I am resuming my irregular Soccernomics blogging. One of the fun insights of the book is that no soccer club from any capital of a democratic country has ever won the European cup. The exception is Real Madrid which gained its status under fascism (the club was always strongly associated with Franco). Benfica from Lisbon also did very well under dictatorship. Instead, in democracies, the cup has largely been won by teams from industrial cities, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham, Milan, Munich, Eindhoven, Marseille, and Turin.No team from Paris or London has ever won. More generally, in authoritarian states, teams from the capital (and government seat) tend to win national titles with much greater regularity than in democracies.
Their explanation is a mix of resources (mostly coming from the state in authoritarian states but from the private sector in market democracies), capture (the state tended to interfere in the success of capital city teams in authoriarian states whereas industrials did so in democracies), and attention (not much else to do for fun in industrial towns). They also argue that this is all about to change as clubs are increasingly being financed by globe-trotting billionaires.
I am not sure if parallels exist to other regions (Latin America?) or aspects of social life. If it is true that authoritarian governments have tended to privilige investment in capital cities more than democracies, it would be interesting to see if these legacies persist once states become democratic. Any way, fun stuff to ponder.
ps. The authors have to make an exception for AJAX Amsterdam, which has won the cup four times. While Amsterdam is the Dutch capital, the government seat is in The Hague, which has had a dreadful team. Moreover, PSV Eindhoven, a team from a small industrial (Philips) city has also won the cup and has won more national titles in recent years than AJAX.