Practice makes perfect — but a few bob helps too
Old friends fill the TV screen for the eighth night on the trot: O’Herlihy, Dunphy, Giles — and like a wedding invitation; plus one. We’ve just watched 90 minutes of intriguing, incident-filled World Cup football between a muscular west African side and a technically-gifted outfit from a small central European mountain top.
Giles it has to be said, is not in the habit of Googling the names of centre-halves who ply their trade in the Russian second tier. Dunphy — though he likes the bit of La Liga of a Sunday evening — is not interested in dissecting the action between two dozen strangers for too long.
Soon, with Bill happy to facilitate a more general chat, we’re deep in a barstool economics seminar where the consensus is soon formed: poor countries produce better players.
“When I was a lad,” Giles has said more than once on RTÉ through the years, “we went out and played for hours in the Liberties — we had nothing else to do, Bill.”
“It’s an escape route from poverty,” Dunphy, and many others, have argued, “the lads from developing nations just want it more.”
I realise we’re scratching the bottom of long-drained barrels here... but is there a silver lining in the economic storms at our doorstep, as Bob Dylan almost said? Now that we’re poorer, will we produce better football teams, at least?
“Dunphy is wrong,” says Simon Kuper, a columnist with the Financial Times and co-author of the acclaimed Soccernomics: Why England Lose, Why Germany and Brazil Win. “Essentially there are three factors that decide whether you’re going to be successful on the football pitch: wealth, population and length of soccer-playing experience.
“Having money is a huge advantage. If you look at Africa — and you have guys aren’t going to end up like a typical African country, of course — but a player goes into a training camp and the conditions are bad, the expert coaching isn’t available, computer data which is increasingly important is non-existent, you can’t scout and talk to your players as easily if you’re the manager. There’s a million disadvantages.
“But as well as that we’ve found that wealth correlates with organisation; the best coaches and infrastructure come with money. If you’re in Nigeria, the chances of being first discovered and then coached properly are much, much shorter than Holland, for example.
“But here’s the contradiction. In rich countries the best players come from the poorest backgrounds. So in France you see black kids from ghettos or children of immigrants making up the national team.
“That’s not because they’re poor, there’s a few factors at play: you’re more likely to play outside because of cramped living conditions, typically there’s less pressure to do homework, you have few other leisure pursuits like computer games so you practice more. And if you want to be a professional footballer, you have to practice.”
So Giles was right. Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, his book on geniuses and how they’re produced, coined a term for it: the 10,000-hour rule — the amount of time one must practice before they become expert. The Leeds United legend would’ve hopped a ball off the terrace gables for more than that as a lad I’d guess.
“You want to get a situation where kids are encouraged to go out and play on estates,” continues Kuper — who is based in the multi-ethnic suburbs of Paris, “This readjustment in Ireland is not going to be that dramatic. What is it? 10-15% of GDP? It’s not going to be that drastic either way. I don’t think it’s going to make a huge difference to the amount of points you’ll collect in European qualifiers.
“But in order to improve, think of Germany as the ultimate in best practice at the moment — they have absolutely hundreds of the best youth academies coaching players in the best way. And I just don’t think that Ireland is going to find the money to make that investment in the next few years.”
Yeah, you think?
This week, as some of our wealthiest young men dipped in and out of fluorescent cones in Malahide ahead of tonight’s bread and circuses performance at the Aviva, Minister for Children Barry Andrews said that child benefit for high earners should be looked at as part of this year’s budget. Who knows how long the payment in any form will last at all?
But with the harsh, unprejudiced ramifications of unemployment, cuts in salaries and increased taxes the lunch boxes of the nation’s children are that bit lighter or filled with cheaper, less nutritious alternatives. Will that mean that those bodies filling the green jersey in 10 or 15 years’ time will be at another disadvantage?
“Diet is going to be a problem,” admits Kuper, “If you take as an extreme example the US — which has a large obesity issue with kids. I don’t know the figures but say you have to strike out roughly a quarter of youth population because of obesity — okay so you have a smaller pool.
“In Ireland you have a very small pool anyway and if obesity becomes an issue then the pool shrinks more.
“But that aside, I think your biggest disadvantage is being at the margins of Europe — and following the British football tradition — which as we know is not a very healthy tradition of football.”
And I thought it was something to do with the Eurozone.
* adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell
