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GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDS: HOW TO AVOID SILLY MISTAKES IN THE TRANSFER MARKET

In 1983 AC Milan spotted a talented young black forward playing for Watford just outside London. The word is that the player the Italians liked was John Barnes and that they then confused him with his black teammate Luther Blissett. Whatever the truth, Milan ended up paying Watford a ‘transfer fee’ of £1 million for Blissett.

As a player Blissett became such a joke in Italy that the name ‘Luther Blissett’ is now used as a pseudonym by groups of anarchist writers. He spent one unhappy year in Milan, before the club sold him back to Watford for just over half the sum it had paid for him. At least that year gave football one of its best quotes: ‘No matter how much money you have here,’ Blissett lamented, ‘you can’t seem to get Rice Krispies.’ More on the beloved British breakfast cereal later.

In summer 2017 alone, clubs worldwide spent $4.71 billion on transfers (about £3.6 billion), reported FIFA Transfer Matching System (TMS), the department of FIFA that oversees international transfers. The sum includes the world record fee of £198 million that Paris Saint-Germain paid Barcelona for Neymar.*

Unfortunately, much of the money thrown around in the transfer market is wasted. Newcastle have long been a particularly humorous example, but in fact the net amount that almost any club spends on transfer fees bears little relation to where it finishes in the league. We studied the spending of forty English clubs between 1978 and 1997, and found that their net outlay on transfers (i.e. each club’s transfer fees paid minus transfer fees received) explained only 16 per cent of their total variation in league position. In other words, taken over many years, the mere fact of being a ‘buying club’ in the transfer market didn’t help a team perform significantly better than being a ‘selling club’.¹

By contrast, clubs’ spending on salaries was extremely telling. The size of their wage bills explained a massive 92 per cent of variation in their league positions, if you took each club’s average for the entire period. That correlation shows little sign of going away. We show almost exactly the same result below using data for the Premier League and the Championship for the decade to 2016. In that period, wage spending still explained more than 90 per cent of the variation in league position. It seems that over the long term, high wages help a club much more than do spectacular transfers.

Obviously we don’t believe that if you took a random bunch of players, and doubled their salaries, they would suddenly play twice as well. It’s not that high pay causes good performance. Rather, we think that high pay attracts good performers. Chelsea can afford to pay Eden Hazard’s wages, whereas Burnley cannot. And if you have Hazard and other good players, you will win lots of matches. Rich clubs pay high salaries to get good players.

Premier League and Championship teams 2007–2016 performance and wage expenditure

THE MORE YOU PAY YOUR PLAYERS, THE HIGHER YOU FINISH: 2007–2016

Club	Wage spending relative to the average	Average league position
Manchester United	3.40	3
Chelsea	3.97	3
Arsenal	2.92	3
Manchester City	3.13	5
Liverpool	2.74	5
Tottenham Hotspur	1.69	6
Everton	1.28	7
Aston Villa	1.54	12
West Ham United	1.31	14
Stoke City	0.91	14
Newcastle United	1.44	14
Sunderland	1.19	15
West Bromwich Albion	0.79	16
Swansea City	0.75	16
Fulham	1.10	18
Wigan Athletic	0.84	19
Blackburn Rovers	0.87	21
Southampton	0.83	21
Portsmouth	1.47	22
Bournemouth	0.58	22
Bolton Wanderers	0.94	23
Hull City	0.63	24
Norwich City	0.69	24
Birmingham City	0.59	25
Reading	0.66	25
Middlesbrough	0.66	25
Leicester City	0.60	25
Wolverhampton Wanderers	0.53	25
Burnley	0.38	27
Cardiff City	0.50	27
Queens Park Rangers	0.80	27
Brentford	0.28	27
Crystal Palace	0.60	27
Watford	0.41	27
Sheffield United	0.60	28
Brighton & Hove Albion	0.37	29
Derby County	0.42	29
Ipswich Town	0.33	31
Nottingham Forest	0.40	32
Blackpool	0.24	33
Preston North End	0.25	33
Charlton Athletic	0.44	34
Sheffield Wednesday	0.23	34
Leeds United	0.36	34
Bristol City	0.29	34
Plymouth Argyle	0.19	36
Colchester United	0.15	37
Millwall	0.23	37
Huddersfield Town	0.23	38
Coventry City	0.26	39
Barnsley	0.17	40
Rotherham United	0.10	41
Peterborough United	0.12	41
Southend United	0.14	42
Scunthorpe United	0.11	42
MK Dons	0.12	43

