Sociology 101

I took some Sociology classes in the past and one of the things I learned was Nietzsche's herd mentality theory. Herd mentality describes how people are influenced by their peers to adopt certain behaviors, follow trends, and/or purchase items. Examples of the herd mentality include the early adopters of high technology products such as cell phones and I-pods.

The term herd mentality is derived from the word “herd,” meaning group of animals, and “mentality,” implying a certain frame of mind. However the most succinct definition would be: how large numbers of people act in the same ways at the same times.

Anyway, before I bore you all to death, there's a reason for my re-kindled interest in Sociology and the herd mentality. An in-game conversation with a comrade sparked a discussion. This manager, we shall refer to him as N., wondered why I even bothered to trial players, as most were just snapped up by others anyway.

He reasoned that people would look at my status in the youth rankings and would just figure that any player I trialled would be decent. Surely, if he was good enough for a top 10 manager, he would be good enough for them. That's a nice example of herd mentality.

People would act as if they were sheep and they would just follow the example of a more dominant manager and sign their trialists, regardless of status, stats or potential. I can't believe people would be that stupid. They are not mindless sheep, who just follow a dominant person.

So either way, I wanted to prove a point and decided to run a little experiment. As most managers are not really into scouting African youngsters, I decided to trial six African youngsters, all of them 16 years of age and neither of them had a PA value above 2.5 stars.

Following the herd mentality idea, people would go mental and start bidding for my trialists, driving the price to around the same level of their European and South American counterparts, which is roughly between 500 and 2,000 quid for such average players.

My experiment ended today, this very morning. I will post the outcome below, noting the player names, their new club and the salary they went for.

• Joe Kuffour - Darxtar Szczecin - 525 quid
• Roland Konaté - Fortuna Aeternitas - 200 quid
• Chris Mokoena - The Reds - 1,001 quid
• Félix Kehinde - Karthi's 11 - 200 quid
• Alain Bell - Fortuna Aeternitas - 200 quid
• Michael Estrada - Dark Knights - 200 quid

Two out of the six players were never bid on by other managers, the other four were. The highest number of offers for any single player was four offers (including my own opening offer of 200 quid). Joe Kuffour was the most sought after, despite having a fairly low PA.

Out of our four players who were coveted by by other managers, two received a bid on them before I could even get my own 200 quid bid in auction. The other two, who were incidentally the most sought after, matched the values of their European and South American comrades.

So what do I conclude from this? Not much really, it's not nearly enough data to make any real conclusions, but if I were to have a go, I'd say that some managers have this herd mentality. They see a trialist at a good team and they just put a bid in. This was certainly the case for Kuffour and Mokoena, who had the best stats from the lot.

On the other hand, I get the idea that people are a bit afraid of what they don't know. They are used to signing Europeans and South Americans and they seem reluctant to bid for Africans, not being certain of how they will develop.

Alternatively, I have nowhere near enough data to back these claims up, but I may look towards repeating this experiment in the future and maybe throwing in some Europeans for fun, to see if they are indeed more popular.