Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

No, the title above does not refer to those who have been trading kicks with me here this past week about the Greek version of football. It's actually a chapter title from an important new book, which is on the way to the Rainy Day library: How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. The author is Franklin Foer, a respected editor at the New Republic and a passionate fan of the great game. The rather timely arrival of Foer's book during Euro 2004, gave Daniel Gross, who writes Slate's "Moneybox" column, a perfect opportunity to look at the sport most Americans find so bewildering and most others find so, well, engrossing. The result is a refreshing piece called "The Capitalism of Soccer, Why Europe's favorite sport is more American than baseball".

Taking as his guide, the Austrian-born economist Joseph Schumpeter, who developed the concept of creative destruction, Gross contrasts American and European ball games and comes to the conclusion that the US leagues are amateurs compared to their Euro counterparts. An excerpt:

"Schumpeter famously likened the elites of a society to a hotel, one in which rooms are always occupied but by an ever-changing roster of guests. The hotel concept almost precisely describes the soccer leagues of Europe. Every year, the worst-performing teams — three in England, four in Italy — check out. Relegated, they must play the following year in the next-lower division. Meanwhile, ambitious upstarts who have succeeded at lower levels check in. They are promoted.

This constant cycling has enormous financial consequences for the teams and their owners. Television, advertising, sponsorship, and gate receipts instantly plummet when a team is relegated... Relegated teams release or sell off highly paid players and instantly face a renewed fight for survival. In the 2001-2002 season, St. Pauli, the Hamburg, Germany-based team, played in Germany's prestigious Bundesliga. Relegated twice in two seasons, it now plays in the strictly minor-league third division. Even long-entrenched incumbents can fall rapidly. Leeds United, which a few years ago finished fifth out of 20 in Britain's enormously competitive Premiership, was relegated this year after it ran into financial problems.

By contrast, the American professional leagues are like a Marriott Residence Inn — once you're allowed to check in, you never have to leave. There's no great punishment for consistently propping up the standings year after year. Yes, the market value of losing teams often suffers in comparison to those of winning teams. But once you're a member of the cartel, there's a floor under the price. The Montreal Expos, despite decades of gross mismanagement, these days by Major League Baseball itself, were valued at $113 million last year, according to Forbes."

Daniel Gross is good. And his conclusion is both apt and amusing:

In Europe, the successful and rich teams grow richer. (For assembling and stockpiling talent, the New York Yankees have nothing on Spain's Real Madrid.) The poor get poorer, some teams fail entirely, and those intent on self-improvement have an opportunity every year to rise above circumstances. To quote another great middle-brow American intellectual (John Cougar Mellencamp): "Ain't that America?"

In a working lifetime, which has included stints on both sides of the Atlantic, I've been in situations where attempts to interpret the world's affairs through the medium of football have been greeted with guffaws. "Boy talk" and similar put downs were and are the standard response by those who consider themselves superior to those who kick a football around a field. Franklin Foer and Daniel Gross show, however, that when it comes to business and culture, soccer can explain an awful lot about society and economics. More on this tomorrow.