In short, wages buy success (something Stefan has been banging on about since his first published article on football in 1991). We have yet to see anyone produce a credible alternative theory. Did Manchester City or Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea hire great managers who won titles, but then also decide out of the goodness of the owners’ hearts to pay the players exorbitant wages? No, they had to hire players whose pay predicted their ability to win games.

True, some players are paid either more or less than they are worth. In fact, it’s an agent’s job to persuade clubs to pay excessive salaries. The former Dutch defender Rody Turpijn has written up a lovely vignette showing how this works. In 1998, the young Turpijn’s career at Ajax Amsterdam was falling apart. The player had only one thing going for him: he was represented by Mino Raiola, a chubby little Dutch-Italian former pizza restaurateur who was becoming one of Europe’s most powerful agents.

Raiola and Turpijn drove to a motorway hotel (classic venue of football deals) to meet the chairman of the small Dutch club De Graafschap. Raiola kicked off by impressing the chairman with some gossip about Juventus’s Pavel Nedved. Then the chairman wrote on a piece of paper the salary he was offering Turpijn. It was more than Turpijn earned at Ajax.

But to Turpijn’s surprise, Raiola shouted: ‘Do you know what he earns at Ajax? This isn’t a serious offer! Come, Rody, we’re not going to waste our time on this.’ Raiola stood up as if to walk out, so Turpijn hesitantly rose too. The chairman anxiously persuaded them to sit down. Twenty minutes later, Raiola had negotiated a lucrative four-year contract. As Turpijn wrote years later in the Dutch literary magazine Hard Gras, that meeting secured his future ‘for just about the rest of my life’.

So Turpijn was overpaid. However, the overpayment didn’t last. Over his four years at De Graafschap it became clear that he wasn’t worth the salary. When his contract ended, the club let him go. Rather than joining another club at a lower and more rational wage, he retired from football aged 25 and happily went off to university. The salary market had corrected itself.

Conversely, in 2012, the teenage Paul Pogba was underpaid at Manchester United, relative to what he could be earning at other clubs. Raiola, who represented him too, went to Alex Ferguson to negotiate a higher salary. One afternoon at his little office in the Dutch town of Haarlem, where Raiola had grown up working in his immigrant family’s pizza restaurants, he reconstructed the pay talks for us:

Ferguson to Raiola: I don’t talk to you if the player is not here.

Raiola: Get the player out of the locker room and sit him here.

Enter Pogba.

Ferguson to Pogba: You don’t want to sign this contract?

Pogba: We’re not going to sign this contract under these conditions.

Ferguson to Raiola: You’re a twat.

Raiola was unfazed, partly because he didn’t know the word.

Raiola: This is an offer that my chihuahuas – I have two chihuahuas – don’t sign.

Ferguson: What do you think he needs to earn?

Raiola: Not that.

Ferguson: You’re a twat.

Ferguson’s published verdict on Raiola: ‘I distrusted him from the moment I met him.’ Pogba left for Juventus, who paid him what he was worth. Once again, the salary market had corrected itself – but in this case upwards rather than downwards.

And so, over the long run, most footballers earn what they deserve, at least measured by their contribution to winning matches. (If you measured their contribution to society, you might end up with very different salaries, but that’s true of almost every profession from bond trader to nurse.) Generally, a player’s salary is a good gauge of his ability to play football. The same is true at a team level: the higher the total wage bill, the better the squad, and the higher the team will finish in the league.

