Neville Wells/25.07.2010

Lots of my Turkish friends have been asking me why England were such a disappointing failure at the World Cup. The more I thought about the question the more complex the answer became. I also realized that when finding reasons or making excuses for England I had to take a look at the other big World Cup flops such as France and Italy and the dark horses such as Uruguay and Ghana.

Of course success and failure are relative terms which come about because of expectations and surely the best judge of expectations would be the free market. Before the tournament began I spent some time looking at the total market value of some of the squads in the tournament (well, it’s better than train-spotting). The first thing you notice is that there aren’t any definitive statistics. In the evaluations I looked at the value of England squad ranked variously from second to fourth (however as you would expect every survey valued the Spanish squad at the top way above all the others). So on paper it looked like England could be expected to at least get to the semi-finals, but unfortunately there is a very uneasy relationship between money and football - as Real Madrid demonstrated last season with their spectacular failure to win anything - and I certainly wasn’t willing to risk betting on England. As for Spain, they proved the statistics and everybody else right, so where does that leave us with the correlation between the market value of a squad and the performance on the pitch?  

Official FIFA World Rankings (another matter for discussion) and market value of squads as of 14.07.10

Figures taken from www.transfermarkt.co.uk/

Missing from this chart are Italy and France, ranked 11^th and 21^st respectively according to FIFA rankings and 4^th and 3^rd respectively in terms of market value. There are also some other surprises when we rank according to market value:

Of course determining market value is by no means an objective process. Footballers are not commodities so any value is nominal. In the case of the England squad the figures quoted may be inflated by the fact that the English Premier league is, in the case of domestic players of course, a very insular market indeed. An English Premier League club might splash out x millions on Peter Crouch (valued at ₤10.8m on transfermarkt.co.uk) or Germaine Defoe (valued at ₤15.3m), but it is highly unlikely that anybody in Spain, Germany or Italy would. They have an ample supply of players at this level available much cheaper and willing to play for much lower wages. At present the only English footballer of note playing in a major European league is Jermaine Pennant at Real Zaragoza and he went there on a free transfer after his contract with Liverpool expired in 2008. English clubs are willing to pay 20% or 30% over the odds (some would say much more) for a player who won’t have the usual difficulties that foreign players have getting used to life in the UK and playing a different style of football (away to Wigan on a freezing Wednesday evening can’t be particularly appealing to a Brazilian international, no wonder Robinho went home). The only players likely to go abroad are the Galacticos such as Gerard and Rooney, following in the footsteps of the two most notable exiles of the last decade Owen and Beckham.

When we take a look at other national teams the greatest overachievers by far are semi-finalists Uruguay, who don’t even make the top 15, with a market value of just over £125m, but that can be explained away by saying that there is always one dark horse at each World Cup. With lesser known teams there is also the chance of new talent coming to light resulting in a sudden jump in the market value of the squad. It might be worth taking a look at the market value of Uruguay in a few months time to see if there has been a notable increase. Russia are the most valuable team that didn’t manage to get into the finals despite, take note Turkish FA, being managed by the legendary Guus Hiddink. Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Portugal all failed to reach the knock-out stages. However, when we take a closer look at the market value of each squad what we see is that the value is not spread throughout the side. In the case of Ivory Coast there are three players, Drogba, Kolo Toure and Yaya Toure who account for nearly 40% of the total market value, Cameroon have Eto accounting for a whopping 27% and Portugal have Ronaldo making up 25% of theirs. On the other hand the most impressive African nation, quarter-finalists Ghana, have a market value of just £54m. So although we know that one or two stars don’t make a team it is certainly worth stressing that they do distort the market value figures.     

Even if we do accept that the market valuation of the England squad is seriously exaggerated (along with their FIFA ranking, another discussion for another day), it is fair to say that England grossly underperformed at South Africa 2010, although not as much as the troubled French squad perhaps. English football needs to look more closely not just at itself but also at its European neighbours to see what it is doing right and wrong. The English Premier League is without doubt the best league in the world and the richest, but could it also be the reason for the decline in English football?

As Spain and England both clearly demonstrated in very different ways it takes more than a team of highly-paid stars to win a World Cup. Even though the market value figures for football teams can clearly be distorted by market conditions or the presence of one or two global super stars, they should still provide us with an indication of where a team should be in the FIFA rankings and how that team can be expected to perform in a major tournament. Finally, hats off to Spain who won the World Cup not just because they had the most valuable squad, but because they played the most consistently good football. They also showed the necessary character to overcome the shock defeat against Switzerland, an event which pulled them together as a squad (in contrast to England who seemed to be on the verge of going into a French style meltdown after draws against USA and Algeria). Their success was a team effort, sorry correction squad effort. You could sense the unity from top to bottom. Whatever their market value, it is going to take an exceptional team to stop Spain from building on this success in 2012 and in Brazil in 2014.

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