Arsène Wenger

In what would be yet a huge step forward in the further commodification of football, Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger is planning to sue the Dutch Football Confederation (KNVB) for compensation related to injuries sustained to Holland and Arsenal forward Robin van Persie during a Holland/Italy friendly last month.  He told reporters yesterday that he “expect[s] financial compensation for the damage [injuries] can make to the championship and the salary involved. It is especially frustrating to lose your players for the rest of the season in a friendly game. The question has to be raised.”

While the KNVB made a hash of van Persie’s injury, with Serbian doctors and animal placentas veiling the fact the striker’s ankle ligaments were more damaged than initially diagnosed by the Dutch national team physician, Wenger’s move could set a precedent that would forever alter the nature of international football, with mid-season friendlies banned and international sides wary of picking the best players available for fear of having to make huge payouts to clubs.

Wenger made his views on international football very clear:

“I am not against the national teams. But at the moment we sit here and they can do what they want.  The players are paid by their clubs and get injured playing for another team. I am happy if England wins, but if we lose because England wins nobody cares about me. There is something completely wrong with the system. I want the power to be rebalanced more in favour of the clubs.”

The implication is that larger national federations like Holland, France, England and Italy make a great deal of money from expensive “goods” supplied at no cost by clubs, and should therefore be liable if those goods are returned “damaged.”  In any case, the move reveals that for Wenger championships are measured in lost revenue, and players are million dollar machines not to be lent out for something as ethereal as national pride.  Few club investors would disagree.

While no one would argue that UEFA, FIFA, or the big football federations (Wenger acknowledged in the case of Adebayor at Togo that not all federations will be able to compensate clubs for lost wages) don’t make a great deal of money from international football, the money earned from England friendlies for example doesn’t all go into the wallets of FA fat cats. Money from international football helps sustain both league and non-league football, funding football grassroots projects and facilities (Clairefontaine anyone?) that, in addition to club academies, help generate the sort of players that made Arsenal so much money over the past decade and a half.

Penalizing international sides for calling up their homegrown talent for friendlies or qualifiers would further diminish the ability of federations and associations to raise money for soccer education and development at the local level, which provides the enormous palate from which the club academy system draws upon for its best young talent.  International football might have the balance of power in Wenger’s eyes, but it could become a meaningless sideshow should the Arsenal manager get his way.

International Stories

• It appears a Canada-Macedonia friendly played last month may have been fixed. The Canadian Soccer Association (CSA) and Macedonian federation are adamant the allegations surround the referee and not any players on the Canadian or Macedonian sides.  Some big question marks still hang over this story though…
• Some goal porn for proud USMNT supporters via Steve Goff:  highlights and Michael Bradley’s winner for Moechengladbach on the weekend.  Enjoy.
• Top seeded Akron will play second seed Virginia for the NCAA soccer crown today at 1 pm EST after Akron beat North Carolina on penalties on Friday night.

When not breaking into foreign recording studios, Richard Whittall writes A More Splendid Life.

Big Story

Arsene Wenger has gone on a media offensive ahead of what could be a difficult season for Arsenal beginning this weekend, with The Times including no less than four articles on the Frenchman, after an in-depth interview in an “anteroom” at a hospital (?!) in order to reveal “who is Arsene Wenger?”.

Matthew Syed quotes Sartre twice and gushes over Arsene’s poetic love of the game — and promises to get to the “deep mystery” of the man. Yet in fact, though Arsene might have depth in his love and understanding of the game, he displays little breadth in his interests; the interview’s focus on Wenger’s single-mindedness and admission he has no time for anything besides football, including family and film, makes him appear just another monomaniacal sportsman — this is not necessarily a criticism of his passion, but it’s hardly a “mystery” that is being unravelled. “When you are 30 years in this job you have to be, somehow, crazy, because you cannot say it has not had a psychological impact. You live it, you think it; it is impossible to escape.”

And in an admission that really ought to shock no-one, Wenger admits he’s not always been entirely objective when discussing his team. “Sometimes I see it [a foul by an Arsenal player], but I say that I didn’t see it to protect the players and because I could not find any rational explanation for what they did.”  I’m shocked, shocked!

