Soccer Men

by Simon Kuper

  “Just watch that goal,” Beane instructed the player, and because Beane is the boss and six foot four and still sports the Charles Atlas physique that once lured half the baseball and football scouts in the United States to his parents’ house in San Diego (his exercise machine stands beside the battered sofa), the A’s player watched the replay. And the second replay. Finally the A’s player got it: That skinny bald little European with knock-knees was as great an athlete as the A’s player himself. “Wow,” said the A’s player, though maybe he said it only to please the boss.

  Like millions of other Americans this past decade, Beane has come to follow soccer with the almost unhealthy fervor of a convert. “I watch as many of the games as I can,” he tells us this morning in the junk room. Often he’s up watching at five thirty in the morning. Sometimes he has to battle his wife for the remote control: He’ll be watching Fox Soccer Channel, and she wants to see the baseball highlights on SportsCenter. However, his study of soccer goes much further. On his morning commute through the northern Californian hills, or while the A’s are playing in the evening, he often listens to obscure soccer podcasts—for up to five hours a day, according to the Toronto Star. “I’m a bit of a junkie,” he admits.

  And he’s also a soccer revolutionary. Five thousand miles from Europe, almost unseen by the media, Beane influences the thinking of Chelsea and Manchester City. He regards Arsène Wenger as a soul mate, and you could even call him the brain behind John Henry’s Liverpool. Beane and his followers are now changing soccer just as he previously changed baseball.

  Sometime in late 2009, an e-mail arrived in my in-box from Billy Beane. “Sorry to intrude,” it began. Chelsea’s performance director, Mike Forde, had given him my address. Beane had read my book Soccernomics and wanted to chat. Of course he’d read the book. He reads all soccer books. He was once raving to me about David Goldblatt’s 978-page history of soccer, The Ball is Round, and when I said that if he liked I could put him in touch with Goldblatt, he exclaimed, with what sounded like genuine excitement, “That would be great!” In fact, he seemed to admire Goldblatt in much the same way that Goldblatt and I admire great athletes like Beane.

  Beane and I began phoning and e-mailing each other to chat about soccer. I first met him in real life in October 2010, at a conference in London. He turned out to be an unusual mix: an amiable Californian, with a boyish quiff and big eyes behind his round glasses, and at the same time a bonehard American businessman. I found the contact enjoyable, but also slightly surreal. I had trouble seeing Beane as a real person. Like millions of other readers, I already knew him from Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball. To me Beane was above all a great literary character, like Winston Smith or Holden Caulfield. Once we became e-mail buddies, I was often reminded of Woody Allen’s story The Kugelmass Episode, in which sweaty old twentieth-century Professor Kugelmass finds himself having an affair with Madame Bovary from the nineteenth-century novel. Sometimes, when Beane rang me from the highway in the California morning, I knew what he was going to say before he said it. I’d already read it in Moneyball.

  We know most of the life story from the book: son of a naval officer in San Diego grows up to be brilliant teenage athlete, a living Greek statue, courted by Major League baseball clubs and college football programs. In the junk room this morning, I ask him whether as a kid he ever played soccer.

  “Not once,” says Beane.

  Did he never even kick a ball?

  “We had a hybrid game at junior high which we called speedball, which would really disgust anybody from outside the United States. You could actually catch it in the air and throw it. I did have a Pele poster on my wall from the Cosmos. Most Americans in the ‘70s knew Pele. They weren’t quite sure what he did, but they knew of him.”

  In the classic American high school divide, Beane was both jock and nerd. His parents, who had married young and never had a shot at college, wanted Billy to use his brain. “Our family wasn’t particularly well off,” says Beane. “Really, the reason my dad introduced me to sports was the ability to acquire a college scholarship. It was just a way to pay for college.”

