by Simon Kuper
He was then still a bit naive about soccer. During England-Trinidad he went to the bathroom and missed one of England’s two goals. But, he says, “You go through life and you think about the best trips you’ve ever taken, and we all have a list of two or three that we’ll always remember, and that by far was the most enjoyable trip I’ve ever taken.” Even better, while they were away in Germany, the A’s won every game. Every day they’d phone home, and their colleagues would say, “Don’t hurry back.” In fact, someone said, if Beane and Farhan would just emigrate to Europe, the A’s would probably win the World Series.
After that World Cup, whenever the A’s players teased Beane about soccer, he’d tell them, “The rest of the world can’t be wrong.” The main thing that had struck him in Germany was the emotion of the fans. You didn’t see that so much in American sports. In Beane’s view, “Wherever I see emotion, I see opportunity.” He drew two conclusions from his German visit: Where there’s emotion, there’s money to be made. And where there’s emotion, people are probably making emotional decisions.
Rational Moneyball thinking might have a place in soccer, too.
A few people at a few English clubs had already begun to try. Wenger had been using computer programs to value players since his time at Monaco in the 1980s. Bolton’s manager Sam Allardyce, whose somewhat Neolithic appearance hid a Beane-esque mind, was always interested in any newfangled ways of getting more bang for his buck. Allardyce hired university graduates like Mike Forde, who spent their days working out questions like: If a striker averages ten goals a season in the French league, how many goals would he typically score in the Premier League? Do inswinging corners produce more goals than outswingers? At what average age do attacking midfielders begin to fade?
In 2005 Beane’s best friend in soccer, Comolli, became technical director of Spurs and did his best to turn them into a sort of London version of the Oakland A’s. Comolli used the new match data that were becoming available (on numbers of tackles, kilometers run, shots on target, shots stopped, and so on) to value soccer players. Using these Moneyball methods he signed a Brazilian goalkeeper with big ears, barely any international caps, and no reputation outside the Dutch league: Heurelho Gomes. (Beane’s followers in soccer have learned over the years how to value a keeper. The crucial stat is the percentage of shots from inside the penalty area that the guy stops. If you credit him with every shot he stops, you’ll be rewarding him for picking up rollers from thirty yards—the sort of easy balls that keepers of the best teams see a lot of. This is one of the many examples of the gradual refinement of Moneyball thinking in soccer.)
In 2007 Comolli paid $14 million to bring an unknown seventeen-year-old left-back named Gareth Bale to White Hart Lane. It seemed an absurd sum. Bale came from little Southampton and had played only a couple of internationals for not very fashionable Wales. But on the phone to Oakland, Comolli would talk about him with great excitement.
A couple of summers ago, when Spurs visited California, Beane got to see Bale up close. He recognized the type at once: “An eighteen-, nineteenyear-old kid, broad shouldered, lean.” Bale was fast, athletic, and strong—a most unusual combination. Beane says, “If he was in the States he would never have touched a soccer ball. He’d have had no chance. He’d be playing wide receiver for the New York Jets, he’d be playing centerfield for a Major League Baseball team, or he’d be a shooting guy for an NBA team.” The great athletes, whatever their sports, are each other’s brothers. By the time Bale was twenty—long after Spurs had kicked out Comolli—it had become clear that he was a sort of Superman.
Later, Comolli took his Moneyball methods to St. Etienne in France. St. Etienne almost never bought players, because it had no money. Rather, its main financial decisions were about whether to offer players new contracts. If you had a starting player who was thirty years old, and you gave him a new two-year contract, that might cost you $3 million. At thirty, the guy was still good. But how could you know if he’d still be good enough at thirty-two? Comolli would look at his statistical trends: In recent seasons, had the player been making 10 percent fewer sprints each year, was the pace of his sprints falling sharply year by year, was his number of passes in the opponents’ half declining sharply? If the trends were all heading downward fast, you wouldn’t offer him a new contract. That’s Moneyball: You never pay for past performance, only for future performance.
