By David Butler

This year Ed Valentine is conducting an interesting experiment that can be followed on the Beat the Bookies tab. Ed currently works with Opta Sports in Leeds as a football analyst and is using statistical models combined with a decision rule to try and outperform the football betting market.

In a similar vein to the horse racing festivals over the years, Ed is aiming to win ‘fantasy’ money by betting on the outcomes of matches in major European leagues. The teams he can choose were selected at the start of the 15/16 season and are based on (i) the win percentage in their respective league over the last 5 seasons and (ii) the median values of the major online book makers’ favourites for the season. These values were weighted to establish the top four teams in each league. The top two teams were then selected from each of the Big 5 European leagues. This allows Ed to bet on the following clubs each week: Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea, Juventus, Lyon, Manchester City, PSG Roma, Real Madrid and Schalke.

He can only bet on domestic league matches for these teams and he does not have to use all of teams every week. Bets are not made when the selected teams play against each other in their domestic league either. An imaginary amount of €50 is staked every week for win only bets.  The odds used are the best value offered by the main bookmakers in the days prior to kick off. 
 
Below is Ed’s profit-loss chart after 13 gameweeks. As the data shows, even with decision rules that favour the ‘best teams’ and statistical models that predict, it is extremely challenging to win money.  Notably, Chelsea have cost Ed's pot on numerous occasions (as I'm sure they have done for every punter!). There's a long way to go however and while Ed is currently in the domain of losses a large part of the season remains.

By David Butler

Over the last months I've reflected on the trade-off Jack Grealish has made by declaring to play international football for England. In short, I think he has weighed up the costs and benefits of a likely briefer, more lucrative career with England, that has the potential to offer more international success, against a longer but less financially beneficial career with Ireland. Sticking with the Boys in Green could have made him a cult hero, albeit for a nation which will likely be less successful in international competitions.

Although Grealish could not be called up to England's squad for the upcoming friendlies, (as he has to wait until the new year to be granted FIFA clearance) it struck me as interesting that Tottenham's Eric Dier, a player quite close to Grealish in age, made the squad for the first time. I asked myself , what age do English midfielders usually begin their senior international career?

Below is a table that shows members of the current England squad and recent call-ups who were capped. They are ordered by their age (excluding Eric Dier who is yet to be capped at a senior level) . The table also shows the age of each player when they made their senior international debut for England.

Alli, Sterling, Barkley, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Wilshere and Carrick will all have been capped at a younger age than Grealish at a senior international level for England. Although it sounds bizarre, at twenty years and one month Jack Grealish  would not be considered 'young' if he is capped by Roy Hodgson. Raheem Sterling is the same age as him and has already chalked up twenty senior international caps. Ross Barkley is one year older and has twenty-one appearances. The Arsenal men Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Jack Wilshere, two and three years older respectively, have collected over fifty caps between them.

Some English players are capped at a later age and go on to achieve a high number of caps.  James Milner started at twenty-three and now has over fifty caps, and Jordan Henderson began his international career at approximately the same time Grealish might. The Liverpool midfielder currently has twenty-two caps. These instances are rarer however and, expectedly, players that begin their international career later in life generally collect fewer caps.

Jack Grealish will have to develop significantly to compete with the current crop of English talent. He will probably have to leave Aston Villa - a clear trend is apparent in the clubs the players above are contracted to.  A fair amount of Grealish's competitors are younger and have more senior international experience than him already. What's more, the table above just looks at midfield players, many forwards players such as Theo Walcott can play multiple roles (debuted at seventeen years and two months as England's youngest ever senior international). Neither does the table consider players outside of recent squads that could potentially be recalled (Ashley Young, debuted at twenty-two years  and four months) or  the next wave of English talent. It  probably won't be long before the next batch of young lions such as Jordan Ibe (Liverpool - nineteen years old), Ruben Loftus-Cheek (Chelsea - nineteen years old) and Josh Onomah (Tottenham - eighteen years old) catch Roy Hodgson's eye.

By Robbie Butler

Last night David Butler, John Considine and I travelled to Kilkenny to attend Kilkenomics. For all three of us it was our debut. Our session of choice - Soccernomics: How the Premiership Could Go Bust. Quite apt I think you’d agree.