  That’s why in 1980 the Beane family was excited when Stanford tried to recruit him as a quarterback. Beane likes to joke that if he’d accepted the scholarship, you’d never have heard of the guy who was then Stanford’s quarterback, John Elway. The A’s media officer, a feisty lady who used to work at Stanford, likes to retort that if Beane had gone to Stanford he’d have spent three years riding the bench behind Elway and nobody would ever have heard of Billy Beane. Anyway, Beane turned down Stanford. The New York Mets were offering him $125,000 to play baseball, and the military middle-class kid felt he ought to take the money. As Lewis records in Moneyball , a family friend advised the Beanes to sink the $125,000 in a real-estate project. The project tanked, and the $125,000 evaporated. Beane missed out on college.

  “I don’t look at it as a regret now,” he says in the junk room. “I’d say missed opportunity is probably a better word. The people that you’re going to school with, what you’re exposed to in future world leaders, senators—I missed that opportunity, and I don’t think you can really put a price tag on that. But it was a great life lesson.” Beane (although a Republican) has tried never again to make a decision based on money alone.

  As I’ve gotten to know him slightly, I’ve come to think of this missed opportunity as his great formative moment. Over the past thirty years, Beane has created his own Stanford. His scientific revolution in baseball, the clever people and books with which he surrounds himself, and his current deep study of soccer: It all seems to me an attempt to catch up on the education he missed at age eighteen.

  Beane began playing Minor League Baseball, but from the beginning he had inklings of having chosen the wrong profession. He recalls:When I was eighteen, the general manager of the New York Mets was a gentleman named Frank Cashen, a lawyer by trade. And he walked into the park, and there was just a certain air about him. And I remember saying to one of my teammates, ‘I think we’ve got this wrong. We all want to get to the big league; that guy over there in the bow tie is the guy you want to be.’ I wanted to be the guy picking the players. I wanted to be the guy running the club. And as I’ve gotten older, I wanted to be the guy running the business, because it’s such an important part of sports now.

  Beane never became the great player the scouts had seen in him. “As a baseball failure—” I begin my question.

  Beane pulls a pained face: “Can we? . . . Do we have another? . . . Is there a synonym that we can use? How about, ‘My relative success’?”

  He did after all make the Major Leagues. In 1990 he was a twenty-seven-year-old outfielder with the Oakland A’s. That was when he walked into the A’s front office and said he wanted to quit playing and become an advance scout. As Lewis notes in Moneyball, nobody ever quits Major League Baseball at age twenty-seven to become a scout. But Beane wanted to be the guy with the bow tie.

  Naturally, he treated his new career as a kind of further education—graduate school, if you like, at the University of Billy Beane. The great thing was that baseball at the time had recently acquired its very own revolutionary intellectual movement: sabermetrics. The sabermetricians, a grouping of mostly weird-looking nerds whose dean was the Kansas janitor Bill James, were very much outside professional baseball. When Beane became a scout, James was already a cult hero, yet hardly anyone inside the Major Leagues had ever heard of him. But as soon as Beane heard about the sabermetricians, he wanted to read their stuff. To this day he still keeps James’s Baseball Abstracts in his office, as revered relics. “I’ll never throw them away,” he says. “I actually have some of the original ones that almost look like academic papers, typewritten.”

  The story of Moneyball is how Beane became general manager of the A’s and reformed the club along sabermetric lines. “We just stole these ideas from smarter people than ourselves,” he says now, and then corrects himself: “Stole, that’s the wrong w
ord.” (Beane spends a lot of his mental energy trying to find the right words.) “We borrowed these ideas that had been written about even long before Bill James.”

  Beane hired smart young statisticians from the Ivy League, like the twenty-four-year-old Harvard grad Paul Podesta. Their job was to find undervalued players, and to further Billy Beane’s education at the same time. Beane was so proud of their conjuring with numbers that he sometimes forwards their e-mails to his friends, as if to say: go figure. Sometimes, when Beane is very busy, and the nerds want to explain another algorithm, he’ll just say, “Cut to the conclusion.” But mostly he considers them an enrichment of the University of Billy Beane.

