Women's football update

Yesterday Spurs got dumped out of the Champions' League, but it hasn't all been doom and gloom for the beautiful game. This may be an important week for women’s football, which regular readers will know I’ve long thought should get more support. Yesterday was the first day of the inaugural season of the Women’s Super League, which is the most professional women’s league my country has ever had. And as we all know, if you want something done well, you should get a professional. The WSL is receiving about three million pounds of investment from the Football Association, and everyone seems pretty pleased about it. Or at least, women seem to be pleased about it. Jose Mourinho and David Beckham don’t seem to have been asked.

The hope is that the WSL will be more competitive than the Women’s Premier League, which has been dominated by Arsenal for ages. The FA investment is being shared around so more clubs will be able to pay more women to be at least semi-professional. That’s a step in the right direction, though it’s still way off what goes on in the US. A more competitive league should increase standards all round, but Arsenal are still top of the WSL at the moment, of course. So we probably won’t win the World Cup this year, but maybe we’ll win Canada 2015. But we probably won't win that either, because we're really not putting very much money in. Sponsors don't seem to have been that taken with it and as a result the WSL is getting a lot less financial support than was initially hoped. So I'm pleased, but I'm only a little bit pleased. I still think we should give this a try.

Are you listening, Mr Blatter?

Women’s football isn’t as popular as men’s football. This is partly because the standard isn’t as high, because it’s not as professionalized, because there’s less money in it, because it’s not as popular. There’s a vicious circle for you. I’d rather women’s football was more popular, the way women’s tennis and athletics are. Why? I suppose it’s because I like equal opportunities, football, and women. There also seems to be a lot of interest in playing football among women, and I’d like to see that encouraged. That means increasing its popularity.

One thing we could do is make female footballers wear different clothes. That’s Sepp Blatter’s idea, and he’s in charge. But I don’t think it would work as well as my idea, and I’m worried it’d alter the priorities of the game and its marketers. Blatter seems to want to increase the popularity of women’s football by making it more like other popular things women do, like waiting tables in Hooters. I’d rather make it more popular by making it more like other popular kinds of football. Men’s football, for example.

At the moment there are two sets of leagues, one for men and one for women. Clubs often have an affiliated women’s team as well as a men’s team, but their fortunes aren’t tied to one another, except in that the financial success of one might subsidise the other. Most football fans care what happens to the men’s team, and don’t care what happens to the women’s one, even if it’s from their club. This afternoon Arsenal’s men’s team blew its most recent chance of ending its six-year silverware drought, and the Arsenal faithful are not consoled that during that period their women’s team has been very successful indeed. There’s a lot that’s incomprehensible about the mind of an Arsenal fan, but this isn’t. The women’s team isn’t as good, and not just because of biology. They’re only semi-professional, and this means they don’t have the time to become as good as the men. It’s not their fault they’re worse, and it’s not the fans' fault they’re not that interested. It doesn’t make them sexist. The situation is different from that of British Tennis.

Here’s my idea. Have one set of leagues, and at the higher levels of the game a club has to turn out a female team as well as a male one. The women compete against women, and the men against men. The women’s results score league points just as the men’s do. (Maybe not quite as many while it's being phased in, but in that case a timetable for parity should be in place from the start.) As such, clubs are incentivised to put their considerable financial weight behind making their women’s teams as good as a team of women can be, on pain of relegation. The fans have to care about the women’s team because their fortunes are tied to those of the men’s team, but this is fine because the women are playing football as well as Serena Williams plays tennis. There’s nothing about the way I’m envisaging this changing football that I don’t like.

Of course you give the clubs a few years’ warning so they can get their acts together, but there’s already plenty of infrastructure there, and there are already plenty of talented girls who’d like to grow up to be professional footballers if the opportunities were there. As it is, the female Maradona didn’t play football professionally at all, and the female Messi’s wasting half her time as plumber or a librarian or something. What a waste.

It's harsh, but does it work?