The venue was intimate. Cleere’s Bar on Parliament Street. Around 9.30pm the audience was directed to what I think (I may be wrong) was the smoking area at the back of the narrow pub, which had been turned into a temporary theatre (for want of a better word). A small stage with five chairs overlooked about eighty seats packed tightly together. Not the most glamorous setting but what can one expect for €12.

If this was to be compared to a football ground it was pre-Premier League days. Condensed. No frills. Not a prawn sandwich in sight. We were here to listen. There was something nice about that.

The experts on stage were from diverse backgrounds.  An academic, an entrepreneur, a journalist and a politician. What more could one want!? Referee for the night was Irish comedian David O’Doherty.

The kick-off was relaxed. O’Doherty revealed an old Panini sticker album from 1984 and reminisced about the ‘good old days’. The first half ensued with a meandering discussion about the general state of football. Topics included important questions of the day such as Yaya Toure’s birthday cake, Ossie Ardiles memorable move to Spurs, the increase in the number of television channels over the past twenty year, and the ubiquity of football on television today.

At this point it became clear the Premier League will not go bust. Simon Kuper and Peter Antonioni reminded us about the huge appetite for live football and the vast and largely untapped markets in North American and South-East Asia. The potential for growth is enormous. There is, it seems, an absence of diminishing returns from game to game or season to season in the Premier League.

The age of old question of why anyone would buy a football club was raised. The answer? Simple. They are enduring brands that values appreciate. While an owner might not make money season to season it's likely the club can be sold in the future for far more than it was bought for in the first place. 

The second half saw the tempo increase. Maybe the pints were starting to kick in. Former Argentinian Economy Minister Martín Lousteau informed us, in no uncertain terms, that club football in Argentina has gone crap, yet the locals still love it. Despite exporting their best players, fans still flock to watch their beloved Boca Juniors or River Plate, and now combine this love with an appreciation of the Premier League, La Liga and Bundesliga.

Things really heated up when the topic turned to the international game and FIFA. The audience were reminded (by Kuper) just how bad England are, a comment not readily accepted by the English experts on the stage. A two-footed tackle. The audience was then on the receiving end of a similar challenge from Manchester born Mike Driver, who jokingly questioned the Irish-ness of one Tony Cascarino. The irony, of course, is that he was happy to claim the legendary John Barnes as 'one of their own', despite the fact he was born in….hem hem… Kingston, Jamaica.

Before we knew it, O’Doherty, who ably refereed throughout, and provided regular laughs for the crowd, told us a ‘man had appeared with a red light’ meaning the end was neigh. The 4th official's board indicated just two minutes. Some more questions were fielded from the floor with topics such as Jose Mourihno, a European super-league, player migration and fans following players rather than clubs, all  being discussed.

We filed out into the night thereafter. A thoroughly enjoyable discussion. The answer a definitive No. The Premier League will not go bust! 

By John Considine

The back page of last Monday's Financial Times carried a piece about the New Zealand rugby team and a piece about Wayne Rooney.  The Rooney piece was based on data that showed the amount of minutes he has played over his career.  Rooney's stats were compared to other famous strikers.  Only Messi and Ronaldo have played a similar amount of minutes at a similar age.  The context of the piece was Rooney's supposed loss of form.  The Financial Times is not the only media outlet suggesting that Rooney has lost form (of the ones I'm familiar with).  Plenty of sports broadcasters have suggested that Rooney should be dropped.  At the moment the focus is on Rooney.  Soon it will be on another high profile player.  The common theme will be that player X is getting played when he should not, or, alternatively, player Y is not getting played when they should be in the team.

Most people will say that this is par for the course.  No harm done.  It is just a difference of opinion.  However, that is to ignore what it says about us and the way we view the world.  This is particularly so for those who call themselves economists.  Most economists believe that individuals do not make systematic mistakes (behavioural economists would disagree and point to a limited range of situations where individuals make systematic errors).  Economists, even those of the behavioural type, must be surprised by the level of mistakes imputed to managers of sports teams.  I'd imagine there are a fair few economists who regularly think that the manager of the team they support is selecting the wrong players.  How does their view of sporting decision makers tally with their view of decision makers in other settings?