At this point the reader is probably jumping up and down and shouting, ‘But what about Leicester?’ In 2016, the club defied odds of 5,000–1 against (for the handful of punters who bet on this outcome pre-season) to win the only title of its 132-year history with the Premier League’s fifteenth-highest wage bill. To find a comparable achievement you would need to go back to Brian Clough and Peter Taylor’s triumphs with Derby County in 1972 and Nottingham Forest in 1978.

The popular theory of Leicester’s title at the time was that it was mostly down to the manager, Claudio Ranieri, who had supposedly instilled the players with the self-belief and will to win, but was too modest to claim any credit. Later in the book we will attempt to demolish this theory but, anyway, you hear rather less of it since Ranieri was sacked six months into the next season with Leicester fighting relegation.

Rather, we would identify two main causes of Leicester’s victory: 1) a very good goalkeeper and defence; 2) luck.

Let’s start with luck. Leicester won the title without performing exceptionally. The team’s goal difference that season was +32 (scored sixty-eight goals, conceded thirty-six). On average over the previous ten seasons, the English champions had a goal difference of +53. Only one champion in the previous thirty-nine years had scored fewer goals than Leicester: Manchester United in 1992/93, with sixty-seven goals.

So Leicester didn’t perform as well as the typical champions. The team’s goals for and goals against were both two standard deviations better than its expected performance, which is a fancy way of saying: much better than expected, but not amazing. Nobody might have noticed Leicester except for another random event: all the usual title contenders had bad seasons simultaneously. That allowed an overachieving mid-table team to end up champions. It’s reasonable to expect an outcome like that once every fifty years or so. In technical terms, Leicester’s triumph was an extreme random event. These things happen. In a single season, the correlation between salaries and league position is weaker than over the long term. That’s because in such a short period, luck plays a big role in performance. Injuries, dodgy referees, poor form and a host of other factors cause big swings in performance from year to year. For any one given season, clubs’ wage spending explains only about 70 per cent of the variation in league position.* A team can therefore get a big extra lift from luck.

Yet the human mind tends to resist the notion of luck, of stuff just happening. Even Einstein said, ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ Instead, most people like to seek explanations in human actions. Hence the view that Ranieri suddenly revealed himself as a genius.

Still, the fact remains that Leicester played remarkably well that season. Patrick Lucey, of the data science company STATS in Chicago, has written a good paper pinpointing exactly why. He says that while Leicester’s attacking stats were unexceptional, the team ‘had by far the most effective defense’. In fact its defensive numbers were the best of any team in the previous five Premier League seasons. STATS calculates that the keeper, Kasper Schmeichel, saved about 4.6 goals more than expected over the season – better than any other keeper in the division except Watford’s Heurelho Gomes. (It seems that the richest English clubs had been missing some tricks on the goalkeepers’ transfer market.) Meanwhile Leicester’s defence did a very good job of forcing opponents to try difficult passes from wide areas. And Leicester had a couple of excellent pass-interceptors. STATS ranked Manchester City’s Nicolas Otamendi first in the league for improbable interceptions, but Leicester’s Christian Fuchs was third and N’Golo Kanté fifth.

Kanté in midfield was clearly crucial. Steve Walsh, Leicester’s then assistant manager and chief scout, famously remarked, ‘People think we play with two in midfield, and I say “No”. We play with Danny Drinkwater in the middle and we play with Kanté either side, giving us essentially 12 players on the pitch.’ The next season at Chelsea, Kanté ran more miles than any other player in the Premier League except Tottenham’s Christian Eriksen. He won another league title, and was voted England’s Players’ Player of the Year.

In other words, excellent players win titles, and they rarely need managers to inspire them. Ranieri himself recognized Kanté’s importance at Leicester’s very first training session. He later told the Players’ Tribune website, ‘He was running so hard that I thought he must have a pack full of batteries hidden in his shorts. … I tell him, “One day, I’m going to see you cross the ball, and then finish the cross with a header yourself.”’

