Europe

Have you ever heard of the seven bridges of Konigsberg? It was a problem created by German mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1735. He drew a map of the city (modern day Kaliningrad) with all its bridges, and tried to find a way to cross all the bridges just once. It turned out you couldn't.

You can walk in order through Belgium, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, though. You can pass through each one just the once, without stepping into any other country, and without stepping out of a country that's qualified for the World Cup. You could include England if you counted the Channel tunnel, although you'd have to double back afterwards.


Which is a roundabout way of saying that western Europe did well in the qualification phase. You can see the same point again, with pictures rather than words, in this GIF here (the earth if it only contained World Cup countries).

The GIF starts with all the countries in the world, then removes them one by one, in the order that they were knocked out of FIFA's various World Cup qualifying tournaments. By the end it looks like the prequel to Waterworld, as nation after nation disappears under the waves. Except western Europe, which is hardly affected at all.

So what, you may say, that's just because nearly half of the places at the World Cup are held for European teams. Which is true, but ignores two things.

Firstly, the rest of Europe starts in the same position, but only four of their teams qualified - Russia, Croatia, Bosnia and Greece. Secondly, giving us 13 places out of 32 actually understates our dominance.

To see this, let's look at the last three World Cups. In 2010, only 6 of the last 16 places went to European sides, but 3 of the semi-finalists and both finalists were European.

In 2006, it was 10 of 16, 6 of 8 and all the last 4. In 2002, it was 9 of 16, 4 of 8, 2 of 4 and 1 of 2.

To sum up, 25 of the last 48 knockout qualifiers were European. And, overwhelmingly, west European. Looking at just the Cup winners, of the 19 tournaments so far western Europe has won 10, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay having won the other 9 between them.


So the question arises: why are we so fucking good at this?

This isn't the first time I've come across this question. In Guns, Germs and Steel, an anthropologist called Jared Diamond considers the same question in world history. Drawing on his work in New Guinea, he asks "why did European ships come to New Guinea with their superior technology? Why wasn't it the people of New Guinea landing on the shores of Europe?"

The answer he finds isn't flattering. It isn't because there's anything special about us, whether in our genes or in our political systems. It's a consequence of the geographical advantages we had.

The book's attracted criticism from specialists in all the fields it touches on, as multi-disciplinary books do. This isn't the place for that though. What I wanted to do was to draw a half-arsed analogy.

Do we have some biological advantage at football? Hardly. Does our success come from our classical, liberal Enlightenment traditions? There's no reason to think that it might.

A far more likely explanation is money. We have the richest leagues, which means all the best players gather here - 570 out of the 736 players at the World Cup. On top of that, we have the best managers and ancillary staff, the best training regimes, the toughest competitions, the soundest dietary regimes.

Non-European players who play in Europe benefit from all this too, of course, but what they don't get is the chance to all play together. Nearly all the English, German, Spanish and Italian teams play in their homeland. The squads of countries like Cameroon are also Europe-based, but they play across Europe as a whole, so don't get to know each other in the same way.

Now here's a surprise. Guess which country has the highest number of home-based players. The natural guess would be England, and we do have 22 out of 23 in the Premiership (the one exception being Frazer Forster at Celtic). The winner, though, is Russia. All 23 of the players in their squad play for Russian teams.

So according to my system they ought to do well. We'll see.