What is happening to Ozil

There is an episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast called ‘My Little Hundred Million’. In it, he argues it is many times more beneficial for philanthropists to give money to smaller non-elite US universities rather than lavishing yet more money on elite institutions like Princeton.

It’s best to upgrade the weakest institutions in the education system than to fortify the strongest. To illustrate his point he contrasts two sports, basketball and football.

Basketball is a “strong link” sport in which the best players have a huge say in the outcome of individual games and championships.

Football, instead, is a “weak link” sport. That means outcomes are decided not always by the best players in a team but the weakest.

The university system is like football, according to Gladwell. It is the equivalent of a “weak link” sport.

Gladwell took his football idea from a book by Chris Anderson and David Sally called ‘The Numbers Game: Why Everything You Know About Football Is Wrong’.

The authors make the point that a football team is only as strong as its weakest link; that the weakest players have more of a say over a team’s chances of success than the stronger ones.

Their data revealed “that the relative strengths of both the best and 11th-best players are significantly and positively related to a club’s goal differential for the season and the points secured in each game.”

As an example, they state that upgrading your weakest player by 10 per cent could add as many as 13 points across a season. Real Madrid’s recent Champions League successes owed less to getting in superstars than it did to gradual improvements in key areas. Dani Carvajal and Casemiro are good examples. Madrid’s titles owed plenty to Cristiano Ronaldo but the key strengthening came in the weakest parts of the pitch and not the strongest.

Using that logic, it’s no wonder that Florentino Perez’s infamous ‘Zidanes and Pavones’ policy failed. There was too big a gap between the team’s top performers and the weakest ones.

It is probably more productive for a team to spend its budget on upgrading the various weaker elements around the squad than blowing it on one superstar. Paris St-Germain learned that last season. Signing Neymar for €222 million got them no closer to the Champions League title.

Football is a low-scoring game. It’s much more likely that a game will be decided by a mistake than by a moment of genius by the best player. Eliminate those mistakes and the chances of losing decrease.

It’s hard not to think of Arsenal in this context where their highest-earner and most successful player – Mesut Ozil – is singled out for criticism every single week.

He did not have a great game against Chelsea, admittedly, but football is a weak link sport. Its outcomes are determined less by the superstars than by the nearly men. Of the latter category, Arsenal have a preponderance.

Looking through their line-up against Chelsea, it was notable that very few on the team can come close to matching the talent and productivity of Ozil and Arsenal’s second-best player, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.

There is a definite mismatch between Ozil – who is a player good enough to win the World Cup – and anybody else in the squad.