We won’t be betting on Leicester to shock the world again. The team just doesn’t spend enough. True luck (i.e. statistical randomness) tends to even out over the years. So if you track each club’s performance over a longer period – fifteen or twenty years, say – then salaries explain about 90 per cent of the variation in league position. Leicester was an exception.

Simon’s colleagues at the Financial Times ranked sixty-nine clubs from Europe’s biggest leagues by how well they did relative to their wage bills from 2011 through 2015. Atlético Madrid emerged from the exercise as ‘Europe’s “smartest” spending club,’ while Everton, Spurs, and Southampton also excelled. Among the worst underachievers were Cesena, Queens Park Rangers and the two Milan clubs. Real Madrid and Paris Saint-Germain also ranked in the FT’s bottom fifteen, largely as an effect of ‘the sheer size of their wage bills’.

But on the whole, the market for players’ wages is pretty efficient: the better a player, the more he earns. By comparison – and this is our focus in this chapter – the transfer market is inefficient. Much of the time, clubs buy the wrong players. Even now that they have brigades of international scouts, they still waste fortunes on flops like Blissett.

As a case study of bad transfer policy, let’s take Liverpool from 1998 to 2010. The club’s managers in this period, Gérard Houllier and Rafael Benitez, kept splashing out on big transfer fees, yet Liverpool hardly ever even threatened to win the league. Jamie Carragher, who played for Liverpool throughout these years, provides a dolefully comic commentary on some of the club’s misguided signings in his excellent autobiography, Carra:

 ‘Sean Dundee was not a Liverpool footballer.’

 ‘The signing I didn’t rate was Sander Westerveld. … I thought he was an average goalkeeper who seemed to think he was Gordon Banks.’

 ‘What about Josemi? He struggled to find a teammate six yards away. Djimi Traore had the same weakness.’

 ‘To be blunt, [Christian] Ziege couldn’t defend.’

 ‘The names El-Hadji Diouf and Salif Diao now make the legs of the toughest Liverpudlians shudder in fear. … The first concern I had with Diouf was his pace. He didn’t have any. … Do you remember being at school and picking sides for a game of football? We do this at Liverpool for the five-a-sides. Diouf was “last pick” within a few weeks.’

 ‘“You paid ten million for him and no one wants him in their team,” I shouted to Gérard.’

 ‘If Diouf was a disappointment, Diao was a catastrophe. … But even he wasn’t the worst arrival of this hideous summer [of 2002]. Houllier also signed Bruno Cheyrou.’

 On the expensive French striker Djibril Cissé: ‘He was supposed to be a strong, physical target man who scored goals. He was neither one nor the other.’

 ‘The greatest disappointment was Fernando Morientes. … He was a yard off the pace.’

When Benitez replaced Houllier in 2004, writes Carragher, the Spaniard encountered ‘a host of poor, overpaid players and expectations as great as ever’. But the new man didn’t do much better than his predecessor. Carragher’s book is gentler with Benitez than with Houllier, presumably because the Spaniard was still his boss when he wrote it, but the waste of the Benitez years is remarkable. Most strikingly, perhaps, in 2008 Benitez handed Tottenham Hotspur £20 million for the twenty-eight-year-old forward Robbie Keane. The much-touted fact that Keane was a lifelong Liverpool fan turned out not to help much. Six months after buying the player, Benitez decided that Keane wasn’t the thing after all and shipped him back to Tottenham (who themselves would soon regret buying him) at a loss of £8 million. Virgin Trains took out newspaper advertisements that said, ‘A Liverpool to London return faster than Robbie Keane’.

