Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski Page B

let him say a word about it.
    Lyon’s method for choosing players is so obvious and smart that it’s surprising all clubs don’t use it. The theory of the “wisdom of crowds”
    says that if you aggregate many different opinions from a diverse group of people, you are much more likely to arrive at the best opinion than if you just listen to one specialist. For instance, if you ask a diverse crowd to guess the weight of an ox, the average of their guesses will be very nearly right. If you ask a diverse set of gamblers to bet on, say, the outcome of a presidential election, the average of their bets is likely to be right, too. (Gambling markets have proved excellent predictors of all sorts of outcomes.) The wisdom of crowds fails when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough. This is often the case in American sports. But in European soccer, opinions tend to come from many different countries, and that helps ensure diversity.
    Clough and Taylor at least were a crowd of two. However, the typical decision-making model in English soccer is not “wisdom of crowds,” but short-term dictatorship. At most clubs the manager is treated as a sort of divinely inspired monarch who gets to decide everything until he is sacked. Then the next manager clears out his predecessor’s signings at a discount. Lyon, notes a rival French club president G E N T L E M E N P R E F E R B L O N D S
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    with envy, never has expensive signings rotting on the bench. It never has revolutions at all. It understands that the coach is only a “temp.” OL
    won its seven consecutive titles with four different coaches—Jacques Santini, Paul Le Guen, Gerard Houllier, and Alain Perrin—none of whom, judging by their subsequent records, is exactly a Hegelian world-historical individual. When a coach leaves Lyon, not much changes. No matter who happens to be sitting on the bench, the team always plays much the same brand of attacking soccer (by French standards).
    Emmanuel Hembert grew up in Lyon supporting OL when it was still in the second division. Now, as head of the London sports practice of the management consultancy A. T. Kearney, he is always citing the club as an example to his clients in soccer. “A big secret of a successful club is stability,” explains Hembert over coffee in Paris. “In Lyon, the stability is not with the coach, but with the sports director, Lacombe.”
    Another Lyon rule: the best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties . Aulas says, “We buy young players with potential who are considered the best in their country, between twenty and twenty-two years old.” It’s almost as if he had read Moneyball . The book keeps banging away about a truth discovered by Bill James, who wrote, “College players are a better investment than high school players by a huge, huge, laughably huge margin.”
    Baseball clubs traditionally preferred to draft high school players.
    But how good you are at seventeen or eighteen is a poor predictor of how good you will become as an adult. By definition, when a player is that young there is still too little information to judge him. Beane himself had been probably the hottest baseball prospect in the United States at seventeen, but he was already declining in his senior year at high school, and he then failed in the major leagues. Watching the 2002
    draft as the A’s general manager, he “punches his fist in the air” each time rival teams draft schoolboys.
    It’s the same in soccer, where brilliant teenagers tend to disappear soon afterward. Here are a few recent winners of the Golden Ball for best player at the under-seventeen World Cup: Philip Osundo of Nigeria, William de Oliveira of Brazil, Nii Lamptey of Ghana, Scottish 70

    goalkeeper James Will, and Mohammed al-Kathiri of Oman. Once upon a time they must have all been brilliant, but none of them made it as adults. (Will ended up a policeman in the Scottish Highlands playing for his village team.) The most famous