Men like Forde and Comolli were learning from Beane how to apply data to sport. But, I ask Beane in his junk room, did he learn anything from European soccer clubs? After all, they too had built up over a century’s worth of sporting know-how.
Beane has to think about that one. Eventually, he says, “They were so much further ahead of us in terms of nutrition.” He thinks some more, and finally he has it: “They dress nicer. I like the fact that when they walk in they all have their blazers on. We could never get our guys to do that.”
Otherwise, watching television every day on his battered sofa in the junk room, Beane sees a pretty emotional sport.
Normally Beane follows European soccer from a distance of 5,000 miles. A year ago he told me, in much the same tones of wistful awe in which he’d spoken of David Goldblatt, that he hoped one day to meet Arsène Wenger. Then one day it happened. In October 2010 Forde organized a conference about sports and data at Chelsea. Beane was flown in from California, to be on a panel with Wenger chaired by Comolli. I too got a small role at the conference: as interviewer of an obscure Qatari soccer official, Mohammad bin Hammam, who had then not yet brought the World Cup to his country or announced his candidacy to replace Sepp Blatter as president of FIFA.
The first night of the conference, about a hundred of us participants gathered for dinner at Marco, Marco Pierre White’s restaurant at Stamford Bridge. At the cocktails I spotted Beane: I looked vertically upward, and there he was. So he wasn’t just a literary character. We began chatting about soccer and data. Comolli joined us, and the three of us sat down at a table. The first course was served. We kept talking about soccer and data. After a while I looked up and saw that the restaurant was empty. Everyone else had finished eating and left. Hours had passed without us noticing. Though I discovered that evening that Beane was a Republican, he turned out to be just as much fun in real life as in the pages of Moneyball.
The next day Beane debated Wenger—or so I’m told, because on Wenger’s orders no journalists were admitted. But afterward the two men came to the room reserved for speakers, accompanied, oddly enough, by Tony Blair’s soccer-mad former right-hand man, Alastair Campbell. They planted themselves on the sofa and sat talking (I timed them) for three hours. The two soul mates had found each other. (Campbell said nothing. As a former member of the Blair government, he was probably happy just not to be kicked out.)
On the last morning of the conference I had breakfast at Stamford Bridge with Beane and Comolli. Beane showed up with the morning papers tucked underneath his arm. The news had broken that John Henry, the Red Sox owner, was also in England. He’d flown over to buy Liverpool. Beane had sent him an e-mail suggesting they meet, but it wasn’t going to work out, as Beane had to fly back to California that afternoon. However, Beane was enthused by the impending deal. Henry had perfected Moneyball at the Red Sox. Imagine, mused Beane, if he could do something similar in soccer. Beane said, “John understands numbers, and in sport it’s about numbers. John is a very rational person.”
“He tried to hire you,” I said.
“Well, that’s the irrational part of him,” said Beane.
I live in Paris. A few weeks after that breakfast in London, I was in a café eating my morning croissant when I noticed a new story in the French sports daily L’Equipe: Comolli was leaving St. Etienne. The paper said he was unhappy at the club, but it also predicted that later that day he’d be joining Liverpool. So it proved. It was clear where John Henry had been getting his advice on soccer hires. Henry was indeed planning a “Moneyball of soccer,” hampered only by his near-total ig
norance of the sport. It must have been useful to be able to ask Mr. Moneyball himself to point him in the right direction.
A couple of months after Comolli moved to Anfield, he used data to sell Fernando Torres and buy Andy Carroll and Luis Suarez. “When you find yourself handling three of the biggest transfers in English football history in the last days of the market, precise figures allow you not to do that blind,” he told a British newspaper.
A lot of calls now ping back and forth between Anfield and the Coliseum. In the A’s’ junk room, Beane says, “Damien, you can call him anytime. He’s up all the time. I’ll e-mail him and it will be two in the morning there, and he’ll be up and he’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m up, watching the A’s game,’ because he watches a lot of A’s games on the computer. The guy never sleeps.” It seems that Beane has become an unpaid consultant to Liverpool’s Moneyball project.