For all the spending, most of Liverpool’s best performers during the Houllier–Benitez years were home-grown players who had cost the club nothing: Steven Gerrard, Michael Owen and Carragher himself. Another stalwart for a decade, centre-back Sami Hyppiä, had come for only £2.6 million from little Willem II in the Netherlands. In short, there didn’t seem to be much correlation between transfer spending and quality.

In October 2009, after Benitez’s sixth and last summer masterminding Liverpool’s transfers, Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper calculated the damage. It found that in those six years at Anfield, Benitez had spent £122 million more than he had received in transfer fees. Alex Ferguson’s net spend at Manchester United in the same period was only £27 million, yet in those years United had won three titles to Liverpool’s none. Arsène Wenger at Arsenal had actually received £27 million more in transfer fees than he had spent during the period, the newspaper estimated. From 2005 through 2009, Benitez had outspent even Chelsea on transfers. Yet at the end of this period he had the nerve to complain, ‘It is always difficult to compete in the Premier League with clubs who have more money.’ Ferguson later commented that he hadn’t been able to see any ‘strategy’ in Benitez’s buying. ‘It amazed me that he used to walk into press conferences and say he had no money to spend,’ Ferguson wrote in his 2013 autobiography. ‘He was given plenty. It was the quality of his buys that let him down. If you set aside Torres and Reina, few of his acquisitions were of true Liverpool standard. There were serviceable players – Mascherano and Kuyt, hard-working players – but not real Liverpool quality.’ (Mind you, with hindsight, Ferguson’s assessment of Mascherano wasn’t perfectly judged either.)

Benitez’s failure at Liverpool was partially disguised by one night in Istanbul: the victory in the Champions League final of 2005, after having been 3–0 down to Milan after 45 minutes. However, as we’ll discuss later in the book, a large chunk of luck is involved in winning knockout competitions – even leaving aside the fact that Benitez got his tactics wrong going into the game and had to turn his team upside down at half-time. The most reliable gauge of a team’s quality is its performance in the league, and here Houllier and Benitez failed. Their expensive transfers didn’t bring commensurate results. If you add in agents’ fees, taxes on transfers and the constant disruption to the team, all this wheeling and dealing helps explain how Liverpool got left behind by Manchester United. To quote Carragher, ‘As I know to my cost at Anfield, having money is no guarantee of success. The skill is spending it on the right players.’

The question, then, is what clubs can do to improve their status. If you are Liverpool now, owned by the American commodities trader John Henry, who understands statistics, and you have this knowledge of the relative importance of wages and unimportance of transfers, how can you win more matches? The obvious answer is to spend less of your income on transfers and more of it on wages. In general, it may be better to raise the pay of your leading players than to risk losing a couple of them and have to go out and buy replacements. Benitez had a net transfer spend of minus £122 million in six years. If he had merely balanced his transfer budget in that period, let alone made a profit as Wenger did, he could have raised his team’s salaries by £20 million a year. In the 2008–2009 season, that boost would have given Liverpool a slightly larger wage bill than Manchester United. United won the title that year.

Clubs need to make fewer transfers. They buy too many Dioufs. But they will keep buying players, and the transfer market is probably the area in which clubs can most easily improve their performance. They need to learn from the few clubs and managers who have worked out some of the secrets of the transfer market.

Any inefficient market is an opportunity for somebody. If most clubs are wasting most of their transfer money, then a club that spends wisely is going to outperform. Indeed, a handful of wise buyers have consistently outperformed the transfer market: Brian Clough and his assistant-cum-soul mate Peter Taylor in their years at Nottingham Forest, Wenger during his first decade at Arsenal (though not since) and, most mysteriously of all, Olympique Lyon, who rose from obscure provincial club to a period of dictatorial rule over French football. From 2002 through 2008, Lyon won the French league seven times running. That era is now over, and the club subsequently made mistakes, as it tried and failed to compete with clubs with much higher revenues, such as Real Madrid or Manchester United. Lyon got tempted into paying big transfer fees for supposed ‘stars’ – for instance, gambling £18 million on the slow playmaker Yoann Gourcuff in 2010. It is now recovering through a new strategy focused on youth development. However, its seven-year reign remains an extraordinary feat. The usual way to win things in football is to pay high salaries. These clubs found a different route: they worked out the secrets of the transfer market.

