足球业，经济还是竞技？

足球业，经济还是竞技？

“如同石油是石油产业不可或缺的一部分一样，愚蠢也是足球产业不可或缺的一部分。”如果你是球迷，那么可别错过FT专栏作家、资深球迷西蒙·库珀的这篇趣文。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

swamp 沼泽，使陷入沼泽

fullback 后卫

dribbler 带球推进的球员

savvy 悟性，理解

catch on 理解，明白

阅读即将开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用时间，并对照我们在文章最后给出的参考值来估算您的阅读速度。

Football: Fitness and finance change face of the beautiful game

By Simon Kuper

Football, for most of its history, was not a thinking sport.

* * *

Just as oil was part of the oil business, stupidity was part of the football business. The men who ran clubs did what they did because they had always done it that way.

However, in recent years the game has become smarter.

It has drawn inspiration from the “data revolution” that began in baseball before sweeping across all sports. Rising TV revenues also encourage a more professional approach. We can expect further advances on and off the field in 2014.

The domain with least scope for improvement should be tactics.

Football’s rules have changed little since they were codified in 1863. Most tactical possibilities have already been tried.

Nonetheless, the game’s most innovative coach, Josep Guardiola, keeps finding new ones. At Barcelona he refined his team’s positioning without the ball.

Now, at Bayern Munich, he sends his fullbacks into central midfield whenever his side has possession. That allows Bayern to swamp its opponents in midfield, and when Guardiola’s team loses the ball, it usually wins it back deep in the opposition’s half.

Coaches worldwide will continue to look to “Pep” for inspiration.

However, the greater advances in 2014 will be physical. At the 2006 World Cup, Jürgen Klinsmann, Germany’s then manager, showed how much fitter footballers could be if trained according to the cutting-edge methods of American sports.

Players’ fitness and speed have kept improving since. Nowadays, clubs have far more physical data on their employees than even five years ago.

Big clubs test, almost day by day, each player’s muscle weaknesses, the movement of the eyes, changes in breathing and many other obvious and less obvious indicators. Players wear GPS devices in training.

Thierry Marszalek, analyst with France’s national team, explains: “We can say that we’ll stop that player because he’s done too much, or that another one hasn’t worked enough and needs to do specific work. What’s interesting is the individualisation of work.”

Already teams such as Bayern play at an unprecedented pace.

A coach such as Chelsea’s José Mourinho expects even the dribbler Eden Hazard to exert himself in defence.

Increasingly, every player participates every second. Physical advances will continue to change the game in 2014.

Growing professionalisation on the pitch will be driven by growing professionalisation off it. It is often said that the football economy is now a bubble. Many pundits cited Real Madrid’s signing of Gareth Bale from Tottenham in September for a reported fee of £85m as the peak of madness.

Yet the critique of football’s increasing spending ignores the game’s rising revenues. Income from TV in particular has soared, chiefly because subscription channels have brought European football to ever more countries.

Football has powered through the global economic crisis. European clubs’ revenues have risen by about 5% a year since 2008. In 2011-12 they hit €19.4bn, says Deloitte, the business advisory firm.

That growth should continue in 2014. The game is only starting to penetrate China, India, the US and Indonesia, which between them account for about 45% of humanity.

The English Premier League currently earns only about 3 US cents in TV rights per Chinese person, compared with about $56 per Singaporean, according to Sportingintelligence.com, the business website. That represents room for growth.

Deloitte predicts that the global value of premium sports TV rights – chiefly the five biggest domestic European football leagues, the Champions League, and the four major North American sports leagues – will rise another 14% in 2014 to £16bn.

Meanwhile, the World Cup in Brazil should be the biggest media event in history, as measured by number of viewers. Its geographic reach will be unprecedented.

When the US team plays a big game in Brazil, American viewing figures should dwarf average US audiences for games in baseball’s World Series or basketball’s NBA finals.

The football industry has got savvier, but so have its consumers.

The Brazilians are the first nation to have caught on en masse to a fact long known to sports economists: hosting a World Cup does not make you rich.

Typically, the host country pays the costs, while FIFA, the global football authority, pockets the benefits – chiefly TV rights and sponsorship deals.

Protesters in Brazil last June waved banners with slogans such as “We have world-class stadiums. Now we need a country to go around them.”

The European football authority UEFA, reluctant to land any country with such a costly burden, has decided against appointing a single host for the European championship of 2020. Instead, in September it will choose 13 host cities in 13 countries.

FIFA, too, will have drawn a lesson from the Brazilian demonstrations: to stage a World Cup in a democracy is to invite protests. Much safer to choose countries that do not tolerate dissent, such as Russia (host in 2018) and Qatar (2022).

Alternatively, FIFA could give the tournament to a wealthy democracy that does not need to build stadiums or infrastructure because it already has them in ample supply.

The US, host country in 1994, is winding up to bid for 2026.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1. About football, which of the following has significant room for improvement?

a. madness

b. rules

c. tactics

d. revenues

2. European football has learned a lot from American sports, like what?(You are encouraged to look back into the article.)

a. Data revolution.

b. High-positioning tactics.

c. Fitness training.

d. Crazy player transfer spending.

3. What do we know about sports TV rights?

a. The Internet is providing a new source of revenue.

b. Rising TV revenues promote professionalisation of sports.

c. It threatens the profits of big competition hosting countries.

d. They are responsible for the bubbles in football industry.

4. The writer supports whom to host the football World Cup?

a. 13 cities across Europe.

b. Brazil.

c. Russia.

d. America.

[1] 答案d. revenues

解释：在前半部分作者指出BC方面是改进空间最少的。而其实疯狂的球员转会费支出其实也不是那么疯狂——因为足球产业的收入一直在快速增长，得益于电视转播权。由于足球产业在中、印、美等地还有巨大的潜力待挖掘，因此D是正确的。看懂这些意思，这篇文章你就懂的差不多了。

[2] 答案c. Fitness training.

解释：如何快速查找信息匹配？方法1：提到“欧洲向美国学习”的内容都在文章的前半部（出现America或US的地方），而涉及AB两项的地方都没有提到美国，只有在“克林斯曼为德国队引进美国最尖端的体能训练”的地方出现了。方法2：首先D不大可能是“值得学习”的，而ABC中涉及篇幅最多的就是C，在文章中部，有多达六段的内容，出现概率最大，先在这里找，于是很快就能看到这一信息。

[3] 答案b. Rising TV revenues promote professionalisation of sports.

解释：原文：Growing professionalisation on the pitch will be driven by growing professionalisation off it.

[4] 答案d. America.

解释：非常明显，最后几段都在酝酿这一观点。