At the end of the interview in the junk room, I give Beane an old baseball card of himself to sign. “Billy Beane: Outfield,” it says. It’s from 1987, when he was back in the Majors with the Minnesota Twins. The season before, according to the card, he’d batted just .213. (Of course, the card doesn’t record what we know now is his far more significant, “OPS,” the combination of on-base percentage and slugging percentage.)
Beane takes the card from me and studies it. “I think this is at the old Cleveland Stadium,” he says, even though about the only one thing you can see behind the young Beane in the picture is a batting cage. “You know, you take these when you’re twenty-two, and you don’t think that you’re going to be immortalized for the rest of your life, and you sure wish you’d shaved that day.” I realize then how much of his life he’s spent being seen through a slightly distorted medium: through baseball cards, and through that Greek statue of a body, Michael Lewis, and now Brad Pitt.
Beane goes off with the A’s stadium manager to find a sandwich. Then he comes back, and he and Farhan sprawl on the battered sofas of the junk room and talk soccer, baseball, data, and irrationality off the record for half the afternoon.
PART III
Some Other Soccer Men
Anthony Minghella
April 1998
When Anthony Minghella was filming The English Patient in the North African desert, the Portsmouth Football Mail was delivered to him every week. Usually, the news was bad. “Part of following a club is accepting that it can have bad spells lasting years,” says Minghella. Or in his case a lifetime.
The English Patient won nine Oscars, but Portsmouth, his team, is now odds on to be relegated to Division Two, the third tier of English soccer. The game against Ipswich is crucial. And so Minghella, his father, and his young son troop into Fratton Park, as the family has done for decades.
These three swarthy gentlemen stand out among the pasty locals. Minghella grew up on the nearby Isle of Wight, where his father made ice cream, but the family origins are Italian, and several Minghellas were interned in the UK during the war as enemy aliens. The director’s father, a chirpy old man born in Scotland, was spared that.
With their mixed descent, the Minghellas could have been characters in The English Patient, which features a Hungarian count, a Sikh sapper, a French Canadian nurse, and an English rose. At Fratton Park all that seems far away. Whereas the film is beautiful—set in Tuscany and the Sahara, featuring Ralph Fiennes and Kristin Scott Thomas—the Portsmouth fans tend toward obesity, and the day is unfeasibly cold. Yet Minghella is entirely at home here: he is a genuine Portsmouth nut, not a celebrity masquerading. He gives me a ham-and-mustard sandwich and fills me in on the merits of the team’s fullbacks. In his contentment he resembles the Scott Thomas character lying in a warm bath with her lover, Almasy:
“When were you most happy?” Almasy asks.
“Now,” she replies.
“When were you most sad?”
“Now.”
“What do you love?”
“Portsmouth Football Club,” Minghella might have answered, but Scott Thomas says, “Water. Your handwriting.”
Sadly, at Fratton Park it is clear from kickoff that Ipswich is much the slicker side. Within minutes a Portsmouth defender is forced to commit a vicious foul.
“Good for you!” shouts Minghella.
I ask him about Alan Ball, Portsmouth’s new manager, famous for producing teams that manage simultaneously to play ugly soccer and lose. “I don’t want to talk about my attitude to Alan Ball,” Minghella says, perhaps worried that I will take Ball to a showing of his next film. “Do I get frustrated? Heartbreaks! You want so much for them to play good soccer, more than anything else.” He wishes Portsmouth could find a continental European manager.
I ask him to tell me about his next film, but just then David Johnson scores for Ipswich. Minghella crumbles. As Almasy phrases it, “My organs are packing up. I’m a bit of toast.”
After the goal, the Portsmouth crowd starts chanting “Play Up Pompey” and Minghella joins in. “Portsmouth have performed mediocrely for decades,” he says, “but it’s supported as if it were a great club.” Eighteen thousand passionate spectators: Minghella, who wrote plays before he moved into film, says there is a lesson here for theater. “If you look at a soccer game, it speaks actively to its constituency. But if you are writing a play, you don’t know who exactly it is for.”
