Simon Kuper Quotes & Sayings

Still, even after the black winger John Barnes scored his solo goal to beat Brazil in Rio in 1984, the Football Association's chairman was harangued by England fans on the flight back home: "You fucking wanker, you prefer sambos to us. — Simon Kuper

But there isn't much else most club managers can do to push their teams up the table. After all, players matter much more. As Johan Cruijff said when he was coaching Barcelona, "If your players are better than your opponents, 90 percent of the time you will win." There cannot be many businesses where a manager would make such an extravagant claim. The chairman of General Motors does not say that the art of good management is simply hiring the best designers or the best production managers. — Simon Kuper

Aulas spotted early that most soccer fans everywhere are much more like shoppers than like religious believers: if they can get a better experience somewhere new, they will go there. — Simon Kuper

Chelsea's players, coaches and agents are now football's wealthiest millionaires. Surely the billions taken from the Russian people by an oligarch in questionable privatisations couldn't be better spent? — Simon Kuper

Entrepreneurs who dip into soccer also keep making the same mistakes. They buy clubs promising to run them "like a business" and disappear a few seasons later amid the same public derision as the previous owners. — Simon Kuper

It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies. — Simon Kuper

you are brought face to face with the great question about the soccer coach: Does he really matter? It turns out that coaches or managers (call them what you like) simply don't make that much difference. — Simon Kuper

The things we once thought of as luxuries soon become necessities (although, by the same token, our sense of well-being would quickly adapt to losing half our income). What we care about is not our absolute wealth but our rung on the ladder. Ruut Veenhoven, a leading researcher of happiness, says, "When we have overtaken the Joneses, our reference drifts upward to the Smiths, and we feel unhappy again. — Simon Kuper

Clubs are all about winning. National teams, however, have an additional function: to incarnate the nation. — Simon Kuper

You'd never last in South America. Fans take their radios to the stadium so they can think what the commentators think. — Simon Kuper

You don't have to be charming to be a fan among fans. — Simon Kuper

Apparently the Germans had a database of 13,000 kicks. — Simon Kuper

The theory of the "wisdom of crowds" says that if you aggregate many different opinions from a diverse group of people, you are much more likely to arrive at the best opinion than if you just listen to one specialist. — Simon Kuper

I remember World Cups in 1982 and 1986 when we weren't there and we'd support Belgium or Denmark, .. They had some players who played in Holland and they were a bit like the Dutch. — Simon Kuper

The average player has the ball for only 53.4 seconds every game (according to Chris Carling, the English performance analyst at Lille in France) so any player's main job is to occupy the right positions for the other eighty-nine minutes and 6.6 seconds. — Simon Kuper

Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere. — Simon Kuper

A club like Bayern Munich, which shuns debt, is in fact missing a trick. Bayern could easily borrow a few hundred million dollars to make itself invincible against human opposition on the long term. — Simon Kuper

Football is not merely a small business, it's also a bad one. Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business. — Simon Kuper

Even before 2007, this half of a small island was the richest football country on earth. In 2005-2006 the Premiership's total revenue was about £1.4bn, 40 per cent more than its nearest rival, Italy's Serie A. That was before take-off. Now foreign television channels are sending so much cash that the Premiership is expected to take in nearly £1.8bn this season. Even the team that finishes bottom of the table (Wigan might be a good bet) will get £26.8m from TV. That's more than all of Argentine or Belgian football put together. — Simon Kuper

in business doing nothing is often the hardest thing. (And not just in business. Harold Macmillan, prime minister during the Cuban missile crisis, mused then 'on the frightful desire to do something, with the knowledge that not to do anything was prob. the right answer'.) — Simon Kuper

The club is not a business. It's a populist democracy. — Simon Kuper

The viewing figures we saw earlier in this book suggest that sport is the most important communal activity in many people's lives. Nearly a third of Americans watch the Super Bowl. However, European soccer is even more popular. In the Netherlands, possibly the European country that follows its national team most eagerly, three-quarters of the population watch Holland's biggest soccer games. In many European countries, World Cups may now be the greatest shared events of any kind. To cap it all, World Cups mostly take place in June, the peak month for suicides in the Northern Hemisphere. How many Exleys have been saved from jumping off apartment buildings by international soccer tournaments, the world's biggest sporting events? — Simon Kuper

The wisdom of crowds fails when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough. — Simon Kuper

His doubts recall Benford's Law, a theory about the frequency with which digits will appear in data. One implication of this law is that datasets with lots of zeroes at the end often turn out to be fraudulent. — Simon Kuper

Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity. — Simon Kuper