There is a fourth master of the transfer market who is worth a look, even if he works mostly in a different sport across an ocean: Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team. In his book Moneyball, Michael Lewis explains how Beane turned one of the poorest teams in baseball into one of the best by the simple method of rejecting what everyone in the sport had always ‘known’ to be true about trading for players. Lewis writes, ‘Understanding that he would never have a Yankee-sized checkbook, Beane had set about looking for inefficiencies in the game.’ It’s odd how many of the same inefficiencies exist in football, too.

MARKET INCOMPETENCE

If we study these masters of transfers, it will help us uncover the secrets of the market that all the other clubs are missing. First of all, though, we present a few of the most obvious inefficiencies in the market. Although it doesn’t take a Clough or a Beane to identify these, they continue to exist.

A New Manager Wastes Money

Typically the new manager wants to put his mark on his new team. So he buys his own players. He then has to ‘clear out’ some of his predecessor’s purchases, usually at a discount.

Strangely, it’s Tottenham during its years under a famously tight-fisted chairman, Alan Sugar, that provides the worst example. In May 2000 the club’s manager, George Graham, paid Dynamo Kiev £11 million – nearly twice Spurs’s previous record fee – for the Ukrainian striker Sergei Rebrov. Clearly Rebrov was meant to be a long-term investment.

But nine months later, Sugar sold his stake in Tottenham, whereupon the new owners sacked Graham and replaced him with Glenn Hoddle. Hoddle didn’t appreciate Rebrov. The record signing ended up on the bench, was sent on loan to a Turkish team and in 2004 moved to West Ham on a free transfer.

This form of waste is common across football: a new manager is allowed to buy and sell on the pretence that he is reshaping the club for many years to come, even though in practice he almost always leaves pretty rapidly. A great example was Paolo Di Canio at Sunderland in 2013: in the six months and thirteen games that he managed the club, he spent £23.5 million on transfers, brought in fourteen players and let fifteen leave. When he was sacked, he left his successor, Gus Poyet, a team in last place in the Premier League. Tony Fernandes, the Queens Park Rangers chairman who spent a net £40 million on transfer fees while getting relegated from the Premier League in 2012/2013, told us mournfully: ‘Sunderland’s going through, in some ways, what we went through. The manager comes in, he changes everyone. If you change a manager, I don’t care who they are, they’re going to have a different opinion, right? Mark Hughes liked a certain player, Harry [Redknapp] doesn’t like a certain player.’

But why couldn’t a chairman just say no to a shopaholic new manager? ‘You yourself see the results,’ replied Fernandes, ‘and you think, “God, we need some change.”’

A manager typically doesn’t care how much his wheeler-dealing costs: he doesn’t get a bonus if the club makes a profit. Billy Beane told us: ‘When you think of the structure of most sports teams, there is no benefit to a head coach in the NFL or a soccer manager to think years ahead. The person who has access to the greatest expenditure in the business has no risk in the decision-making.’ He added that the exception to this rule was Wenger. Beane said, ‘When I think of Arsène Wenger, I think of Warren Buffett [the billionaire investor]. Wenger runs his football club like he is going to own the club for one hundred years.’

Stars of Recent World Cups or European Championships Are Overvalued (and so Are Superstars in General)

The worst time to buy a player is in the summer when he’s just done well at a big tournament. Everyone in the transfer market has seen how good the player is, but he is exhausted and quite likely sated with success. As Ferguson admitted after retiring from United: ‘I was always wary of buying players on the back of good tournament performances. I did it at the 1996 European Championship, which prompted me to move for Jordi Cruyff and Karel Poborský. Both had excellent runs in that tournament, but I didn’t receive the kind of value their countries did that summer. They weren’t bad buys, but sometimes players get themselves motivated and prepared for World Cups and European Championships and after that there can be a levelling off.’

