Buy Soccer Players Now

One of the most fascinating things for sports fans is how the main the managers and coaches make decisions for recruitment of players. related to this is how fans and enthusiastic team owners judge the performance of players. Recently, I read this book by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski and confirmed a number of things about the management and economics of soccer. The authors use as data analysis approach to answer a number of questions that many soccer fans and club managers consider as obvious.

Among the nuggets of wisdom is that the choice of players is not as objective as should be because clubs overpay for blond players and those who have performed well in a major international tournaments.  with this in mind, I have been setting my eyes to see whether managers will again be fooled by performances during the World Cup tournament in South Africa in June. Arsene Wenger, the manager of the Arsenal Football Club has just confirmed that he has commenced negotiations for players and expects to conclude discussion before commencement of that tournament. Indeed, he states publicly that his intention is to avoid the inflated prices that would result from performances during the tournament. the authors mention that this is one of the mangers who trusts data and his economics reasoning above the conventional wisdom. What surprises me is that there will be the inevitable scramble for a few players who perform well after that tournament while the information shows that that is a poor predictor of longer-term performance.