When did soccer become modern (and how this explains the presidential race)

Chris Oates
Aug 8, 2017 · 7 min read

One of the biggest difficulties in social science is answering questions about today’s world, when the only data we have to consult is from some point in the past.

The more data we have, the better we can construct models of the world, so we want to go back in our data collection as far as possible. But the older the data is, the greater chance it’s no longer applicable to today’s world, and our models become useless. For example, if we’re looking at average annual car crashes, it doesn’t make much sense to collect data from before the car was invented.

This is one of the sources of the current biggest car crash: the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

Republicans in 2015 and 2016 assumed that Donald Trump would fail, because all the past data said that people like him failed. But that data didn’t capture the state of the GOP after seven years of obstructionism and twenty years of Fox News.

Strategists for Bush, Rubio, and Cruz missed this because they built their campaigns on how “modern” Republican politics functioned — but their start date for modern politics was too old. Their mental frameworks began at 1964, or 1980, or 1994, when they should have realized that the birth date of 2016’s Republican base was 2009, and seen in Trump the same uncontrollable rage that gave us the Tea Party in that year.

Is Tom Brady the best ever? Who knows?

Any person who opines about sports faces the same problem. Tom Brady can be compared to Peyton Manning, because they played at the same time. But can he be compared to Johnny Unitas, who played in the 1950s and 1960s? They operated in different environments, with different players, and different challenges for quarterbacks (Brady faced an ignoramus of a Commissioner, Unitas a more run-heavy game).

When we’re trying to understand when the modern era started in any field — politics or sports — we have to figure out what is different from then to now. The problem is that many of the explanations about turning points are probably wrong, and even the right ones may not be very definite.

For a podcast/blog that’s all about the “modern” world, and about what is new in a globalized environment, not knowing when the modern world started is a pretty big problem. So let’s see if we can prove when the modern era began for at least one sport, and then look at whether that exercise means that last year’s Republican strategists deserve some sympathy.

When did modern soccer begin?

The first set of rules for soccer were drafted in 1848 at the University of Cambridge. The FA Cup began in 1872 and the first professional league in the following decade.

In the hundred and forty years since then, the game has changed. Somewhere along the way, it went from the old-timey soccer of hoofing the ball up muddy fields to the slick passing of Guardiola’s Barcelona.

The question, if we want to compare players across eras, is when the eras changed.

It’s a difficult question for any field that has undergone constant evolution. As Jonathan Wilson beautifully details in Inverting the Pyramid, the tactics and strategy of the game have seen constant fluctuations over the years. Further, some of the possible metrics for modernity, such as when athletes reached a certain level of conditioning or faced a certain level of media scrutiny, were never recorded — or are too hard to definitively prove.

Luckily, there is one statistic that does exist, that has been collected, and that can shed some light onto the starting point of modern soccer: home field advantage.

Home field advantage is a big deal

In soccer, home field advantage matters a lot, to the point that UEFA created the away goals rule to moderate its effects in the Champions League. More importantly to us, it’s a feature of the game that has been present, and measured (through records of wins and losses), since the beginning.

We are fortunate to have great data to examine this phenomenon, courtesy of James Curley, a professor at Columbia University. He has compiled a dataset of all English league games in the top four tiers since 1888, 192,004 games that spans the likes of Manchester United, Grimsby Town, and Middlesborough Ironopolis. It is, to say the least, comprehensive.

He and others have examined the question of home field advantage (HFA) using this data set. They’re good articles and I recommend reading them to get more insight into the phenomenon and what light it sheds on the game.

Using Curley’s data, we can identify the percentage of points won by the home team since 1888.

HFA used to be gigantic. The split between points taken by the home and away teams was, in the earliest years, 70–30. The average team took about twice as many points at home as it did away until the mid-1970s.

It has now fallen towards the norm for other sports, about the percentage that the home team in baseball wins its games and below the home ice/court advantage for the NHL and NBA.

Historical terms

If we unpack the data a bit further, we see that there are four distinct eras in English home field advantagedom with the first three punctuated by world wars.

In the Edwardian era before World War I, HFA was volatile. This is understandable, as the league did not introduce the third and fourth tiers until 1920 and 1958, respectively. Fewer games in the seasonal dataset means that we would expect greater variance.

In the Interwar era, from 1919 to 1938, HFA was steadily increasing. But the era’s overall home point percentage averaged 67.7%, the same as the Edwardian era. Whether HFA would have continued to rise indefinitely, or if we’re just seeing patterns in a smaller sample size, we don’t know. But we can say that HFA was roughly the same before World War II as it was before World War I.

In the Postwar period, England returned to the terraces, but the game was now a little different. Home field advantage was lower, with around 64% of all points going to the home team. This era was the most stable of all periods, with a smaller standard deviation than Edwardian and Interwar.

But somewhere between 1974 and 1981, depending on how you wish to view the spike in 1981 (when wins became worth 3 points rather than the 2 points), HFA began to tumble. This is a dramatic change from the earlier history of the game and the start of a tectonic shift in English league soccer.

Is this the modern world?

But here is where an analyst of modern soccer, or one of the GOP candidates’ strategists, face a difficult problem.

Is the start of a trend the same thing as the start of a new era?

Looking at the graph, it seems clear that the mid-70s to early-80s saw something new happen in soccer that led to the decline of home field advantage. Given how important home field advantage can be in soccer, and how it might reflect lots of different on-field mechanisms, there’s a good argument that its decline represents the shift to the modern era.

But a player in 1985 still operated in an environment with roughly the same HFA as one in 1950. It is only with retrospect that we can see he played at the start of a new trend. Should we group players according to the trends they witness or those closest to them in the metric?

In other words, do we compare Kevin Keegan (played 1968–1984) to Harry Kane (2009-today) because they both played in the “Modern Era” according to HFA, or do we compare Keegan to his partial contemporary Bobby Charlton (1956–1975), even if Charlton never played after HFA started declining? Logic dictates the second option.

Therefore, I would say that, according to home field advantage, the modern era in English soccer started around 1990. That’s when HFA moved decidedly to levels never seen in the game before. It’s also around when the last of the true old school footballers had his greatest success.

Turning point v threshold

Even looking at one sport, in one country, with a single metric that shows a marked trend leading to the modern world, it’s hard to identify when the modern era began. This is why I think the GOP strategists deserve a bit of a break.

Finding turning points are easy in retrospect. It’s much more difficult to figure out when a trend has crossed a threshold into a new era. The Republican Party had been growing more oriented towards white resentment since Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy in 1968, but it didn’t nominate Trump for another 47 years.

When did the GOP switch to be open to Trump? 2013: when the House GOP shut down the government? 2009: when the Tea Party started? 2008: when Sarah Palin was nominated for VP? Or 2006: when anti-immigration sentiment defeated bipartisan legislation supported by their own President?

This isn’t to totally excuse those strategists, especially their part in what the Republican Party did that contributed to the trend from 2006–2015. This post is rather intended to caution against any pundit that acts like he or she knows what is definitely true in the “modern era of politics/sports” without defining or defending when that began.

The modern world may have started more recently than they think.


Originally published at www.chrisoates.info.

Chris Oates

Written by

Political risk analyst asking questions about the interconnected world. Podcast is Globalize and Ears. Blog at globalize.fm

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