Moreover, if you buy a player because of a good tournament, you are judging him on a very small sample of games. Take, for instance, Arsenal’s purchase of the Danish midfielder John Jensen in July 1992. The previous month, Jensen had scored a cracking long-range goal in the European Championship final against Germany. Arsenal’s then manager, George Graham, told the British media that Jensen was a goal-scoring midfielder.

But he wasn’t. The goal against Germany had been a one-off. Jensen would go years without scoring for Arsenal. Over time this failing actually turned him into a cult hero: whenever he got the ball, even in his own penalty area, the crowd at Highbury would joyously shout, ‘Shoot!’ By the time Jensen left Arsenal in 1996, he had scored one goal in four years. (Arsenal fans printed T-shirts saying, ‘I was there when John Jensen scored.’) Graham’s mistake had been to extrapolate from that single famous goal against Germany. This is an example of the so-called availability heuristic: the more available a piece of information is to the memory, the more likely it is to influence your decision, even when the information is irrelevant.

Signing these shooting stars fits what Moneyball calls ‘a tendency to be overly influenced by a guy’s most recent performance: what he did last was not necessarily what he would do next’.

Real Madrid are of course the supreme consumer of shooting stars. This is largely because the club’s fans demand it. Madrid (or Spurs, or Marseille) probably aren’t even trying to be rational in the transfer market. The club’s aim is not to buy the best results for as little money as possible. When it bought the Colombian James Rodríguez for about £63 million in 2014, it may well have suspected it was paying more for him than the benefit it was likely to get in results or higher revenues. But big signings of this type (like Newcastle buying fragile Michael Owen from Madrid for £17 million in 2005) are best understood as marketing gifts to a club’s fans, its sponsors and the local media. (It’s hugely in the interest of Marca, the Spanish sports newspaper, for Real always to be buying players, or else hardly anyone would bother reading the paper over the three-month summer break.) As Ferguson explained Real’s purchase of Cristiano Ronaldo in 2009: ‘Madrid paid £80 million in cash for him, and do you know why? It was a way for Florentino Pérez, their president, to say to the world, “We are Real Madrid, we are the biggest of the lot.”’

In 2013, Madrid’s purchase of Gareth Bale for £85 million (a bit more than the club admitted to) made the same statement. Probably nobody at Madrid believed that the Welshman was twice as good a player as Mesut Özil – sold to Arsenal for half Bale’s transfer fee – but he was deliciously new. His record fee only enhanced his glamour. There was a high risk that the money paid would not bring commensurate reward, but Real probably didn’t care very much. The club is not a business. It’s a populist democracy. Few football clubs pursue bean-counting quests for return on investment.

Raiola is so wary of Real’s tendency to buy a player just for his name that in 2016 he advised Pogba not to move there. Real Madrid had just won the Champions League, and Raiola realized that although the club was keen to sign Pogba, it didn’t actually need him. ‘Another player for the cabinet. A trophy player, I call it.’ By contrast, United needed Pogba.

Buying a big name (even if you don’t need him) makes every person in the club feel bigger. Christoph Biermann, in his pioneering German book on football and data, Die Fussball-Matrix, cites the president of a Bundesliga club who said his coach got very excited whenever the club paid a large transfer fee. Biermann explains, ‘For this coach it was a status symbol to be allowed to buy players who cost many millions of euros. My car, my house, my star signing!’ In short, it’s conspicuous consumption. The very pointlessness of the purchase emphasizes that the purchaser is a prestigious high roller who can afford to waste money.

Buying names also gives supporters the thrill of expectation, a sense that their club is going somewhere, which may be as much fun as actually winning things. Buying big names is how these clubs keep their customers satisfied during the summer shutdown. (And some managers buy players to make themselves some illicit cash on the side, as George Graham did when he signed Jensen, but that’s a subject for Chapter 5.)

