R E Q U I R E D R E A D I N G F O R T H E D I S C E R N I N G G A M B L E R • F I T Z D A R E S. C O M • T H I R D E D I T I O N, C H R I S T M A S 2 0 1 5
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HIGH LIFE The day I beat the bookies
My record breakers and golden Brits for Rio 2016
OSCARS Favourites and long shots at the 88th awards
BY BARNEY CURLEY
BY DENISE LEWIS
BY JOE HODGSON
’t a ake, logic doesn st t a s n o li il m e ite th
t was 1998 and the young Dutch footballer Rody Turpijn was watching his career fall apart. His club, Ajax Amsterdam, was letting him go. Turpijn had only one thing going for him: he was represented by Mino Raiola, an aggressive Dutch-Italian former pizza restaurateur who was becoming one of Europe’s biggest agents. Raiola and Turpijn drove to a motorway hotel (the classic venue of football deals) to meet the chairman of the small club De Graafschap. Raiola kicked off by impressing the chairman with some gossip about Juventus’s Pavel Nedved. Then the chairman wrote on a piece of paper the salary he could offer Turpijn. The player was delighted: it was more than he had earned at Ajax. But to Turpijn’s surprise, Raiola shouted: “Do you know what he earns at Ajax? This isn’t a serious offer! Come Rody, we’re not going to waste our time on this.” Raiola stood up as if to walk out, so Turpijn
lways prevail
hesitantly stood up too. The chairman hastily persuaded them to sit down. Twenty minutes later, Raiola had negotiated a massive salary for a four-year deal. As Turpijn wrote years later in the Dutch literary magazine Hard Gras, that meeting secured his future “for just about the rest of my life”. There’s a moral here: salaries in football aren’t always rational. In general they are: as Stefan Szymanski and I showed in our book Soccernomics, the more a club pays its players, the more matches it will win. The rule of thumb is that the club with the highest wage bill finishes top, and the club with the lowest, bottom. Averaged out over a ten-year period, wage spending explains about 90 per cent of the variation in clubs’ league positions. In short, most footballers earn what they deserve, at least measured by their contribution to winning matches. And yet economists have shown that
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mics, says Sim in football econo
startling irrationalities still survive in the market for players. In England in the 1980s, the number one irrationality was racial discrimination. Put simply, a black player earned less on average than an equally good white player. No wonder, because this was an era when pundits like Emlyn Hughes explained the curious absence of black players at Liverpool and Everton by saying: “They haven’t got the bottle.” Some clubs refused to field black players because they thought they weren’t good enough, or because they thought fans wouldn’t accept it. As Szymanski shows, the clubs with more black players did better – adjusted for their level of wages – than clubs with fewer. This discrimination disappeared by the early 1990s. Today, only black managers suffer discrimination. As of November 2015, the 92 English professional clubs employed just four black managers between them.
on Kuper
Here are some other irrationalities that persist in football’s job market: 1. Certain positions are undervalued.
Goalkeepers earn less than outfield players (according to a study by the German economist Bernd Frick), even though keepers have longer careers and make a very big contribution to results. By contrast, the highest-paid position is striker. In Italy’s Serie A between 2009 and 2014, forwards earned an average of €1.1m, midfielders €820,000 and defenders €700,000, says the new French book Sciences Sociales Football Club by Bastien Drut and Richard Duhautois. Perhaps this is simply because strikers are most likely to score and therefore end up on TV. 2. Compared with goalscoring, unseen work is undervalued. Bundesliga players
who ran more kilometres than others
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