The joy of sport is its unpredictability. As the FIFA World Cup approaches, everyone wants to know who is going to win it.

Statisticians, economists, sociologists and various other experts are attempting to uncover the hidden patterns that might reveal the outcome.

While no one can predict what exactly will happen, social science offers valuable insights into the dynamics at play.

In international sports, the factors determining success are not different from those for economic development.

Success depends on the resources that each side brings to a match. Those resources correspond to the inputs in what economists call a production function.

We can think of sporting competition in the same way as we think about national output, or GDP. In both cases the key inputs are labor, capital and "total factor productivity". The first two are easy to understand. The bigger your national population, the greater the chance that there are superstars to be uncovered. Finding and developing those superstars requires capital for establishing talent scouting networks and training facilities.

Total factor productivity, a concept that explains variations in economic output across countries, often hinges on a nation's innovative capacity.

This in turn is closely tied to human capital — the knowledge and experience accumulated by individuals and shared across society, what one might call the wisdom of the crowd.

This framework works pretty well for football too. More than 200 nations participated in the qualifying rounds of the World Cup, a number that has been pretty stable over the past eight editions of the competition. But only eight countries have ever won the World Cup. Six of those eight have won it more than once, and in the 14 World Cups since 1966, only three countries have entered the elite group — Argentina in 1978, France in 1998 and Spain in 2010.

The pattern is not going to be any different this year. Spain and France are the favorites with outside chances for Argentina, England and Brazil. The most highly favored "outsider" is Portugal, a country with an impressive football pedigree.

All of these countries were at the forefront of football's development more than 100 years ago. This also means football is not like manufacturing.

Many onetime "developing" nations have caught up with countries that were once at the forefront of manufacturing and even outstripped them.

Manufacturing is relatively easy to copy, and therefore does not remain a consistent advantage over the very long term.

A more likely comparator might be universities. The US, Britain and Germany housed the most prestigious universities in the world 100 years ago, and this is still largely true. New universities have come up in other parts of the world and become leaders in some fields, but for consistent excellence, the older universities usually have an edge.

This suggests that there is something in the transition of know-how from one generation to another that gives an advantage — a consensus about best practices and their preservation, even if those best practices evolve over time.

This might well be the process that enabled the same countries to dominate the World Cup for so long.

The dominant soccer nations are tied together in a shared network. In Europe, these countries all border each other, and ideas move freely across national boundaries.

Innovations that emerge in one part of Europe quickly spread to the rest of it. Brazil and Argentina have a similar networked relationship, as well as being plugged into Europe through historical connections with Portugal, Spain and Italy.

Not that these networks imply a friendly sharing of ideas — the relationships are driven by intense rivalries and the desire to win. But it is very hard to keep any secrets in football — your ideas are visible on the pitch.

This network effect, then, may be the "secret sauce" — the source of total factor productivity that explains the dominance of the same national teams.

It is striking that both the US and China, which now vie to be the world's important players in almost everything else, have not dented the pre-eminence of the old nations in football. The US has devoted far greater resources to the effort, but even as hosts, they have a very slim chance of winning this year's World Cup.

When it comes to football, the difference between US men's and women's teams is very striking. The US women's team has been the best in the world since the women's game started to spread. For European and South American women, there were no historical networks to fall back on, and in fact the US created the dominant network. Chinese women too have fared much better than the men.

For countries like China and the US, there are two pathways for competing at the highest level in men's football. One is to join the existing network — which is a strain in terms of geography. The other is to create their own networks. While this is the most likely path, so far it has proved to be a mountain too high to climb.

The author is a professor of sports management at the University of Michigan.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.

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