Soccernomics Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bergkamp, Tostao, Socrates, Osvaldo Ardiles, Jorge Valdano, Josep Guardiola, Fer-nando Redondo, Kaká, and others—stayed in school after that age, or even attended college, is ignored. This is probably because many British coaches and players are suspicious of educated people.
    It is true that the clubs’ new academies are meant to help players keep studying, but in practice this rarely happens. A few years ago one of us visited the academy of an English club. It’s an academy of some note: two of its recent graduates first played for their countries while still teenagers. But all the boys we met there, bright or otherwise, were sent to do the same single lowly vocational course in leisure and tourism to fulfill the academy’s minimum educational requirements. Together the boys caused such havoc in class that all the other students had dropped out of the course. It’s not that soccer players are too busy to study; they rarely train more than a couple of hours a day. Rather, it’s that being studious is frowned upon inside the English game.
    English soccer consequently remains unwelcoming to middle-class teenagers. To cite just one example, Stuart Ford, who at seventeen played for England Schools, gave up on becoming a professional because he got tired of listening to rants from uneducated coaches. Being middle class, he always felt like an outsider. He recalled, “I was often goaded about my posh school or my gross misunderstanding of street fashion. That was just from the management.” Instead, he became a Hollywood lawyer. Later, as a senior executive at one of the Hollywood W H Y E N G L A N D L O S E S A N D O T H E R S W I N
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    studios, he was one of the people behind an unsuccessful bid to buy Liverpool FC.
    If the working classes get little education, that is mainly the fault of the middle-class people who oversee the British school system. None -
    theless, the educational divide means that any middle-class person entering British soccer feels instantly out of place.
    Many middle-class athletes drift to cricket or rugby instead. Often, this represents a direct loss to soccer. For most people, sporting talent is fairly transferable until they reach their late teens. Many English soccer players, like Phil Neville and Gary Lineker, were gifted cricketers, too.
    Some well-known rugby players took up rugby only as teenagers, when they realized they weren’t going to make it in soccer. And in the past, several paragons represented England in more than one sport. Only a few sports demand very specific qualities that can’t be transferred: it’s hard to go from being a jockey to being a basketball player, for instance.
    But English soccer competes with other ball games for talent, and it scares away the educated middle classes.
    This is particularly sad because there is growing evidence that sporting talent and academic talent are linked. The best athletes have fast mental reactions, and those reactions, if properly trained, would make for high-caliber intellects.
    All this helps explain why even though the academies of English clubs are the richest in the world, England doesn’t produce better players than poor nations. Instead of trying to exclude foreigners from English soccer, it would be smarter to include more middle-class English people. Only when there are England players with educated accents—as happens in Holland, Argentina, and even Brazil (Dunga and Kaká, for instance)—
    might the national team maximize its potential.
    CLOSED TO INNOVATIONS:
    ENGLISH SOCCER’S SMALL NETWORK
    When the Internet arrived, many pundits predicted the decline of the city. After all, why live in a small apartment in East London when you 24

    could set up your laptop in an old farmhouse overlooking a sheep meadow?
    The prediction turned out to be wrong. Cities have continued their growth of the past two hundred years, which is why apartments in East London became so expensive. Meanwhile, the countryside has turned into