richest and most egregious example, but revelations in recent weeks suggest that question marks hang over other areas of UK sport. Nothing illegal, mind, nothing so crude as the“state-sponsored doping” we so loudly deplore in others, but little tweaks here and there, and especially close readings of the rule book that identify the opportunities between the lines.

So it is that the stellar success story of our times, Britain’s emergence as a world leader in cycling, looks slightly less glorious now that hacked reports have revealed the chemical help some cyclists were receiving – quite legally, it must be stressed – in order, as the people’s hero and multiple Olympic gold harvester Bradley Wiggins put it, to ensure “a level playing field”. Is a doctor’s note now to be considered part of sportsmanship?

And on the eve of the Rio Paralympics, there were reports of unhappiness within the British camp over allegations that classifications were being – how shall we say? – manipulated in the pursuit of more medals. We are sticklers for observing the letter of the law, it would seem, where the spirit of sport is concerned. But the story is starting to look a little different.

The shock here – if it is a shock – should not be that UK sports officials are as adept at playing the system as anyone else – within but sometimes also outside the law. It should rather be the persistence of the myth that only foreigners (especially Russians) cheat, and that British sport across the board – just because it is British – is cleaner, more honest and, yes, more innocent than everyone else’s. It isn’t.

The magic of Leicester City goes well beyond football

Ed Smith in The Guardian

The Premier League has become a case study in capitalism – which is why this underdog team’s success matters

 

Leicester’s manager Claudio Ranieri celebrates with players at the end of the Premier League game with Swansea City on 24 April. Photograph: Rui Vieira/AP

Saturday 30 April 2016 09.00 BST


Great sport strikes an optimal compromise between excellence and surprise. The pure randomness of throwing dice is never going to draw a crowd. But if the “best” team wins every time, and there is no room for luck and uncertainty, then the drama becomes both boring and depressing. We turn to sport for inspiration and reassurance as well as virtuosity.

Football is inherently good at surprise – one reason it’s the world’s favourite sport. Because the value of an individual goal is so huge (even a run in baseball isn’t as important) luck and unpredictability are hardwired. A shot hitting the post, a single refereeing decision, a goal against the run of play: these allow football to sustain justified faith among underdogs, both on the pitch and in the stands. On any given Saturday, the favourite is less likely to win at football than in any other sport.

The problem, however, is that over the course of a long season, this unpredictability disappears. The same teams keep winning. The rich ones. That’s why the success of Leicester City, who could win the Premier League title this weekend, has breathed fresh life into football.

One telling tribute has come from a segment of principled Arsenal followers. I know several who transferred their allegiance to Leicester, even when their own team still had a shot at the title. Madness? Perhaps. But their logic was in the spirit of Arsenal’s manager, Arsène Wenger. The phrase “financial doping” – the idea that sporting success that has been bought by a super-rich owner is at best semi-legitimate – was first attributed to Wenger in 2005. Leicester stand 17th in the league in terms of wage spending, first by points ranking. By Wenger’s own logic, a Leicester triumph would be more virtuous than victory for his Arsenal.

Not everyone has joined the party. Successes such as Leicester’s, gift-wrapped for screenwriters, inevitably inspire a rationalist backlash. “Debunking” the Leicester miracle has now become a popular intellectual counter-rhythm, as though the romantic bandwagon needs to be kept in check.

The revisionists have proposed that Leicester’s success is about systems, not romance. Leicester have invested in marginal gains, ranging from a pioneering scouting system to rotational fouling, aimed at reducing yellow cards. This savviness, however, doesn’t undermine the story at all: doubtless David had a very elastic sling when he felled Goliath. Besides, we do not have to turn Leicester into saints to marvel at their success.

The Premier League has an especially bad track record at producing improbable title winners. In its 23 seasons, it has coughed up only five champions – with the four giants of Arsenal, Manchester United, Chelsea and Manchester City sharing 22 titles, and a single triumph for Blackburn Rovers (even that victory was powered by an injection of cash).

