Simon Kuper Quotes

#1. Aulas spotted early that most soccer fans everywhere are much more like shoppers than like religious believers: if they can get a better experience somewhere new, they will go there.

Simon Kuper

#2. I remember World Cups in 1982 and 1986 when we weren't there and we'd support Belgium or Denmark, .. They had some players who played in Holland and they were a bit like the Dutch.

Simon Kuper

#3. The theory of the "wisdom of crowds" says that if you aggregate many different opinions from a diverse group of people, you are much more likely to arrive at the best opinion than if you just listen to one specialist.

Simon Kuper

#4. Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity.

Simon Kuper

#5. His doubts recall Benford's Law, a theory about the frequency with which digits will appear in data. One implication of this law is that datasets with lots of zeroes at the end often turn out to be fraudulent.

Simon Kuper

#6. Football is not merely a small business, it's also a bad one. Anyone who spends any time inside football soon discovers that just as oil is part of the oil business, stupidity is part of the football business.

Simon Kuper

#7. You don't have to be charming to be a fan among fans.

Simon Kuper

#8. you are brought face to face with the great question about the soccer coach: Does he really matter? It turns out that coaches or managers (call them what you like) simply don't make that much difference.

Simon Kuper

#9. The average player has the ball for only 53.4 seconds every game (according to Chris Carling, the English performance analyst at Lille in France) so any player's main job is to occupy the right positions for the other eighty-nine minutes and 6.6 seconds.

Simon Kuper

#10. Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.

Simon Kuper

#11. Apparently the Germans had a database of 13,000 kicks.

Simon Kuper

#12. Chelsea's players, coaches and agents are now football's wealthiest millionaires. Surely the billions taken from the Russian people by an oligarch in questionable privatisations couldn't be better spent?

Simon Kuper

#13. in business doing nothing is often the hardest thing. (And not just in business. Harold Macmillan, prime minister during the Cuban missile crisis, mused then 'on the frightful desire to do something, with the knowledge that not to do anything was prob. the right answer'.)

Simon Kuper

#14. The wisdom of crowds fails when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough.

Simon Kuper

#15. A club like Bayern Munich, which shuns debt, is in fact missing a trick. Bayern could easily borrow a few hundred million dollars to make itself invincible against human opposition on the long term.

Simon Kuper

#16. It seems that soccer tournaments create those relationships: people gathered together in pubs and living rooms, a whole country suddenly caring about the same event. A World Cup is the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies.

Simon Kuper

#17. Clubs are all about winning. National teams, however, have an additional function: to incarnate the nation.

Simon Kuper

#18. Still, even after the black winger John Barnes scored his solo goal to beat Brazil in Rio in 1984, the Football Association's chairman was harangued by England fans on the flight back home: "You fucking wanker, you prefer sambos to us.

Simon Kuper

#19. You'd never last in South America. Fans take their radios to the stadium so they can think what the commentators think.

Simon Kuper

#20. The club is not a business. It's a populist democracy.

Simon Kuper

#21. Entrepreneurs who dip into soccer also keep making the same mistakes. They buy clubs promising to run them "like a business" and disappear a few seasons later amid the same public derision as the previous owners.

Simon Kuper