But the quaint 1950s chant fails to stimulate the appalling Portsmouth team. This is no game for a neutral; Minghella apologizes to me.
“I’m enjoying watching Ipswich,” I reply.
“That was a terrible thing to say.”
He recalls Terry Venables, the former England manager, taking over for a doomed spell as Portsmouth’s chairman. “We had such hope,” says Minghella. “There’s always some messiah around the corner, some rock billionaire.”
His wistfulness seems strange. After all, Minghella has just directed a film that has grossed more than $300 million. Has the club never asked him to help out? “I’d love to be a director,” he says—he means a soccer club director, not a film director—“but I’m sure it would make absolutely no difference. I don’t have that kind of financial wherewithal.”
Halftime comes with the score still only 1–0—Ipswich is being merciful—but the future looks grim. A man in front of us opens Bernard Crick’s biography of George Orwell.
We eat more ham-and-mustard sandwiches, and Minghella tells me about his next project. Called The Talented Mr. Ripley, a film about Americans arriving in Europe in the 1950s, it will star Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow and goes into preproduction in Italy in a few days. Much of the planning seems to involve trying to get tickets to the World Cup in France this summer.
Soccer also dominated the making of The English Patient. While Minghella edited the film in Berkeley, California, he would drive to San Francisco at six in the morning to watch a satellite feed of Euro 96. Every time England played he would go berserk, watched by an aghast Michael Ondaatje, author of the antitribal novel on which the film is based.
Will Minghella ever put soccer into a film?
I love the fact that soccer is entirely apart from my working life. But soccer has been a useful paradigm for thinking about the work I am doing.
Soccer has high drama, but in the most rigid of forms. In soccer there is unity of time, place, and action, as Aristotle recommended for drama. Very few outcomes are possible—it’s rare for more than four or five goals to be scored in a game—yet moment by moment it is very exciting. That is a real lesson to writers. I wish every film had as exciting a shape as most soccer matches.
Minghella, his son, and I turn to the subject of our playing careers and discover that we are all right-halves. The English Patient damaged Minghella’s chances of soccer fame—he broke his ankle on the set—but one day he plans to get fit and start again. He assures me that Daniel Day Lewis, the actor, is also a keen player. As for Matt Damon, “I gather his great sadness in life is that he wasn’t tall enough to play basketball.”
Nowadays, Minghella just watch
es his son, even if he slightly regrets the fact that the boy supports Manchester United. His son offers, “I support United, but I like it more when Portsmouth win, because they don’t win so often.” Minghella is pleased.
In the second half Portsmouth improves, led by its center-forward, John Aloisi, an Italian Australian. Later, Ball sends on Paul Hall, a Jamaican forward. “Incomprehensible that Hall didn’t start,” Minghella complains.
Has he met many of the players? “I’ve said hello to Andy Awford a couple of times. And I once presented some awards with Paul Walsh.”
Suddenly, just as Portsmouth seems certain to equalize, Ball takes off Aloisi. “Extraordinary decision,” mumbles Minghella. Indeed, Portsmouth immediately collapses.
The Ipswich winger, Bobby Petta, a Dutchman of Indonesian Christian descent, starts tearing Portsmouth’s defense apart, and only boredom and laziness keep Ipswich from scoring a few more.
The match ends, Portsmouth has lost, and Division Two looms. The three Minghellas smile wanly. Minghella’s father distributes kisses and disappears.
“Grandpa always looks like he doesn’t care,” says Minghella’s son.
“Oh, he cares a lot,” says Minghella. “He’s just better at hiding it than we are.”
Minghella tells me that Portsmouth might yet survive, as long as rival strugglers Manchester City lose to Middlesbrough and . . . But he looks distraught, like Almasy being taken prisoner as his lover lies dying in a desert cave.
“The afternoon got colder,” says Minghella. Or as the count phrased it, “You can’t kill me. I died years ago.”