Stumbling and Mumbling

Football, and happiness

Here at IC Towers, we've been wondering what are the best and worst teams to support, from the point of view of maximizing happiness?
The natural answer - Arsenal - won't do. Sure, they play the best football. But this is  offset by the fact that it's hard to get tickets, and when you do, you're surrounded by tourists. And tourists have no more business being at football grounds than women or the middle classes. By contrast, fans of smaller teams get to have a laugh with their mates, and get  the civic pride of supporting  their local team and not being glory hunters.
This leaves two theories.
1. People adapt to their circumstances. This predicts that the happiest fans will be those doing well relative to the recent past - Watford, West Brom, Man City - whilst the unhappiest will be those doing badly - S****s, Sheffield United.
2. Memory matters. My Evertonian colleagues seem happy enough, even though they last won the league 20 years ago. And Paul rarely shuts up about Forest's European Cup  wins. This suggests that the memory of good times can tide us over lean periods; it's not too bad to live in the ruins of an empire.
The thing is, these two theories conflict. If Forest and Everton fans take pride in the glories of 20-30 years ago, shouldn't S***s fans take comfort from the relative success of the last couple of seasons? But this seems not to happen, suggesting a non-linear relationship between past happiness and present happiness. Does this generalize outside football?
As the answer to the original question, how about Newcastle as the worst team to support? They don't have any glorious history, at least in living non-fictitious memory. And yet their fans seem never to have adapted to their team's mediocrity.

Caring vs talking

The acres of dead trees discussing the craptaculartude of the world's worst football team reminds me of Heather Mills.
No, I don't just mean that England played like unipedal cretins. I mean that journalists are making the same mistake Ms Mills makes - of confusing caring with talking.
The thing is, no true football fan cares that much about England. Our loyalties are to our club side.
But we often talk more about the national side than about our club side. This is because the England team acts as a convenient focal point for discussion.  
I have a couple of colleages who support S****; as I say, work is alienating. I don't discuss the really important footballing questions with them: Walcott vs Rosicky? Should Hleb play out wide or in the middle? Have physicists discovered a unit of measurement large enough to capture the extent to which Cesc is superior to every other player on the planet?
Talking about Arsenal with S**** fans would be like discussing Rembrandt with David Blunkett. Similarly, they don't discuss their misfortune with me, for fear of hearing my Nelson Muntz impersonation.
Instead, we talk about England; it's a convenient meeting point for discussion. In other words, the England team is an Adler superstar (pdf). We talk about it not because we like it more than other things, but because its something we all know. The difference between the England team and piles is that we agree that one is a suitable topic of discussion whilst the other isn't; indeed, this might be the only difference.
The same is true for many celebrities. People talk about Britney Spears, Paris Hilton or Heather Mills not because these women are more talented or better-looking than others, but simply because they are well-known.
There are two implications here.
First, inequalities of income can be unmerited. Celebrities can earn big money not because they have ability, but simply because they get people talking; this is the secret of Piers Morgan's success*.
Second, celebrities themselves can get fooled by this. Some - and this is where Ms Mills comes in - think that because we talk about them, we care. But we don't. For making this mistake, Ms Mills will probably kick herself.
* No mention of Mr Morgan can pass without Stephen Fry's contribution to the Uxbridge English Dictionary: "Countryside: the act of killing Piers Morgan."

Martin Jol and hiring problems

Martin Jol's sacking by Tottenham, just months after  he had been given a huge transfer budget, raises the question: why do football directors make so many bad hiring and firing decisions?
In theory, you'd expect the opposite to be the case. Football directors are usually very successful businessmen with presumably lots of experience of hiring people. And football coaches' track record is publicly available, in a way that employees' records in other businesses are not; most us in a job interview could exaggerate our achievements without being found out, whereas Gary Megson could not claim to have done a great job at Nottingham Forest when he applied for the Bolton job.
You'd therefore expect better matches between coach and club than in most businesses. But this is not so. Last season saw 48 management changes at League clubs, implying that the average boss lasts less than two years - much less than job tenure in other businesses.
Here, then are some theories:
1. There are threshold effects. It's moderately easy to hire someone to do a basically competent job - though even here, bad hiring decisions cost economies around 1% of GDP a year. But it's vastly harder to spot someone who can do really well. Spotting real talent is hard.
2. Success in football coaching is not easily replicable. What works at one club can fail at another - the classic instance being Brian Clough at Leeds. So a coach's track record gives less clue to his chances of success than one might think.
3. Football directors' success in business amplifies their over-confidence and egomania. And just as overconfident share traders take too many decisions, so overconfident bosses are too quick to hire and fire, believing that they can get it right this time.
4. Criteria for success are too high, as directors are not just overconfident, but over-optimistic. Worse still for coaches, success raises expectations which increases the likelihood they'll fall short. This contributed to Jol's problems. His record at Tottenham (45.3% of games won, 28.3% lost) was in fact better than Tottenham's long-term average. But his bosses demanded even better than better-than-average.