  As Moneyball records, stats worked for the A’s. Whereas other clubs did things because they’d always done them that way, the A’s came up with new ways of running a baseball club. They dropped the idiotic ancient strategies of base stealing and sacrifice bunting. They stopped recruiting batters for their batting average and began recruiting them for their much more telling on-base percentage. Whereas other clubs tried to recruit living Greek statues like the eighteen-year-old Billy Beane, the A’s were quite happy to sign fat players. “Big-boned is the term we prefer to use,” chuckles Beane. Always, they were trying to find players who had been undervalued by other clubs. Inevitably, he looks for an analogy in soccer. What the A’s were doing, he says, was “looking for the next Gareth Bale, paying £500 for Gareth Bale and seeing him perform at a certain level and then turning ‘round and selling him.”

  Other people began to notice the A’s. In 2002 John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, tried to lure Beane to Boston. He offered him a minimum of $12.5 million over five years, more than a GM in baseball had ever been paid. Beane first said yes, but then he said no. He wasn’t going to make a decision based on money again. Instead, Henry hired a twenty-eight-year-old Yale graduate named Theo Epstein as GM.

  The A’s never had the money the Red Sox did. Beane says, “We are in a big media area, but we share it with a bigger club. I guess, we were sort of Everton to some extent.”

  “Smaller,” I say. “More like Wigan,” and Beane agrees.

  The Wigan of the Major Leagues punched above its weight for years. The A’s won the American League West four times between 2000 and 2006. With a bit more luck they might have made it to a World Series. (Beane reckons that success in the baseball playoffs, like success in the knockout rounds of a soccer World Cup or Champions League, mostly comes down to luck, because it is decided over so few games.) The A’s weren’t lucky.

  And there the story might have ended, with Beane a minor celebrity at a small club, but for the fact that he had met a clever guy who lived just down the road from the Oakland Coliseum, in Berkeley: Michael Lewis. (I owe a particular debt to Lewis because his first book, Liar’s Poker, explains so clearly what a bond is that it got me through my job interview at the Financial Times in 1994. Seventeen years on, I’m still at the paper.)

  The University of Billy Beane is always on the lookout for visiting professors. Lewis, the master of business books, was the perfect candidate for a man who has educated himself largely from business books. “I consider him both a friend and an incredibly stimulating person to be around,” says Beane. Partly for that reason, and partly because Beane is a canny businessman who knows the value of publicity, he let Lewis hang around at the Coliseum for a year. In 2003 Lewis published Moneyball. Suddenly everyone in baseball knew what Beane and his fat A’s had been doing.

  More and more clubs began to copy them. Baseball, says Beane now, “has turned into more of a science—I think more of a science than even people will publicize.” As German author Christoph Biermann writes in Die Fussball-Matrix , the best book so far on soccer and data, Moneyball is the only book that changed a sport. But Moneyball’s influence goes even further: It changed other sports, too. In 2004 the first NBA team hired a full-time statistician. Now they all have statisticians. And from there, the statistical revolution spread across the Atlantic to sports like rugby, cricket, and even soccer.

  The conquest of baseball by Moneyball methods was formally sealed in 2004, when the Red Sox of John Henry and Theo Epstein won the club’s first World Series since 1918. In 2007 they won another. In a way these were triumphs for Beane, but they weren’t visible triumphs.

  Once almost everyone in baseball went Moneyball, the A’s lost their advantage and stopped punching above their weight. (Those who scoff that Moneyball was wrong because the A’s haven’t been winning lately don’t seem to understand the basic principles of imitation and catch-up.) It’s surely no coincidence that in recent years, as the A’s have tailed off somewhat, Beane has developed an obsession with soccer.

  It began when Beane’s wife had a birthday. Like most men, Beane couldn’t think of a present. He panicked. Luckily, he says, “I had a cheap flight to London. So I said, ‘Hey, honey, we’re going to London for your birthday.’”

  “I didn’t go over to London anticipating falling in love with soccer,” he claims now. But inevitably, he did treat the trip as a sort of seminar in English culture. Every morning in London he’d study the British newspapers. He noticed that they barely ran a word about the NFL or baseball. Instead, they just went on about soccer all the time. On romantic strolls through town with his wife, Beane noticed that in front of almost every pub was a chalkboard with the times of that day’s televised soccer matches. From the A’s junk room he recalls, “I’m a big college football fan here, and it was very similar to how college football is in the South: SEC football where you have this passion and you have a large number of massive fans in this small area.”

