This brings us back to soccer. Soccer is—like basketball, unlike baseball—a highly improvised and team-oriented sport, but even more so than basketball. Eleven soccer players form one of two teams on the field, interacting in a fluid, rapidly unfolding manner, similar to the way most nonsporting organizations work today. In soccer, a team’s probability of scoring goes up as it strings together more and more successful passes. There is no shot clock, so a team can possess the ball as long as it would like and limit scoring opportunities. However, the teams face the pressure of a timed game, which consists of two forty-five-minute halves for a total of ninety minutes. Star players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi can significantly impact a game, as can NBA stars, but a soccer star’s scoring is much more dependent on the player receiving passes from teammates at exactly the right time and place. Keep in mind that during the 2014 Champions League final, Ronaldo barely touched the ball in the entire first half. On average, Ronaldo and Messi possess the ball twenty times a game, three seconds each time, for a total of merely one minute per ninety-minute game. You read that right! Ronaldo and Messi touch the ball for around sixty seconds per game, around 1 percent of the game time.50 Both stars have to work for their shots, as they are often fouled three to four times per game, reducing their twenty possessions to sixteen or seventeen. Goals mean a lot more in soccer than points do in most sports. Quality shot opportunities in soccer are very scarce, so making the most of them is critical. Within those sixteen to seventeen non-fouled possessions, Ronaldo and Messi typically attempt four to six shots per game.
Of Ronaldo’s and Messi’s four to six shots, 40 to 50 percent will be on goal and 40 to 50 percent of shots on goal (about 25 percent of all shots) will actually result in a goal, which is ridiculously high compared to other star soccer players. Ronaldo and Messi are responsible for around 50 to 60 percent of their team’s total shot attempts when including assists, similar to the contributions of Bryant and James in basketball. Playing defense, however, Ronaldo and Messi have a more limited impact in stopping the opposing team’s scorers. Thus, even with soccer stars like the duo, soccer teams are more interdependent than are baseball teams or even basketball teams. Moreover, unlike with basketball greats James and Bryant, soccer greats Ronaldo and Messi have no near equivalents. They are outliers in most relevant scoring categories. Whether one is better than the other, the data analysis demonstrates that those two players are significantly better than all other soccer players. Either Ronaldo or Messi has won the best player award, the FIFA Ballon d’Or (“the Golden Ball”), every year since 2008. In NBA basketball, unlike in soccer, no two players have won the player of the year award or have been statistically dominant scoring outliers year in and year out, over a seven-year period.51 After discounting the individual effect of Ronaldo and Messi as outliers, soccer becomes much more interdependent than even basketball.
Because of the interdependence required in soccer, Ronaldo has to work on different goal scoring scenarios every day with his teammates. They know he has “one second, two seconds—and bang.” They work on creating an image of different situations and the desired outcome, asking themselves and each other, “Where am I positioned? Where’s the ball coming from? Where is my teammate coming from? Where is he going? What is his speed? What is his preferred foot and angle? What opportunity do I have to get the ball there? Is the pass best in the air or on the ground? Where is the defense? Where’s the goalkeeper likely to be? Where and what is the highest percentage for a finish?” Both the passer and Ronaldo have to almost instinctively know what the other is likely to do and when. Within seconds, they both have to analyze the situation and take action or the scarce opportunity is missed.
Soccer stars get no guarantee of possessions or shots, unlike baseball stars who get a minimum number of at bats, and opportunities in soccer are significantly fewer than in basketball. In addition, while in basketball it is very possible for a player to get an inbound pass underneath his basket from a teammate, dribble the length of the court without passing to another teammate, shoot, and score, the equivalent in soccer would be extremely difficult.
Table 2.3: Comparison of Baseball, Basketball, and Soccer
Table 2.4: Comparison of Star NBA and Soccer Players
21 Susan Fournier and Lara Lee, “Getting Brand Communities Right.” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2009/04/getting-brand-communities-right.
22 Ibid.
23 Albert M Muniz, Jr. and Thomas C. O’Guinn wrote a paper published by the Journal of Consumer Research in 2001 titled “Brand Community.” They state that “a brand community is a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand . . . brand communities exhibit three traditional markers of community: shared consciousness, rituals and traditions, and a sense of moral responsibility . . . Brand communities are participants in the brand’s larger social construction and play a vital role in the brand’s ultimate legacy.”
24 Alexander Chernev, Professor of Marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, classifies Real Madrid as a “personality brand,” just like Harley-Davidson, Ferrari, and IRONMAN. According to Chernev, “Personality brands express consumers’ individual values and preferences. Personality brands are less about asserting an individual’s status, wealth, and power; instead, they reflect an individual’s idiosyncratic beliefs, preferences, and values. Unlike status brands, which have a price point that makes them unattainable by the majority of the population, personality brands are not differentiated on price, which makes them accessible to a larger segment of the population.”
25 For example, Athletic Bilbao has a policy of exclusively signing and fielding players meeting the criteria to be deemed as Basque.
26 Ronaldo sells the most jerseys in the world and has the largest social media following. Therefore, the data indicates that Ronaldo is the world’s most liked soccer player. Messi had 101.6 million total followers (66.3 million fewer than Ronaldo). The first non-soccer player on the list is basketball player LeBron James, who had 56 million total followers (111.9 million fewer than Ronaldo).
27 On the correlation of revenue and performance, Francisco wrote in his unpublished 2008 thesis: “The point we want to make with this argument is that other things being equal, making money and investing it on players is the best way clubs can make sure they enter in the virtuous circle of winning games, attracting more fans, having more TV audience, selling more merchandising, and making more revenue to reinvest in players.”
28 The club isn’t simply a soccer team. The club also owns a basketball team. The basketball team was added in 1931 and has won a record twenty-five Spanish