West Brom are a popular club. They play entertaining football, they don’t expect to spend more than a few seasons at a stretch in the top flight, and when they play against local rivals Aston Villa I’d rather cheer with Adrian Chiles than David Cameron. ‘The Baggies’ is an endearing nickname, too.

In spite of these four good reasons to the contrary, I’m going to be booing West Brom for the rest of the season. I hope they go down ignominiously, and if they don’t get their act together and go back to being a club Chiles can be proud of, then I hope they spend a good few seasons in the doldrums where they can think about what they’ve done. And what exactly have they done? They’ve sacked their charming manager from his first big job after he’d secured them automatic promotion last season and had been meeting if not exceeding expectations in the notoriously difficult first season back in the Premiership. Then they replaced him, not with someone like Mourinho or Hiddink who really would have been a step up, but with the latest journeyman to find himself out of work. Sound familiar? It should do. Those paragons of realism Newcastle United did the same thing in December.

Now, the most successful English club in recent decades has been Manchester United, and they’ve stuck with the same manager over that time. Even the dimmest misinterpreter of statistics will realise that there’s a chance the managerial stability was caused by the success and not the other way round. So if you want to know whether clubs benefit from sacking managers who seem to be losing their stuff, it’s not as simple as comparing stability with success. We should also be wary of being overly impressed by bounces in performance after a sacking, partly because short-term results have a lot of random noise in them, and partly because it doesn’t take great results to do better than a series of losses, and usually managers are sacked after a series of losses.

I’d have a lot more sympathy for boards sacking managers so frequently if there was evidence that it was good business, but it’s hard know what to measure. I’m not sure how to do it, but I’d be surprised if Steven Levitt couldn’t work it out. It’s right up his street. It’s as if he read somewhere that Galileo said “measure what is measurable, and make measurable what isn’t” and thought “you know, that’s not such a bad idea!”. Freakonomics isn’t the best popular economics book I’ve read; Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist is. But finding out whether sacking Di Matteo was a good idea is definitely Levitt’s department.

Ed Balls update

Today Ed Balls was made Shadow Chancellor, and all I can say is: about time! Well, I can also say congratulations, since although it’s not a proper job and he won’t get a payrise, it’s still a promotion of sorts. But seriously, it’s about time. If I’ve understood Ed’s career correctly, his were a large portion of the brains behind Gordon Brown’s chancellorship, and various ideas like giving the Bank of England more independence were largely his. Then it became apparent that Brown might one day need a Chancellor of his own, so Ed got himself elected in 2005 so he’d be eligible for the job. In 2007 Brown became Prime Minister as we all assumed he eventually would, and... Alistair Darling was made Chancellor. I don’t completely blame him for the global economic meltdown that happened largely on his watch. I expect that things would be different if he’d acted differently over Northern Rock, RBS and the rest, but the issues are very complicated and I don’t really understand them. I doubt he did either.

I never worked out why Brown picked Darling as his Chancellor. Perhaps he offered Ed the job, but Ed saw the crisis coming and knew that nothing could be done that would leave the Chancellor looking good, so he did what Hague should have done in 1997 and bided his time. Or perhaps Brown got cold feet the way Sven did with Theo Walcott at the 2006 World Cup. Either way, now it’s finally Ed's job to tell us all how we ought to be dealing with the mess the economy’s in, and to oppose Mr Osborne when he does something else. I’m looking forward to seeing how he does. If he does a really good job, I might even vote Labour next time. Probably not though, because I don’t live in a marginal and I’m still annoyed about those wars.

Moral victories

Sometimes people don’t win but claim a moral victory. The grounds for such claims fall into at least three categories. One is where the result would have been different if the luck had been more evenly distributed. The idea there is that you played better than your opponent but they still won because you picked up nothing but Is and Us while they were laying down ‘jaguars’ and picking up ‘oxidize’. The second kind of moral victory is when the result was affected by bad officiating. If the winning goal was a penalty which shouldn’t have been awarded then it is commonplace for the losing side to claim a moral draw. The third kind of claim is when the opponents cheated. It’s hard to say where to draw the boundaries between cheating, gamesmanship and using one’s nous, but it’s uncontroversial that some kinds of cheating can take the morality out of a victory.