North America

• So Landon Donovan has swine flu. Pretty random, and I don’t have much to say about it. It appears to be a mild dose that he caught in the U.S. and which he says hurt his performance at the Azteca once he got to Mexico: “During the game and even after the game I thought maybe it was the altitude, the heat, whatever. But even so I’ve never felt that bad. The last time I was there [at Estadio Azteca] I didn’t feel that bad. I just felt lethargic, slow. I didn’t feel normal.”
• The MLS All-Star game provided a $3 million boost to Sandy’s economy, according to one of those dollar multiplier study’s that always seem a bit suspect.
• Obscure channel mun2 received a huge boost by showing the English-language version of the Mexico-U.S. game on Wednesday. The afternoon kick-off did not stop the channel, which was put on free preview on cable and satellite systems across the country for the occasion, recorded its highest-ever ratings with 322,000 home viewers watching live. It remains a lost opportunity that the game was not shown on a better-known and promoted English language channel, but those are still pretty impressive numbers.
• Freddie Ljungberg is learning the tough side of soccer in America: the frustratingly poor officiating, with players getting away with things that “would be a straight red in Europe. They wouldn’t be allowed to play more of the game.” Welcome to MLS.
• According to Reuters, CONCACAF.com will begin showing highlights of US national team matches.

Worldwide

• Some follow-up on our piece about internet rights in the Premier League: paid:Content UK looks at the auction underway for digital rights for the 2010-2012 cycle, reporting that ESPN are keen to add the VOD rights to their portfolio from next season (Virgin Media currently owns VOD rights in the UK). However, this package would not include live streaming rights, which remain bundled with domestic television broadcast rights.
• In Lebanon, a unique event took place: a match between landmine survivors. The MidEast News Source writes that “Despite their limited numbers, and the lack of teams to play against, the action on the pitch is fierce. These players have been through years of physiotherapy and are well accustomed to their prosthetic limbs, so the speed and skill of play on the field is not unlike what one would see on a regular soccer pitch of able-bodied players. Tempers flair, spirits are high and when goals are scored arms shoot up in jubilation or fall in despair.”
• Paul Simpson at FourFourTwo takes a sweeping look at the various efforts of billionaires to build a network of global clubs, from Dietrich Mateschitz’s continued effort at global branding with Red Bull in Austria, the U.S., Brazil and Germany to Joe Lewis’ faltering attempt at global hegemony (the Tottenham owner having begun shedding himself of shares in AEK Athens, Basel, Rangers and Vicenza).
• It might be somewhat buried under the men’s version, but the FA Women’s Premier League gets underway this weekend as well. Fair Game has the preview.
• Norway’s tonking of Scotland on Wednesday led to the quote of the week from the Scottish FA Chairman Gordon Smith, who gave one of the weakest votes of confidence in living memory by stating “While George is employed by the SFA we believe he is the right man to take us forward.”
• Two Hundred Percent has a typically quality piece on Chester City’s travails under the disreputable ownership of Steven Vaughan. “So, Steven Vaughan wins and the game of football dies a little more inside. The FA have decided to back the Football Conference and have given Vaughan’s Chester the right to start the new season, in flagrant contravention of rule 2.7 of the Conference’s own constitution and awarded the club a licence to play football for this season.” The decision sets a terrible precedent for the sport,  as THP writes: “There is no point even having a rule designed to stop clubs body-swerving their obligations towards their creditors if, when push comes to shove, the authorities relent and allow these rules to be bypassed. The Conference has broken its own rules, and the FA have sanctioned it.”

The Sweeper appears daily. For more rambling and links throughout the day every day, follow your editor @pitchinvasion on Twitter.

Now Simon Kuper comes along and says, at least at the highest level, it doesn’t even matter who the manager is or what he does. He himself could do as good a job as Alex Ferguson. “The obsession with football managers is misguided,” Kuper writes in today’s FT. “Hardly any of them make any difference to results. The institution of manager is something of a con-trick. Ferguson and Ancelotti are best understood as marketing tools.”

Kuper cites Stefan Szymanski’s research which looked at 40 English teams between 1977 and 1997 and “found that their spending on salaries explained 92 per cent of their variation in league position.” (Though he curiously doesn’t mention it in the article, Szymanski is the co-author of a new book with Kuper using statistics to explain football phenomena).

It’s only when there are “knowledge gaps” (such as Wenger’s advanced knowledge on nutrition and foreign players in the 1990s) that a manager makes a difference, according to Kuper. At the highest level in England now, though, “the Premier League is like a market with almost perfect information,” so no such gaps exist (at least currently — how do we know this will always hold?). Therefore, Kuper concludes, “If I managed United I would probably get about the same results as Ferguson does.”

