Football, Human Action and Economic Planning

Over at the Ludwig von Mises Institutes’ blog, Christopher Westley shares an anecdote from Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World.  It deals with how Ukrainian manager Valeri Lobanovsky attempted to manage Ukrainian football with a similar style as Soviet economic planning.  In defense of football and individualism, I commented with the following:

Christopher,

For me football (a.k.a. “soccer”) provides the perfect example of individual, and unpredictable, human action. Although the sport includes set piece plays, and specific maneuvers, ultimately the success of a team will depend on individual human action. That is what makes football such an exciting sport to watch—it is unpredictable. Although coordination is also a key component, and therefore prediction and analysis can be considered a component, these quantitative characteristics can only accurately be applied on the individual level. It proves useless to apply these to some type of aggregate.

If Valeri Lobanovsky’s model is still in use in Ukraine—by, at least, the national team—it is no wonder that apart from the 2006 World Cup the Ukraine National Football Team has been unable to preform as well as either the Russian national team, or the even more successful national teams in Western Europe (although, it was FC Shakhtar Donetsk who won the Europa League last year).

The opening match for Ukraine’s 2006 World Cup group serves as the perfect illustration for my point. It was between Ukraine and Spain. Although Spain was hardly in the same shape it is today, the characteristic Spanish style of football still permeated the squad. Ukraine lost their match against Spain, 4–0 (Ukraine won their next two group stage matches, but these were against entirely substandard teams).

Ukraine’s mathematical approach to the game could not compete against Spain’s more individualistic approach. Although Spain’s style relies heavily on coordination and cooperation, these elements only exist because Spanish players have learned to coordinate and cooperate on the individual level. They do not follow some type of “master plan” or “scientific method”; instead, they rely on individual skill and individual understanding, based upon years of experience with playing with each other.

While some may try to cheat nature and apply some type of metric to football, the sport is really a shining example of human action outside of the world of strict economics.