Rather than presuming that Louis van Gaal is making an error by picking Rooney, or Jose Mourinho is making a mistake in dropping Eden Hazard, we could presume they have more information than we do and/or are better at selecting players than we are.  In these circumstances we might wonder what it that makes them select Rooney (or drop Hazard).  Operating along these lines we might presume that Steve Hansen picked the correct starting 15 for the Rugby World Cup final.  We might presume he was correct in not starting Sonny Bill Williams for most of the games that mattered.  By contrast, Hansen always selected McCaw and Carter in the starting 15 for important games.

Hansen's decisions are questioned less because they won.  Van Gaal and Mourinho are not having the best of times.  But consistency, at least for economists, suggests we should presume the manager gets it right most of the time.

by Declan Jordan

​In a recent post my colleague Robbie Butler raised the thorny issue of FIFA country rankings. He bemoaned the problem of countries achieving a higher world rank than should perhaps be warranted because some countries will play more competitive matches against tougher opposition because of their continental affiliation than others. He’s right of course. But the problem of games against tougher opposition is perhaps one that some countries might welcome.
 
The FIFA ranking (or to give them their full title the FIFA/Coca Cola World Ranking) is largely a marketing exercise and is of little consequence. Teams from different continents rarely play each other. In the World Cup finals, teams from various continents are generally kept apart in the group stage draw. This means the overall ranking has little impact, with a country’s position relative to other countries in the same confederation being the critical aspect. For this reason, comparing positions across confederations is of limited value.
 
It does however prompt comparison of how countries accumulate ranking points and inevitably calls into question the conduct of competitive qualification tournaments in each confederation. I have written before about my views on the unfairness of the African qualification process relative to Europe and South America. The African and European contexts are similar to the extent that both confederations have about the same number of affiliated members (54 and 55 respectively). The root of the unfairness lies in huge disparity between the number of qualifiers each continent has – Europe 13 has spaces (not including hosts Russia) and Africa has 5.
 
The African qualifying campaign for Russia 2018 has already begun, and for 13 countries has already ended. In the middle of this month it will have ended for another 20 countries – this is 30 months before the finals will be held. For me this was brought home when looking at the fixtures for my football-mad son, who is Ethiopian, and seeing that they managed to overcome Sao Tome e Principe after being surprisingly beaten 1-0 in the first leg. Their reward is a game against Congo (the eighth ranked African team) in two weeks' time. It seems he has a much better chance supporting Ireland.

Could football fans and national associations in Europe countenance a situation where the lowest 26 ranked teams would have a play-off to continue with World Cup qualifying and risk being eliminated from the World Cup in October 2015 for a 2018 World Cup Finals tournament? The bottom 26 nations in Europe currently includes Turkey, Serbia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Finland, Norway, and more importantly the Republic of Ireland.
 
The first play-offs in Africa were held last month and 13 countries have been eliminated from the 2018 World Cup – having played two matches, one at home. The second round puts the 13 winners from the first round with the remaining 27 African nations who play in a home and away qualifier – the 20 successful teams will progress to play in five groups of four teams with the winner of each group going to the finals in Russia. This means the majority of African countries (33 out of 53 in the current campaign) have less than four World Cup qualifying matches and two at home. 
 
(This contrasts hugely with the South American qualifying campaign where teams play 18 games in a league format with the top four  In fact, Ecuador and Uruguay both won less than half of their matches (7 from 16) in qualifying for the 2014 World Cup – there were 16 games in qualifying last time because Brazil qualified as hosts).
 
The argument of course is that the European teams are better and so deserve more places at the finals (one hopes it is not based on market size or Asia and Africa will soon be entitled to a lot more spaces on that criteria). The FIFA rankings can be used to justify the superiority of the European (and South American) nations. However, this is a circular argument where nations can achieve more points by playing more competitive games, with some of them against higher ranking teams). Playing these (and more of them) fixtures makes teams better – or at least gives them an opportunity to improve more rapidly. Is it possible that Wales’ dramatic improvement from 112th in the world in 2010 to 8th in 2015 could have been achieved in a qualifying environment like Africa’s? This shows the benefit of having games against the 'best' to develop players at international level.