Kuper acknowledges this wouldn’t actually work in practice, as fans would not accept a man like him due to their cultural need for a manager to meet a certain stereotype — he must be over-35, a former professional, “almost always white”, and have a neat haircut. But in his view, a manager is a mere figurehead conveniently embodying a stereotype to fulfill a cultural expectation in football and avoid rocking the boat.

There is something to Kuper’s claim here. He’s right that the cultural stereotype of what a manager should look like is sadly limited and the role a manager plays certainly does become totemic to a level that exaggerates the actual impact he has. But Kuper oddly concludes that (a) we didn’t already know that the economic factor is dominant; and (b) that this means no manager would be better than any manager.

Syzmanski’s research in fact has only found what’s actually a pretty obvious fact we all understand anyway — being able to pay your players more than your rivals is by far the most important factor in a team’s success? No shit. One doesn’t need to be a professor of economics to have figured that one out. I think most fans with any sense already realise that if you put Alex Ferguson in charge of Hull City, they still wouldn’t win the league given the disparity in resources between Hull and Manchester United. Managers might be lionised, but everyone knows the reason David Moyes won’t win the title with Everton has little to do with his abilities. Common sense has told us this already.

It’s fair that Szymanski and Kuper may help redress our understanding of the balance between the factors a little, if they are correct in the 92% figure cited that leaves perhaps less of a role for managers than we commonly accept (though it’s hard to analyse this rather exact number without seeing Szymanski’s research — for example, how does it account for the fact that the clubs that spend the most on player salaries to get the best presumably also do so for managers?).

The problem is that Kuper runs away with this “discovery” to reach some curious conclusions, beginning with his belittling of Alex Ferguson’s success: “If you are able to stay manager of the world’s richest club for 23 years in an era when money determines results, you are guaranteed to stack up trophies.”

Well, yes. The question is why he has stayed so long. Kuper says it’s because Ferguson’s “accomplishment is not winning, but keeping all the interest groups united behind him for so long. They back him because of his personality, and because he seems to incarnate United.” But wasn’t it Ferguson’s accomplishment in the first place in breaking United’s title drought in 1992 that set in train their entire period of dominance and was crucial in making them the world’s richest club?  Where is the analysis explaining that Ferguson had resources that had been unavailable to all his predecessors after Busby over two decades to break the long run of failure in the first place?  If you’re going to make this argument based on numbers, you need to back it up with some.

Even if Ferguson has only made a 1% difference on results at United due to his management out of the remaining 8% unaccounted for in determining success from Syzmanski’s research cited, surely that’s significant at the highest level of sport, where we know the margins between success and failure are infinitesimal. After all, many teams with more resources than United have come and gone from the top.  Having that consistent 1%, or whatever it is, over 23 years has obviously been critical to United’s ability to build and rebuild under Ferguson.

Sure, Ferguson probably isn’t actually a genius and by far the most important factor in the results under his tenure is indeed Manchester United’s ability to continually pay very high salaries (though notably, he often succeeded with a far tighter wage structure than rivals, something Kuper does not examine) and maybe we should mention this more often. Point taken.

But Kuper takes this and twists it to go from managers not being as crucial as we think they are (except when they are, as in the cases of Wenger, Clough and Shankly that he cites as exceptions) to not mattering at all:  “One day a club will stop hiring managers, and allow an online survey of fans to pick the team. That club will probably perform well, because it will be harnessing the wisdom of crowds, and because it can use the money it saves on managers to raise players’ salaries.” (That experiment didn’t get very far with MyFootballClub, did it?)

This seems a bizarre conclusion to reach based on the evidence he’s presented. To say a manager might not make all the difference in the world as some fans think is miles away from being able to conclude on no evidence that not having a manager at all wouldn’t make a difference and would actually improve results.

Kuper has gone just a little too freakanomic here.

Daily Talking Point

There’s considerable debate about the value of the MLS All-Star game going around today. A sold-out Rio Tinto stadium in Salt Lake looked impressive last night, but the tepid match and the penalty kicks to determine the result seemed rather pointless — does anyone actually care that Everton won?  Steve Davis, writing on the official MLS site, comes to the rather generous conclusion that “it now looks more like a real game than a friendly.”

