As an English sports fan, naturally I have a borderline obsession with the fortunes of our national football (soccer) team and therefore a book entitled Why England Lose holds great intrigue.
The premise is that, inspired partly by Michael Lewis’ excellent Moneyball, Kuper and Szymanski attempt to use data and statistics to answer questions that have baffled football coaches, journalists, and supporters for years. One of their approaches to the titular conundrum is to run a regression analysis on England’s results in order to gauge whether the side have indeed historically underachieved.
They conclude that a national football team’s results can be predicted fairly accurately by a combination of the country’s GDP, population, and international football experience. While the results are clear to see, there are numerous outliers, including the extraordinarily successful and notable example of Brazil. For a nation such as this which has won 5 World Cups, there are many other less tangible factors behind their success.
Futebol is everywhere in Brazil and children all over hone their footwork playing in tight streets and playgrounds. This has led to them historically producing players of great skill like Garrincha, Ronaldinho and Neymar in the modern day – products of a completely different culture to that of England’s youth coaching, which tends to value physical attributes like strength and speed above more technique-based ones.
This is a cultural difference that is, essentially, impossible to capture in a regression analysis like that run by Kuper and Szymanski and is a problem that is also paramount in market research. Traditional metrics and analysis can only take you so far, and occasionally more innovative methods are needed to identify and solve problems. We know that people think in imagery, and supplementing standard questioning with methods that can get under the surface is often the best way to help brands and products become winners – just like Brazil!
