Today, English clubs dominate European soccer. If you ask why, the simple answer is they just buy the best players. The victor here is money. This is the opposite of the German Bundesliga strategy of each club cultivating its own players and slowly building up a pool of local talent. English club football does the exact opposite: it simply buys the best players from anywhere in the world and pays whatever huge sums of money it takes to snag them.
Is this an example of vice beating morals? It’s an old question. If he could travel from the early eighteenth century and see this today, would Bernard de Mandeville be delighted with this example? Wasn’t his whole point that vices like greed for fame and profit make the world a richer and more lively place? If this argument has been known to social science for so long, why is it still strenuously resisted?
Is it wrong that money should win? Are we witnessing here the evil of big business against a German model that is more honest and moral? How can social science answer this question? Big enterprises connect in complex ways. Does the German model only help Europeans whereas global purchases launch footballer’s careers around the world? Is the English model an economic imperialism, robbing developing countries of their best talent? Doesn’t English club football get the money to pay for all these talented players because the fans find their matches more exciting? After all, bigger audiences make Premier League clubs more profitable, while the German games are often boring. In this case, big money appears to express the world popularity of a genuinely more exciting style of game played by English clubs.
In the end, Mandeville isn’t acknowledged because his theory is harder to understand. It relies on processes we call the ‘invisible hand’ – complex unintended outcomes that are hard for social scientists to track through their particulars. And sociologists are not familiar with giving such processes credit for working out well; too often people are seen as victims in these circumstances. But when its only a game, the stakes really aren’t that high. Aren’t the play-offs of a sports tournament a moment to evaluate an important theory of this neglected social scientist? It’s my guess that many other good things result from Mandevillian ‘private vice.’ The challenge lies in specifying exactly under what conditions these things work out well.