  Back home in California, he started studying for his major in soccer. “I just literally—and it’s been going on for a decade—have read every piece of literature I could find on it,” he says. “The history of baseball’s part of my DNA. Ironically, the history of the Football Association is almost identical in terms of length as Major League Baseball. So I had this whole new sport that I had to learn 150 years of history, and instead of starting at age five I started at a much older age. It’s never stopped for me. It continues because I have so much to catch up with.”

  But Beane is a jock as well as a nerd, and the other thing that drew him to soccer was the athleticism of the players. It turned out they weren’t little wimps at all. Watching them, Beane saw, “These are the exact same guys that are playing our sports. They just chose this sport. Had they grown up in the United States, they would be playing at the highest level at whatever sport they did.” For instance, when other Americans ask him what this guy Lionel Messi is like, Beane will say, “Well, just imagine if you had Barry Sanders—who’s one of the greatest running backs in the history of the NFL—his quickness and his ability to change direction, with the vision of Steve Nash on a basketball court. That’s Lionel Messi.”

  Just around the time that Beane got interested in soccer, something fortuitous happened: People in soccer got interested in him. Mike Forde, a Briton then working as performance director for Bolton Wanderers, who happened to have gone to college in Beane’s hometown, San Diego, and who loved American sports, read Moneyball. “To be able to make contact with these people is really something that would have never happened had the book never been published,” says Beane. Forde visited the Coliseum, where Beane bombarded him with questions about soccer. Only right near the end did Forde manage to steer the conversation to what Beane did at the A’s.

  Frenchman Damien Comolli, who had worked for Wenger at Arsenal, and then briefly been technical director of Spurs, also dropped by. What the visitors really wanted to know was: How do you use stats to evaluate sportsmen? If Moneyball had worked in baseball, might it have some use in soccer?

  Beane became friendly with Comolli, Forde, and a German expat in California named Jürgen Klinsmann. When Klinsmann later became manager of the German national team, he hired more sports scientists than anyone in soccer had ever seen (some of them Americans, which was another taboo) an
d guided Germany to a surprising third place at the World Cup of 2006. Afterward Klinsmann joined Bayern Munich and sent Beane a Bayern shirt with BILLY BEANE on the back. Beane was happy with the shirt, but admits he is too self-conscious to wear it into the local Starbucks.

  Beane had become a soccer junkie. However, he still spent his days surrounded by baseball junkies paid to think and talk about baseball all the time. That couldn’t last. The University of Billy Beane needed a small soccer faculty. One day, when the A’s were looking for a new young statistician, Beane interviewed an MIT economics graduate named Farhan Zaidi.

  At this point in the conversation, Beane summons Farhan and his laptop to the junk room. Farhan is a cheery, small, round brown guy with a sense of humor. He’s the kind of person you’d expect to meet late one night after a gig in a bar in a college town, not in a professional sports club. At MIT he specialized in behavioral economics (“Like that’s real useful,” teases Beane). But when Farhan came for his job interview at the A’s, Beane quizzed him on one topic: Oasis, the favorite band of both men. When it then transpired that Farhan was a soccer junkie, too, he was hired. “I tried to direct the conversation in each of those directions,” Farhan admits now.

  In between crunching baseball stats, the two of them have been talking soccer ever since. As Farhan says, “We spend so much time together that if all we ever talked about was the numbers on spreadsheets, we would have killed each other a long time ago.”

  Farhan had been to the World Cups of 1998 and 2002. When the World Cup 2006 in Germany came around, they both reasoned that they really ought to go, even if it happened to fall in the middle of the baseball season. Together with the A’s owner Lew Wolff, they played hookie and flew over for eight days. “We were just like college kids with backpacks, shorts, going to every match we could,” Beane recalls.