Soccernomics by Simon Kuper, Stefan Szymanski

thirty-five miles down the 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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    highway to gritty proletarian Saint-Étienne. In 1987, Olympique Lyon, or “OL,” or “les Gones” (the Kids), was playing in France’s second division on an annual budget of about $3 million. It was any old backwater provincial club in Europe. Today it rules French soccer, and proclaims that it is only a matter of time before it wins the Champions League. Its ascent is in large part a story of the international transfer market. Better than any other club in Europe today, Lyon has worked out how to play the market.
    In 1987 Jean-Michel Aulas, a local software entrepreneur with the stark, grooved features of a Roman emperor, became club president.
    Aulas had played fairly good handball as a young man and had a season ticket at OL.
    “I didn’t know the world of soccer well,” he admits over a bottle of
    “OL” mineral water in his office beside the stadium (which he aims to tear down and replace with a bigger one). Had he expected the transformation that he wrought? “No.”
    Aulas set out to improve the club step by step. “We tried to abstract the factor ‘time,’” he explains. “Each year we fix as an aim to have sporting progress, and progress of our financial resources. It’s like a cyclist riding: you can overtake the people in front of you.” Others in France prefer to liken Aulas to “ un bulldozer .”
    In 1987 even the local Lyonnais didn’t care much about les Gones .
    You could live in Lyon without knowing that soccer existed. The club barely had a personality, whereas Saint-Étienne were the “miners’ club”
    that had suffered tragic defeats on great European nights in the 1970s.
    Saint-Étienne’s president at the time said that when it came to soccer, Lyon was a suburb of Saint-Étienne, a remark that still rankles. At one derby after Lyon’s domination began, les Gones’ fans unfurled a banner that told the Saint-Étienne supporters: “We invented cinema when your fathers were dying in the mines.”
    Aulas appointed local boy Raymond Domenech as his first coach. In Domenech’s first season, OL finished top of the second division without losing a game. Right after that it qualified for Europe. Aulas says,
    “At a stroke the credibility was total. The project was en route.”

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    It turned out that the second city in France, even if it was a bit bourgeois, was just hungry enough for a decent soccer club. The Lyonnais were willing to buy match tickets if things went well, but if things went badly, they weren’t immediately waving white handkerchiefs in the stands and demanding that the president or manager or half the team be gotten rid of. Nor did the French press track the club’s doings hour by hour. It’s much easier to build for the long term in a place like that than in a “soccer city” like Marseille or Newcastle. Moreover, players were happy to move to a town that is hardly a hardship posting. Almost nothing they get into in Lyon makes it into the gossip press. Another of Lyon’s advantages: the locals have money. “It allowed us to have not just a ‘popular clientele,’ but also a ‘business clientele,’” says Aulas.
    Talking about money is something of a taboo in France. It is considered a grubby and private topic. Socially, you’re never supposed to ask anyone a question that might reveal how much somebody has. Soccer, to most French fans, is not supposed to be about money. They find the notion of a well-run soccer club humorless, practically American.
    It therefore irritates them that Aulas talks about it so unabashedly.
    He might have invented the word moneyball . Aulas’s theme is that over time, the more money a club makes, the more matches it will win, and the more matches it wins, the more money it will make. In the short term you can lose a match, but in the long term there is a rationality even to soccer. (And to baseball. As Moneyball describes it, Beane believes that