Football managers interviewed after a bad result often make excuses which seem tantamount to claiming a moral victory, and while there’s a degree of reasonableness to at least some of these claims, they do it far too often for my taste and presumably also too often for most people’s. There’s a particular type of claim managers make which really bugs me though, and thinking about it reveals two distinct ways of keeping the moral scorecard. This is when a team loses say 4-1, and the other team scored a wrongly awarded penalty when the score was 1-1. The losing manager will say that they were really in it until the penalty was awarded, and after that the game was as good as over and things just unravelled.

There are two ways of looking at this. One way to keep the moral scorecard is to keep the regular scorecard, crossing off tainted goals and adding goals where penalties should have been awarded. The other is to calculate what the score would have been if nothing dubious had happened. On the first measure the moral score was 3-1, so the team which should have won did win. The plaintiff here must be invoking the second moral scorecard, saying that the game changed after the penalty, presumably because they had to play more aggressively and kept getting caught on the break. I’m not denying that a case can be made here that if the penalty hadn’t been awarded the game would have been a draw. The reason I think this sort of moral scorekeeping should be resisted is that it gives no credit for how the teams played after the dubious incident. It can act as evidence for how they would have played, but lots of things can act as evidence. Actual play should have a distinctive role which on this kind of moral scorekeeping it doesn’t have.

This sort of thing leads to crazy results. It doesn’t just mean that it doesn’t morally matter how you play after you change your tactics in response to a bad decision; it also means that morally nobody needs to defend against a corner or free kick which was incorrectly awarded. You do hear this though: sometimes people will claim that a goal doesn’t morally count because there was an incorrectly awarded throw-in during the buildup. Enough. Defending is just as important whether the other team should have possession or not.

One thing we could do in response to this is calculate the moral scorecard in the first way. I don’t think that’s a good idea, because the second way is plainly more accurate. A goal can change the whole complexion of a game, and a wrongly awarded penalty can sometimes change the result by more than one goal. I think the only thing for it is to forget about the moral scorecard altogether and only pay attention to what the score actually is. This isn’t the same as saying that the real score is the moral score; it’s to say that the moral score is unknowable even if it’s coherent, so we should just ignore it. It’s not easy to view bad officiating the same way you view the weather, but that’s the mature thing to do. You can campaign for better referees, but you can install undersoil heating or put a roof on your stadium. I don’t know how normal people feel about this, but Strawson said the difference was resentment. You might not like the weather, but you don’t resent it. I find it can be quite liberating to stop resenting your incompetent referees and cheating opponents as well.

Gareth Bale

I’m a Spurs fan so naturally I’m pleased that Bale’s having such a good run of form. I’m also bemused. Bale’s always been a promising young player but I’ve always seen him more in the category of players disappointingly but conspicuously failing to consistently live up to their potential, along with Ashley Young, Theo Walcott and the mindboggling Jermaine Jenas. He’s never struck me as the kind of player like Giggs or Rooney who are clearly the real deal and can be expected to play fabulously unless they pull a Tiger Woods and become suddenly incompetent for reasons firmly external to the game.

Given this, it’s hard for me to view Bale’s purple patch the way others seem to, namely as his apotheosis from Paul Konchesky into Ronaldinho, a transformation destined to happen the moment Harry relieved him of his defensive duties. That seems to me about as sensible as hailing Nani as the new Cristiano Ronaldo every time he does a stepover. If six months from now Bale is the same towering mediocrity who didn’t win any of his first 24 league games for Spurs then nobody should be surprised.

That’s why I’m not pleased about Bale’s apparent committal of his future to the club. We’re not short of wingers and if we sold him in January we’d get a huge fee which we could spend on some decent defenders who weren’t always crocked. That’d be much more use than what I expect him to turn back into, and I think we can all agree he’s quite likely never to have a pricetag higher than the one he’s got at the moment. Then again, if he keeps playing the way he's playing now then he might singlehandedly win us the Champions' League. I'd like that.