I suffered withdrawal symptoms last week when, on Wednesday
and Thursday there were no World Cup matches to watch.
It surprised me because I thought I was not emotionally invested
in this year’s edition in Russia. Clearly I was wrong.
I have also been rereading my copy of Soccernomics, the enlightening book by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, whose promise to explain, “Why England lose, Why Germany, Spain and France win and why one day the rest of the world will finally catch up” caught my eye, when I bought if before the last world cup in Brazil....
There is a new updated version that came out earlier this
year.
Using data the authors unravel the mysteries of why Africa
teams struggle on the international stage, that football clubs are best when
they make losses, how the health of populations determine whether a country
will be successful or not and that World Cups do not make money for hosting
nations among other subjects.
It’s a veritable page turner.
What interested me was the author’s assertion that to be
successful on the soccer world stage a county needs to have a GDP per capita of
at least $15,000.
They worked out by going over hundreds of data points this
was the magic number as it suggested that such countries have taken care of
their basic needs and have enough money left over to build the infrastructure
to identify and nurture world beating soccer players.
In World Cup history of the eight countries that have won
the World Cup only two countries have economies that do not meet this criteria.
Interestingly they are all from South America. Argentina winners in 1978 and
1986, Brazil in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994 and 2002. Uruguay who lifted the cup in
1930 and 1950 have a per capita GDP of $18,000. Brazil and Argentina’s numbers
come in at $10,224 and $14,000 respectively.
But interestingly even those countries all European, which
meet the criteria, the catchment area for their stars was the poorer sections
of their society.
The explanation was that the middle class kids have school
and other extracurricular activities while the poor are not only playing all
the time but are more likely to give up their education to pursue a
professional sports career.
With differing degrees of sophistication all these winners
have an extensive soccer networks with teams at every level from toddler to the
professionals. The Europeans have more sophisticated infrastructure compared to
the South Americans, famed for learning their skills on the street using
everything from oranges to stuffed socks.
They also showed that these countries are exposed to a lot
of competition. Not only are their respective leagues very competitive, they
have very competitive continental tournaments and play a disproportionately
large number of friendlies annually.
And finally the corporate backing of the sport in all these countries is significant but it is underpinned by functioning governing bodies. Football associations who facilitate the recruitment, nurturing and placing of talent....
The long and short of It, the book, shows is that making it
to the World Cup leave alone winning it is not the sole responsibility of the
respective football federation. To paraphrase, it takes the whole country to
win the World Cup.
There are no miracles. And whenever there is overnight
success in soccer know it has been years in coming.
So we want to go to the world cup and even win it.
To get a seat at the table – you will not get a chance to
win the World Cup if you are not participating in it, we need to grow our
economy significantly.
At $15,000 per capita at the current population we need to
grow our economy to $600b – about the size of Taiwan’s economy, from the
current $25b.
Assuming the current economic growth rate of about 6 percent
it would take us 55 years to hit the target.
A daunting prospect.
In order to increase the economic output this level
investments infrastructure would have to remain consistent for the said period.
We have a long way to go. For instance just to get to a middle income economy
we have to quadruple the stock of paved roads to at least 88 km per square km
of land from the current 20 km per unit area. And we would have to then
quadruple it again to even come close to a $600b economy.
We need to get our power consumption to at least where
Brazil’s. A 2014 estimate put Brazil’s power consumption per person at 287 kwh
per year. At the same time Uganda’s was about 70 kwh per person.
And we haven’t even started talking about the quality of our
human resource, which is key because you can have all the infrastructure in the
world but if the quality of your human resource isn’t at a certain level this
would count for nothing.
"There are no shortcuts. We will not fluke our way into the World Cup if our context is wrong...
If winning could be forced a former communist country would
have been one of the eight winners of the World Cup. Only Czechoslovakia and
Hungary have ever made the finals.