Sepp Blatter is an idiot

Sepp Blatter is a moron. That's the only possible reaction to his desire - contrary to EU law - that teams be limited to playing five non-nationals in their side.
Basic economics tells us this will be disastrous. If you restrict the supply of footballers, their price will rise.  This will have two effects:
1. Fans will be paying more, for lower quality. It was just about acceptable in the 1980s for us to watch a fat drunk welly the ball 50 yards, because we were only paying £2 to do so. If Blatter gets his way, we'll be paying £50 for the privilege.
2. The league will get less competitive, because the power of rich clubs will increase. Blatter's restrictions will increase demand for scarce - very scarce - English talent.  If you thought Darren Bent was expensive at £16.5 million, just imagine how much he'd go for if smarter coaches had to bid for him because they weren't allowed to buy better foreign alternatives.  Only the money launderers or Manyoo could afford what little quality English players there'll be.
Worse still, there's no offsetting benefit. Blatter says: "When you have 11 foreigners in a team, this is not good for the development of football."
But this confuses cause and effect. Arsenal having 11 foreigners in their team is the effect of English footballers being rubbish - Paul Robinson is England goalkeeper, remember - not the cause of it.
Indeed, importing foreigners can be a way of improving the domestic game. Just as foreign investment helps improve the productivity of indiginous firms by showing them how to improve so foreign players can show domestic ones the way. Any player who trained with Cantona, Zola or Bergkamp will  say that they learned a lot from doing so.
So, let's hope someone puts this idiot back in his box.

Brooking's wrong

In his playing days, Sir Trevor Brooking hurt my heart. Now he's hurting my brain, with his claim that the influx of foreign players is hurting English football.
Let's grant - which is highly doubtful - that there's a correlation between the strength of a national team and the proportion of foreigners in its league: Italy, the World Cup holders, have relatively few foreigners in their league, for example.
The question then arises - what's the direction of causality? Are there many foreigners in a league because there's a lack of native talent? Or are native players talented, but not getting the opportunities because of a large supply of foreigners?
There's one obvious test: look at the prices of native players. If native talent were scarce, prices would be high. But if it were abundant but overlooked, prices would be low.
And the money suggests native English talent is very scarce. Just look at the summer signings. Kieron Dyer and Scott Parker - at best, players on the fringe of the England side - cost £7m a piece. Darren Bent and Nigel Reo-Coker cost £25m together. That's more than the entire foreign-born Arsenal side that demolished Portsmouth  on Sunday.
So, isn't it obvious that the influx of foreigners is a symptom of the ineptitude of English footballers, not a cause?

Martin O'Neill and objective reality

Yesterday's Aston Villa-Liverpool game raised a question about the nature of reality.
Villa boss Martin O'Neill said of the clash between Steven Gerrard and Stiliyan Petrov that led to Liverpool's winning goal: "I don't think it was a foul."
This suggests he subscribes to some version of the correspondence theory of truth. There are external facts - fouls - and the job of the referee is to make claims - "that's a freekick" - that correspond to these facts. The referee can therefore be wrong.
But there's an alternative view - that the referee doesn't perceive facts, but rather constructs them. On this view, fouls exist (or not) only if he blows his whistle or not, and referees cannot be wrong, because the truth doesn't exist until the ref calls it.
Which view is right? The laws of the game admit both possibilities. Law 12 begins:

A direct free kick is awarded to the opposing team if a player commits any of the following six offences in a manner considered by the referee to be careless, reckless or using excessive force...(emphasis added)

This suggests a constructivist view of fouls.
But the law continues:

A direct free kick is also awarded to the opposing team if a player commits any of the following four offences...

With no reference to the ref's opinion, this suggests a correspondence theory.
Worse still, many contacts between players could fall into either category. Was Petrov attempting to trip Gerrard - a constructivist offence - or was he holding him, which is a correspondence theory offence?
Although there's an ambiguity here, I suspect it's far better for their blood pressure if managers adopt the constructivist theory. Such a view will stop them being driven barmy by bad refs.
This, though, is not to deny that there are objective, unassailable facts in football. One is that S****s are shite.