The league’s first two decades were dominated by successive duopolies (Manchester United and Arsenal, then Manchester United and Chelsea), so much so that England’s top tier was less like a sports league and more like the Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Once, while I was giving a speech about competitive equipoise in sport, I read out the successive winners of the Premier League: one, then the other, then the first one again, then the other one. It became so repetitive that it felt only marginally different from saying “Oxford, Cambridge, Cambridge, Oxford.” So while improbable things certainly do happen, they have proved remarkably reluctant to happen inside English football.

The idea of an establishment, or at least the dominance of entrenched interests, has become the prevailing theme of our times. It is a slippery concept and often mishandled, but sport has done little to undercut the gloomy narrative of the top 1% greedily carving up the booty. There is an 89% correlation between wage spending and league position, as Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski identified. Put differently: financial doping works.

A connected point is the burgeoning influence of possessing a glamorous sporting history. It is reputation that drives the club’s brand, magnifying its financial clout. Super-clubs such as the New York Yankees or Manchester United support Thomas Piketty’s theory of capital: they are able to exploit past successes to ensure they keep a grip on present advantages. The sale of Yankees baseball caps is remarkably resilient, even when the team is having a bad season – which inevitably reduces the probability of bad seasons happening. Owning history in sport is like owning London property: you’re pretty much made.

Sport’s embrace of ultra-professionalism has created new ways for money to express an advantage. In the late 1970s Brian Clough’s tactical and psychological skills made Nottingham Forest champions of Europe. Since then, rich teams have benefited from the new layers of professionalism – physiotherapy, prehab and all the rest – making it harder for the enlightened maverick to stand out.

Elite football, in fact, could almost be a case study in late capitalism. The game as now played (loosely analogous with absolute standards of living) has undeniably improved at dizzying speed. In terms of skill, speed and attacking flair, is it easy to forget how much the game has evolved. The greatest leap forward was the proliferation of the yellow card, which gave the attacker the advantage, not the thug in long spikes. A leading commentator told me that when he watches archives of 1970s football, he estimates that half the players would today be sent off for violent fouls.

Yet while the game itself dazzles, the top flight has become an increasingly closed shop. One former footballer, now a leading figure in the sports industry, confided recently: “Each season, I am 1% more in awe of what happens on the pitch. And 1% more disgusted by the industry behind it.” Football has delivered magnificently as a spectacle, but failed at sport’s version of social mobility. Until now, that is.

And that’s why Leicester’s success matters beyond the game itself. Sport has never been a level playing field, but it does rely on an essential splash of surprise. There is room for some dynastic continuity, but not a rigid caste system. And every now and then in life, just as in football, an outsider has to steal the show.

From football to steel, we don’t have to be slaves to the market

Will Hutton in The Guardian


The southern corner of Arsenal’s Emirates stadium, reserved for fans from visiting teams, was eerily empty as the game against the Bundesliga champions, Bayern Munich, began last week. Instead, there was a banner. “£64 for a ticket. But without fans football is not worth a penny,” it read. After five minutes, the Bayern Munich fans cascaded into the stands to loud applause from the 60,000-strong home crowd. Everyone knew a powerful point had been made.

Except Arsenal do have a huge fan base and they do pay £64 a ticket because that is the price the market will bear. The clapping against blind market forces came as much from the management consultants, newspaper columnists, media multimillionaires, ex-central bankers and university vice-chancellors who now constitute Arsenal’s home base, as much as painters, plumbers and assembly line workers.

Yet everyone was united in understanding the Germans’ protest. Football has to be more than a money machine. Passion for a club is part of an idea of “we” – a collective identity rooted in place, culture and history – that defines us as men and women. £64 tickets redefine the Arsenal or Bayern Munich “we” as those with the capacity to pay.

Britain in 2015 is in a crisis about who the British “we” are at every level. Decades of being told that there is nothing to be done about the march of global market forces has denuded us of the possibility of acting together to shape a world that we want, whether it’s the character of our football clubs or our manufacturing base.

