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something of a desert, inhabited by a few farmers and old people, and used by the rest of us mostly for long walks. It turns out that people still want to live in dirty, overcrowded, overpriced cities. And the reason they do is the social networks. To be rural is to be isolated. Networks give you contacts.
    Someone you meet at a party or at your kids’ playground can give you a job or an idea. Just as the brain works by building new connections between huge bundles of neurons, with each connection producing a new thought, so we as individuals need to find ourselves in the center of the bundle in order to make more connections.
    Networks are key to the latest thinking about economic development. Better networks are one reason that some countries are richer than others. As it happens, networks also help explain why some countries have done better at soccer than England. English soccer’s biggest problem until very recently was probably geography. The country was too far from the networks of continental western Europe, where the best soccer was played.
    Once upon a time, England was at the center of soccer’s knowledge network. From the first official soccer international in 1872, until at least the First World War, and perhaps even until England’s first home defeat against Hungary in 1953, you could argue that England was the dominant soccer nation. It was the country that exported soccer know-how to the world in the form of managers. The English expatriate manager became such a legendary figure that to this day in Spain and Italy a head coach is known as a “mister.”
    Many English people clung to the belief in England’s supremacy long after it had ceased to be true. The astonishment each time En -
    gland didn’t win the World Cup ended only with the team’s abject failures in the 1970s.

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    The gradual British decline in soccer echoes the decline in Britain’s economic status. The country went from supreme economic power under Queen Victoria to having its hand held by the International Monetary Fund in the late 1970s. Admittedly, in soccer as in economics, most observers exaggerated Britain’s slide. The country’s position in the top ten of economies was never much in doubt. But in soccer it became clear by 1970 at the latest that dominance had shifted across the Channel to the core of western Europe. For the next thirty years, that part of the Continent was the most fertile network in soccer. And Britain was just outside it.
    The German World Cup of 2006 demonstrated western Europe’s grip on global soccer. The region has only about 400 million inhabitants, or 6 percent of the world’s population, yet only once in the entire tournament did a western European team lose to a team from another region: Switzerland’s insanely dull defeat on penalties to Ukraine.
    That summer even Brazil couldn’t match western Europe. Argentina continued its run of failing to beat a western European team in open play at a World Cup since the final against West Germany in 1986 (though it has won two of the eight subsequent encounters against Europeans on penalties). Big countries outside the region, like Mexico, Japan, the US, and Poland, could not match little western European countries like Portugal, Holland, or Sweden. If you understood the geographical rule of the last World Cup, you could sit in the stands for almost every match before the quarter-finals confident of knowing the outcome.
    Western Europe excels at soccer for the same fundamental reason it had the scientific revolution and was for centuries the world’s richest region. The region’s secret is what historian Norman Davies calls its
    “user-friendly climate.” Western Europe is mild and rainy. Because of that, the land is fertile. This allows hundreds of millions of people to inhabit a small space of land. That creates networks.
    From the World Cup in Germany, you could have flown in two and a half