If you are, like me, a fan of Arsenal F.C., you probably hate national team soccer. Things of the sort that has just happened to Arsenal's brilliant Dutch striker Robin van Persie happen to soccer clubs all over the world, and make their managers furious. In mid November, van Persie got called for national duty to play for the Netherlands in a friendly (i.e. sparring) game against Italy. In that game, he suffered an injury that rendered him unable to play for the rest of the 2009/2010 season. And this in effect means that Arsenal is no longer able to mount a serious campaign to win the English Premier League.
Think about this from a club manager's perspective. You buy players for your team, pay their wages, as well as invest money in coaching necessary to make sure their skills improve. In exchange, those players do their best to help your team win trophies. Of course, every once in a while during your trophy-winning campaign, some of your players will get injured. Soccer is very physical, sometimes downright brutal, so this is unavoidable. If this happens to one of your players important enough that their absence significantly diminishes team value, you'll probably whine a lot and curse your bad luck. You will not think it's unfair, however; after all, every player in every team faces a positive risk of injury in about every game they play. But then there are national teams, whose managers can call your players and use their services in their own competitions, thus exposing them to an additional risk of injury and, what's worse, when they do call them you cannot refuse (clubs that won't release their players for national duty face severe sanctions from soccer governing authorities such as FIFA or UEFA, ranging from fines to suspending a player or even revoking his license altogether).
To me, this situation is blatantly unfair to the clubs. What's also interesting is that most soccer fans I talk to do not see this fundamental unfairness, and tend to just dismiss club managers' complaints without even trying to provide an argument. In fact, there is only one rational argument in favor of the status quo that I've ever heard; it comes from a sports statistician Voros McCracken, and goes something like this. The very best soccer players are also more likely to want to play for their national teams (for reasons of prestige or whatever); therefore if you, as a club manager, wanted to be able to forbid them from doing so, you'd face a situation in which those very best wouldn't want to play for your club so you'd have to settle for choosing your employees from a weaker pool. You can think of the best soccer players as of great potential employees that have a dangerous hobby (namely, playing in national team competitions); since players that don't have that hobby tend to be weaker, you can't really complain about how unfair it is when one of your best employees gets hurt while exercising his dangerous hobby.
Rational as it may be, this argument is still wrong; here's why. The relevant question is not whether or not better soccer players are more likely to want to play for their national teams than weaker players do. The relevant question is: how important is the best players' desire to play for their national team as compared to the commitment to the club that currently employs them, in a situation when those two goals are in conflict? The problem is that, given the current set up, we can't know the answer, because whenever a player gets called for national team duty, it's not just his club that can't refuse; he himself can't, either. The price of such refusal is long suspension or perhaps even the end of career, and that's just prohibitive. In a perfect world, clubs would be free to draw contracts that could either let players partake in their national teams or forbid them to do so, and then players would be free to choose which type of contract they'd want to sign. If Voros were right, we'd see forbidding contracts paying out higher wages than the non-forbidding ones (holding player quality constant); if he were wrong, there'd be no such difference; and if he were really right, the monetary price that clubs would have to pay to make a player get rid of his hobby would be just too high, so there'd be no forbidding contracts at all. The thing is, as of now, neither the clubs nor the players have such freedom, so Voros' claim is perfectly unfalsifiable.
Interestingly, Voros' "dangerous hobby" analogy helps defeat his own argument. Great soccer players also are, on average, more likely to have personalities that make them seek thrills in dangerous activities such as motorcycle racing, mountain climbing, sky diving, bar fighting etc. Some clubs do draw contracts that actually contain clauses explicitly forbidding players to, say, ride bikes or climb mountains, on pain of being fined or even fired, and some players do choose to sign such contracts. Until players are allowed to exercise the same amount of choice over national team duty versus club duty, we can't claim to know which is more important to them.
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