The same day that the Arsenal crowd was clapping the Bayern Munich fans, Tata Steel announced it was mothballing its steel plants in Scotland and Teesside. Over the last fortnight, Redcar’s steel mill has been shut as Thai owner SSI has gone into receivership, while manufacturing company Caparo is liquidating its foundry division in Scunthorpe. A pivotal component of our manufacturing sector, with incalculable effects across the supply chain, is being shut.

Yet when questioned, business secretary Sajid Javid’s trump answer is that the British government does not control the world steel price. He will, of course, do everything he can to soften the blow and help unemployed steel workers retrain or start their own businesses. But the message is unambiguous. Vast, uncontrollable market forces are at work. The government will not even raise the matter of how China exports steel to Britain at below the cost of production and intensifies the crisis.

It becomes purposeless to talk about what “we” might do because there are no tools for “us” to use. The new world is one in which each individual must look after her or himself. Even the trade unions and new Labour leadership, aghast at the scale of the job losses, do not have a plausible alternative – except to plead that the £9m proposed support package for unemployed steel workers in Scunthorpe is paltry.

There could have been, and still are, alternatives, but they are predicated on a conception of “we” resisted by right and left. A stronger steel industry, more capable of riding out this crisis, could have been created by more engagement with Europe and refashioning the ecosystem in which production takes place.

But since the collapse of Britain’s membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, governments of all hues have abjured any attempt to keep the pound stable and competitive, either pegging sterling against the euro and dollar or even – perish the thought – joining the euro. The pound, except for a short period after the banking crisis, has been systematically overvalued for a generation. Manufacturing production has stagnated as imports have soared. The trade deficit in goods in 2014 was a stunning £120bn, or some 7% of GDP. Yet dissociating Britain from all European attempts to manage currency movements and keeping the independent pound floating is as widely praised by John McDonnell on the left as John Redwood on the right. A devastated manufacturing sector, and now the crisis in the steel industry, is too rarely mentioned as part of the price. Alongside pegging the exchange rate should have been a determined effort to develop areas of industrial strength, with government and business working closely as co-creators. Yet even such a relationship – close to unthinkable in a British context – would have needed business keen on creating value rather than a high share price and a government setting some ambitious targets backed by spending the necessary billions.

Britain, for example, could have had a brilliant civil nuclear industry, a vibrant aerospace sector, the fastest growing windfarm industry, clusters of hi-tech business all over the country – and a hi-tech steel industry. Instead it is no better than a mendicant subcontractor. It does not have a share stake in Airbus, while France and China are building our nuclear power stations. Our green industries, once the fastest growing in Europe, are shutting. Only banks and hedge funds are protected and nurtured in a vigorous, uncompromising industrial policy, but they don’t buy much steel. They are the “we” behind which even ultra-libertarian Sajid Javid will throw the awesome weight of the state. Scunthorpe, Redcar, Teesside and the West Midlands are not; they can go hang.

And yet. Part of the reason the “northern powerhouse” is such a powerful idea is that it redefines the “we” so that the priorities and aspirations of the north are as valid as those of a hedge fund manager or the pampered board of HSBC. It is also obvious that newly empowered public authorities will have to co-create the vision with private partners and work with a Conservative government and the EU. There will be no “northern powerhouse” if it is locked out of European markets, nor is much progress likely with a third-rate transport and training infrastructure. It also needs a prolonged period of exchange rate stability.

Little of this easily fits the categories in which either Javid on the right or McDonnell and Corbyn on the left think. There is a powerful role for public agency and public spending, but it is much less directive, statist and top-down than traditional left thinking. Equally, the driver of any growth has to be vigorous, purposeful capitalism, but one co-created between private and public in a manner foreign to the traditional libertarian right. And there should be no place for hostility to Europe, also part of this reformulated “we”.

In this sense, there is a golden thread between the applause of the crowd in the Emirates and the way the “northern powerhouse” is taking shape, along with dismay at our dependence on China to build our nuclear power stations. There has been too much of a surrender to supply and demand. It is time to shape markets and football leagues alike. There is a “we”. It could be different.