Despite the paucity of its coverage within the overwhelming majority of sports media, the literature of football has for a long time thrown up some really interesting reads. Particularly engaging are the ones that come from left-field, or put another way, the ones the nationals wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. Why England Lose is another of these, this time by the guy who wrote Football Against The Enemy, Simon Kuper and my old tutor, the sports economist Stefan Szymanksi.

Their Big Idea, is to borrow statistical methods from the world of economics and apply them to football, in order to see whether or not its cliches and shibboleths hold true. In these post crash, Black Swan generated times, economic statisticians are not exactly Triple-A rated themselves and some methodologies in Why England Lose are indeed as flimsy as those used by a Lehman Brother’s risk assessor. Some of the conclusions are also contenders for this year’s award for stating the bleeding obvious, but having said that there is enough of real interest, enough of that counter-intuitive, statistical jiggery-pokery to make Why England Lose a sort of Freakonomics of sports books.

These questions start light-ish (Why do Newcastle always buy the wrong players? Penalties: what are they good for?) but they open up wider issues that take in the whole make-up of the sport.  Some of their conclusions include:

• Club success is not at all correlated to transfer spend, but is directly correlated to wage spend. the reality is that the top four wage bills sit with the top four clubs in the league and have done so for the past 20 years or so. Contrary to the image of Arsene Wenger as a small budget miracle worker, in the rarified atmosphere in which he works he is something of an underachiever. Money really does talk – unless you support Newcastle, in which case money howls at the moon like a barking lunatic.
• The most footie-mad countries in the world are Norway and Iceland. They watch more, they play more and they spend the most in order to have the most public facilities. Well what else are you going to do?
• Success at international level is directly correlated to GDP, playing experience and population size. Over time the biggest and richest countries with the most, healthy players will win.
• Contrary to expectations, England do just fine in relation to the key success criteria. It is the expectations that are out of line.
• Spain punches above its weight and could well continue to do so, but other over-achievers like Holland and Portugal are on a perma slide. The world of diversity is disappearing at international level just as it did for clubs in England and across Europe.
• The coming countries will be US, Japan, China and Turkey and… Iraq (insert your own war related punchline here)

The key tension at the heart of modern football is the contrast between the ideal of football as a sport and the reality of the modern football industry and Kuper & Szymanski are very good at highlighting this split. They expose some of the myths behind supporters’, particularly the image they have of themselves as most are not especially fervent and tend to behave more like consumers than fanatics.

True as this is, it leads the authors toward some sort of apologia for the emerging status quo as dictated by the biggest clubs and their quest to get even bigger and to prevent any other club from catching up. According to the authors and contrary to the amount of money, column inches and TV hours spent following it, football is neither particularly big nor does it behave like a business but it is the ones who generate the most money, if not the most profit, who are succeeding on the field. What we have now is hegemony and Kuper & Szymanski show how and why TV is ensuring it will remain endemic.  There is no place in this for the “magic of the cup” and there probably hasn’t been for twenty years.

Why England Lose is not as numbery as Freakonomics or Outliers but in its own niche way is just as head-scratchingly enjoyable.

Englischer Fussball on the other hand is a translation of a German book by a German author that seeks to explain to a German audience why English football is what it is. As such it’s a bit like earwigging a private conversation or secretly attending your own funeral, i.e. irresistably interesting.

Englischer Fussball explores the founding myths of the national game finding out whether or not English football really is all about manliness, hard work, fair play and a visceral distrust of individual brilliance. It turns out that some selective myopia aside, yes it is. We are at worst failed idealists not hypocritical cynics. Blame public school thrashings and buggery and working class violence. Apparently.

Modern Germany for pretty obvious reasons does not revel in the past. We on the other hand like nothing more than a good nostalgic wallow. Nothing that is unless that good wallow is wrapped up in a bit of Kraut bashing – Wembley 66, Mexico 70, Italia 90. Euro 96, 5-1 away, two world wars and one world cup and the rest. How galling is it then to discover that the objects of our rivalry don’t feel the same way. If Germans feel any rivalry at all it is toward the Dutch and the Italians, but the English? No way.

Despite such a dispiriting revelation Englischer Fussball is a breeze.

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