LettersLetter to the editor

A game of two ideologies

“How to win the World Cup” (June 9th) presented the heartening conclusion that “dictatorships are rubbish at football”. It would be neat if the beautiful game could only thrive in democracies. But this conclusion, which is based on data for the period between 1990 and 2018, is mistaken. Italy won two World Cups during Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship in the 1930s (beating an authoritarian Hungary in 1938). Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, have had excellent international sides both in democratic periods and when under military dictatorship.

Countries in communist east Europe, including Hungary, whose “Golden Team” lost just one match between 1950 and 1956 (the World Cup final in 1954), Czechoslovakia (World Cup finalist in 1962), Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union (four-time finalist in the European Championship), were an equal match for any national team in democratic Western Europe. Spain under Francisco Franco won the European Championship in 1964 and produced the most dominant club team of any period, the formidable Real Madrid side that won five consecutive European Cups in the 1950s.

A study of the relationship between democracy and football performance based on data after 1990, when communism had broken down in east Europe and military dictatorships had fallen in Latin America, suffers from selection bias. The countries that do well today are by and large the same countries that did well in the interwar period and in the decades after the second world war, namely countries in Europe and southern Latin America. They have dominated football irrespective of their political stripe. Dictatorships are, alas, not necessarily rubbish at football. But the countries that are still dictatorships today are.

PROFESSOR JORGEN MOLLER
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark

Summit view

Say what you want about Donald Trump—and you go on at length about his penchant for upending the post-1945 rules-based international order and its long-term consequences (“Demolition man”, June 9th)—but he has succeeded in getting Kim Jong Un to the negotiating table and committing to denuclearise the Korean peninsula. Perhaps what Mr Kim needed to hear to bring him to his senses was not another carrot offered in the form of yet another international gabfest, such as the wholly ineffective six-party talks on Iran, but an American president who had the gumption to call him “rocket man” and growl that “mine’s bigger than yours”.

SANJIV MEHTA
Montreal

The cost of rescuing a bank

The British government paid £5.02 per share for Royal Bank of Scotland in 2008 and recently sold 925m shares at £2.71, representing a loss to taxpayers of £2.1bn, or $2.8bn (“Cut your losses”, June 9th). You reported the National Audit Office’s estimate that the cost of bailing out RBS was actually more like £6.25 per share. This takes the loss to taxpayers to £3.3bn. But the real loss is far greater, namely the opportunity forgone. Had the £6.25 cost per share been put instead into the FTSE all-index tracker, it would have almost doubled in value since, to £12 per share. So, the real cost to the taxpayer of the recent sale of RBS shares amounts to more than £8.6bn.

JONATHAN MICHIE
President
Kellogg College
University of Oxford

The top two

“Almost blue it” (June 9th) described California’s primary system, where the two candidates in a primary who get the most votes go on to the general election regardless of party, as “dysfunctional”. The article then proceeded to describe the primary elections in Orange County, where voters were spoiled for choice, an underfunded candidate beat his wealthy rivals, and both a Republican and a Democrat advanced to November’s general election in a district evenly split between the two parties. These are the exact kind of outcomes that California’s voters wanted when they approved the top-two system.

If you consider competition and choice dysfunctional, I hate to imagine the words you reserve for closed primaries that limit voter choice, empower special interests, and create even greater polarisation in Congress.

CONYERS DAVIS
Acting director
Schwarzenegger Institute
University of Southern California
Los Angeles

You got a fast car

I agree that the costs and benefits of speed on public roads have to be balanced, but I was surprised that your leader supporting the reduction of speed limits in France did not mention Germany (“Live fast, die fast”, June 2nd). Sections of the German Autobahn have unrestricted speed limits. Its roads are as safe as its European neighbours and significantly safer than America’s. This shows that governments do not have to control “humanity’s love of speed” by imposing limits, but by investing in smart technology to control traffic flows and maintain roads. Enforcing the rules on safe driving and strict tests also help. Taking away a freedom should never be a model if effective alternatives exist.

MARTIN IHRIG
Associate dean
Division of business
New York University

Frenchmen who complain about reducing the speed limit should be glad they did not live in their grandfathers’ time. In 1923 Rudyard Kipling took a tour of France in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, passing the time by writing “A Song of French Roads”. One line celebrates how “Ninety to the lawless hour the kilometres fly”. Lawless indeed. The speed limit outside towns was then a mere 30kph.

PHILIP HOLBERTON
Kempsey, Australia

Radical chic

I enjoyed your obituary of the sartorial Tom Wolfe, in which he fixed “A proper Windsor knot!” on his tie (May 26th). But in the picture accompanying the article, Mr Wolfe used a four-in-hand knot on his tie, which tends to be longer and narrower than the Windsor. Of the two, the four-in-hand knot is actually the more traditional, having a long history associated with driving horse-carriages. The Windsor is the relatively new invention, attributed to the Duke of Windsor, who desired a wider knot with a more symmetrical appearance.

JOHN GRAVES
Houston

Reliving the future

I do not for one moment begrudge James Carville his fun in his wish to be reincarnated as the bond market, because he could then “intimidate everybody” (“Matteo Salvini’s quest for power”, June 2nd). Personally I would like to come back as the law of unintended consequences, which I suspect would be a laugh a minute.

PETER WILKINSON
Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire