LET’S SEE. What would be the ideal product designed just for me? Perfectly steamed dim sum signed by all four Beatles? Not bad, but should I eat them or frame them? Too much of a dilemma. An iPod that keeps Diet Coke cold? Fine, until it runs out of batteries.

A book (good start) entitled How Soccer Explains the World — An Unlikely Theory of Globalisation? Perfect. Better still is that someone (an American called Franklin Foer) has actually gone to the trouble of writing it.

It’s good stuff, too, earning glowing reviews, which it thoroughly deserved. Yet Foer never entirely succeeds in proving that soccer explains the world. I think his essential problem is that it doesn’t. Oh, and I could have told him before he started working on a chapter entitled “How Soccer Explains the Jewish Question” that the exercise wouldn’t end well.

I have an alternative theory to that of Foer. I don’t think “soccer explains the world”, I think that’s too much of a stretch, but I do think the world explains soccer, or at least a great deal about it. And I thought that this week, with the World Cup looming, would be a good time to share my ideas with you. So here we go with my social theory of England’s chances of winning the World Cup.

It is well known that rich football clubs have an advantage over poor ones. The reason is simple — they are able to purchase and pay the best players. This does not guarantee success (see Real Madrid over the past couple of years), but it certainly helps (see Chelsea).

For a similar reason, but one more often overlooked, countries with big populations have an advantage. A major reason for Brazil’s superiority over England, for instance, is that they can select the most able players from among 186 million people, while we select the best from among 50 million. The relationship isn’t a simple one — some big countries don’t play much professional football, while some small countries do well — but it is strong nevertheless. To cite one study, 69 per cent of the variation in the strength of teams in Europe is explained by differences in population size.

There are limits to the ability of the England football manager to expand the population, despite the heroic tabloid exploits of Sven-Göran Eriksson. So the best way of increasing our probability of becoming world champions is to ensure that we use the population we have as efficiently as possible. And unfortunately we don’t.

I’ll begin with a real oddity — footballers’ birthdays. I think, unless there are any nutcase astrologers among you, that we can agree that footballing talent and date of birth are not related. If we are using our talent efficiently, then, the birthdays of our top players should be reasonably evenly spread across the year. Here’s the oddity — they aren’t.

A study by the physicist John Wesson for his book The Science of Soccer shows that the probability of becoming a Premiership football player is more than twice as high for boys born in the autumn as for those born in the summer. The explanation offered by Wesson, and others who have noticed the same thing, is that children born in the first half of the school year are favoured for school teams over their less mature, physically weaker classmates. The early boost they receive to their progress as players is a long-lasting one.

So there’s my first World Cup winning idea — stop discriminating against the younger children in the school year. Here’s another one — stop discriminating against the South East. English-born professionals come disproportionately from the North of the country, always have done historically. This can’t be efficient, given, again, that innate ability is likely to be evenly spread.

Yet neither of these inefficiencies are as important as the third — class. English football is boycotted by the educated middle class. Middle-class people watch the game: a Populus study of the European Championship conducted a couple of years back for this paper showed the level of interest was consistent across classes. It’s just that they don’t play it, or at least not professionally.

The quantitative impact of drawing your players from only one section of the population is obvious. But there is also a qualitative impact.

The former Chelsea manager Gianluca Vialli and the journalist Gabriele Marcotti have recently produced a book entitled The Italian Job. It’s a comparison of football culture in Italy and England, and one of the best soccer books I’ve read. Vialli, himself from a wealthy background, argues that, in countries other than Britain, becoming a professional footballer is an acceptable occupation whatever your social background, while here it isn’t.

The result? He believes that Italian footballers, for one, because some at least are drawn from educated backgrounds, have a more intellectual approach to the game, are more questioning, and want to understand the point of every exercise that the coach gets them to undertake. They also produce better managers. They value formal education and training and are more creative tactically.

So, in a nutshell, if we want to increase England’s chances of winning the World Cup we should be less worried about Wayne Rooney’s foot and more interested in his GCSEs.

A country held back by its education system, its regional divisions and its class obsession. Perhaps Foer has some sort of point after all. Perhaps soccer does explain the world.

But what the hell, I’m sure we’ll win anyway.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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