Reddit reviews Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Germany and Brazil Win, and Why the Us, Japan, Australia, Turkey - And Even Iraq - Are Destined

Simon Kuper is one of the best writers in football. Anybody who likes this should read The Football Men: Up Close with the Giants of the Modern Game, Soccernomics or Football Against The Enemy.

Also I hate when footballers are labelled idiots. It requires extreme intelligence to be a top class player. Not "book learning" intelligence or even basic common sense, but extreme intelligence nonetheless. It's no different to how a top tier Physics academic might not be able to book a hotel room online. They are brilliant in their field, bit sometimes dim in other areas.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soccernomics-Simon-Kuper/dp/0007457847

You should read this book.

I found soccernomics really interesting.
Inverting the pyramid is a must though for tactics.

I think the interesting bit is encapsulated in this image - specifically the dotted lines in the top half.

'mTTV' is the valuation of the team as compared to the median of the league - therefore, we can see that City had just about a mid-table squad up until 2008. (By mid-table I mean in terms of the team's cost, which these guys equate very closely to success.)

*How they work out the cost is quite complicated, I don't completely understand it, but they work in wages, "football inflation", and transfers, as well as the "usefulness" of players I believe.

Now in the earlier years of the Premiership you could win the league with maybe 2x the median. This was what circa late '90s Arsenal and Man United had, more-or-less - although the Invincibles were actually very low, I think 1.66x the median. Nowadays, to win the league you need 3x or 4x.

So, we can clearly see the stratification into a top 3 of Mancs + Mancs + Chelsea, and the chasing pack of Arsenal, Spurs, Liverpool.

So basically the guy is saying Arsenal need to invest quite a bit to break back into that new top 3. (Duh I hear you say, as that's what the title is.)

Disclaimer: I haven't actually read the article, I just looked at the image, but I've read [Pay As You Play](http://transferpriceindex.com/), [Why England Lose/Soccernomics*](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soccernomics-Simon-Kuper/dp/0007457847/) and also some of this writer's other articles - I quite like his stuff actually but I don't pretend to understand the specifics, just the main gist of it.


Edit - another interesting thing with that graph - it seems like beyond a certain point, the mTTV seems to be a diminishing quality - otherwise, Chelsea would have walked the league every season since 2004. Or perhaps, it's a huge credit to what Ferguson has achieved (you would have expected him to be runner-up much more often).

You should read this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0007457847?pc_redir=1407687343&robot_redir=1

It disagrees with you that stats mean less in soccer than american sports. It is an insightful read and I recommend giving it a chance.

It's a book. Here you go!

> I'm not sure where you're getting your numbers from

This book.