Net Gains by O'Hanlon Ryan;

Author:O'Hanlon, Ryan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams, Inc.
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

BIG TED

About 4,000 people live in De Motte, Indiana, and about 3,840 of them are white. It’s one of those midwestern towns that exists for no reason other than “it’s been a while since the last stop, let’s put a railroad station here.” The town was named after Mark De Motte, a colonel in the Union army and a one-term US congressman. Every year, the town celebrates something called “Touch of Dutch,” your standard small-town parade-plus-festival, just with some miniature windmills and wooden shoes added in. Ted Knutson remembers people talking about how his hometown once held the Guinness World Record for the most churches per capita, but I have been unable to confirm that fact. “We’re out in the cornfields, and you don’t have a lot of choice,” he said. As for soccer? “We didn’t have it.”

In Paris, they have plenty of it. Were someone able to figure out a way to codify the idea, the Île-de-France, as Greater Paris is known, would probably hold the Guinness World Record for world-class soccer players per capita. At the 2018 World Cup in Russia, 15 of the players on the French squad were from Paris, while other cities produced no more than 10 for their respective countries. Per an analysis by the sociologist Darko Dukić, the estimated transfer value of those Parisian players was €483 million; players from Buenos Aires were next at €180 million. Across the five World Cups from 2002 through 2018, 60 of the players were Parisians—10 more than were from Buenos Aires.

Except, this is a relatively new phenomenon—both within France and within the history of European soccer. While there are all kinds of socialistic methods to maintain competition and redistribute wealth and talent across the major American sports, the best teams still tend to be the ones in the biggest and richest cities. Across the NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL, and MLS, the city with the most championships is New York, followed by Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Boston is the outlier, perhaps, but New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are the three biggest cities in the country. Drafts, salary caps, equal distributions of TV revenue? They haven’t prevented the talent from trickling toward the biggest markets.

Given that European soccer has no draft, distributes TV revenue unequally, and limits spending only as a percentage of overall revenue, you might expect the list of champions to read like a list of the richest cities on the continent: Paris, London, Moscow. Yet, those three cities have combined for only two Champions League titles—and the first one didn’t come until 2008. Throw in the likes of Rome, Istanbul, and Berlin, and the number stays stuck at two. Meanwhile, the city of Liverpool has five, Manchester has three, Porto and Nottingham each have two, while Birmingham, Rotterdam, and Dortmund each have one. Not quite De Motte, Iowa, but not quite the fashion or economic capitals of Europe, either. Remember how the best early English clubs sprang up around factories? This happened all throughout Europe, in smaller industrial towns.

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