Like in the NFL, though, the whole concept of the All-Star contest as a “real game” has a real problem — there’s a reason the Pro Bowl takes place after the NFL season, and is little more than a procession. As soccer is also a sport dependent on physical contact, would we even want our MLS players going for it balls-out and risk getting injured with half the season still to go?  It doesn’t make any sense for the All-Star game to be vaunted as a serious contest.

At US Soccer Players, J Hutcherson has a potential answer as he argues that what the event needs is actually less substance and more flash, with the return of a skills contest and a fan-orientation. “Say what you will about baseball’s version, but it’s setup as an outward event. Same with the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League,” Hutcherson writes. “Not so much for MLS, who have instead turned it inwards.  A destination for sponsors and once, current, and future League employees.  Everybody else, thanks for buying a ticket.” Would a more fun set-up make it easier to avoid pretending it’s a serious contest and market it otherwise? Or would it just make the whole world laugh at MLS All-Stars kicking balls through hoops?

The fact that the All-Star game went on as an MLS team were playing a continental Champions League game that actually means something seemed rather perverse, and at MLS Talk, Daniel Feurstein comes to the opposite conclusion from Hutcherson and says “it’s time for MLS to end the All-Star game.” It’s hard to deny that with all the other high-profile friendlies going on in the US this summer amidst a glut of competitive soccer proceeding in parallel shadows, one more or one less game just doesn’t make much difference.

Brian at the Run of Play addresses all of this with his usual elan, as he notes that “if there were a player who showed the kind of craft and subtlety that we routinely employ in judging the importance of soccer tournaments, he’d be spending the summer professing his loyalty to his current employer while not saying anything to discourage Real Madrid.”

Americas

• MLS’ woes continued in the CONCACAF Champions League, with Toronto FC losing 1-0 at home to Puerto Rico Islanders of the USL. With the Red Bulls representing the league tonight, things can only get worse, one would expect.
• Meanwhile, at the 24th minute, Duane Rollins points out the curiosity that with ESPN planning to show MLS in England, it’ll be easier to watch the league a Canadian team participates in from across the Atlantic than in Canada itself, where MLS games are rarely shown outside of Toronto FC. This seems like a situation MLS should really work to fix ahead of further planned Canadian expansion.
• The Designated Player rule is apparently up for debate, as Steve Davis reports that “I’m hearing that big hitters in the league are talking about ways to get more teams on board with the Designated Player initiative.” This makes sense; the $415,000 hit to a team’s $2.3 million salary cap puts too many eggs in one basket, and there are only one or two DPs in the league right now justifying that on the playing field.
• In WPS, Boston Breakers Coach Tony DiCicco expressed mild dissatisfaction with the standard of the refereeing as his side lost to the Washington Freedom, noting of the referee: “He’s over his head. Most of the referees in this league have been over their heads.”  Think he’ll get fined for that?

Europe

• Yet more trouble in Scotland, where Hearts are facing insolvency after HM Revenue and Customs filed in court for unpaid debts. The club again exclaimed its shock, saying they have the money, just as they did last season when they blamed “technical glitches” for their failure to pay players on time. One could write a book about the bizarre ownership of Vladimir Romanov, who appears bent on shredding the nerves of all Hearts supporters.
• Will Arsene Wenger spend some of the loot he’s taken in in recent weeks with the sales of Emmanuel Adebayor and Kolo Toure?  “The fans want signings,” screeches Rob Kelly in the Telegraph, “and if they do not get them, they deserve answers.”  In the Guardian, David Hytner puts the Frenchman’s parsimony down to both pragmatism and principle, praising his youth development policy and noting Wenger’s feeling of “vulgarity” on the mere idea of spending £20 million on a player. The bigger question, though, is just how much pressure he’s getting to sell in order to shore up the club’s shaky finances and continue his success at developing youth and selling at the right time for a big price.
• AC Milan are expressing a similar aim, with club president Silvio Berlusconi calling on manager Leonardo to only target younger players — a similar proclamation to Alex Ferguson’s last month. This all comes down to money, with younger players obviously far more likely to bring a return on investment down the line, a model Wenger has shown to be very successful. At some point, though, does the market tip to make it worthwhile going for the 29 or 30 year-olds if big clubs aren’t bidding on them?
• And finally, previously unseen Hillsborough documents are to be released to an independent panel.