Yet it turns out that the superstar isn’t necessarily the player who has the biggest impact on a team’s performance. (Note that Spurs didn’t obviously suffer from losing Bale.) Nor is the decisive player the team’s weakest link. Chris Anderson and David Sally argue in their book The Numbers Game that the best way to improve a team is to replace the worst player. But when Stefan and his University of Michigan colleague Guy Wilkinson looked at which players in the team had the biggest impact on results, they found it was neither the best nor the worst. Instead, it was the transfer fee of the second-best player that was most decisive. Here, they argue, is the best way to allocate a club’s transfer budget across the eleven starters:

Best-paid player: 25.76%

Number two: 25.76%

Three: 18.41%

Four: 9.80%

Five: 9.80%

Six: 9.80%

Seven: 0.14%

Eight: 0.14%

Nine: 0.14%

Ten: 0.14%

Eleven: 0.14%

In other words, they found it would make sense for a club to spend almost nothing on its five cheapest players, since they have very little impact on results, and instead to devote about 70 per cent of the budget to the three best players. But in fact, clubs don’t do this. Clubs in the Premier League in 2012–2013 typically spent more than 1 per cent of the budget even on the team’s cheapest player, and about 8 per cent on the seventh cheapest. In short, they spread the money around more equally than they should. This might be because they think that massive differences in status within a team could unsettle the locker room. It might be because they want to keep some good players in reserve in case the best get injured. Or perhaps there just aren’t enough stars in the sport to go around, especially not for smaller clubs, so relatively little money is spent on the top players. Still, we think an innovative club could do well by concentrating its budget upwards. Chris Anderson recently added an interesting nuance, saying that rather than target scarce superstars, clubs should try to assemble productive combinations of two, three or four players. ‘Who plays well with whom?’

Certain Nationalities Are Overvalued

Clubs will pay more for a player from a ‘fashionable’ football country. American goalkeeper Kasey Keller says that in the transfer market, it’s good to be Dutch. ‘Giovanni van Bronckhorst is the best example,’ Keller told Christoph Biermann. ‘He went from Rangers to Arsenal, failed there, and then where did he go? To Barcelona! You have to be a Dutchman to do that. An American would have been sent straight back to DC United.’

For decades the most fashionable nationality in the transfer market was Brazilian. As Alex Bellos writes in Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life: ‘The phrase “Brazilian footballer” is like the phrases “French chef” or “Tibetan monk”. The nationality expresses an authority, an innate vocation for the job – whatever the natural ability.’ A Brazilian agent who had exported very humble Brazilian players to the Faroe Islands and Iceland told Bellos: ‘It’s sad to say, but it is much easier selling, for example, a crap Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican. The Brazilian gets across the image of happiness, party, carnival. Irrespective of talent, it is very seductive to have a Brazilian in your team.’

That sentiment may have been dented by Brazil’s 1–7 defeat to Germany in the semi-final of the 2014 World Cup in a Belo Horizonte. In recent years Belgians have been coming into fashion, and after the 2014 World Cup Costa Ricans suddenly became the hot new items in every self-respecting club’s wardrobe. After the little country got within a penalty shoot-out of reaching the semi-final, the total value of transfer fees for Costa Rican players moving internationally rose from $922,000 in 2013 to almost $10 million in 2014, said FIFA TMS. A wise club will buy unfashionable nationalities – Bolivians, say, or Belorussians – at discounts.

Gentlemen Prefer Blonds

One big English club noticed that its scouts who watched youth matches often came back recommending blond players. The likely reason: when you are scanning a field of twenty-two similar-looking players, none of whom yet has a giant reputation, the blonds tend to stand out (except, presumably, in Scandinavia). The colour catches the eye. So the scout notices the blond boy without understanding why. The club in question began to take this distortion into account when judging scouting reports. We suspect the bias towards blonds disappears when scouts are assessing adult players who already have established reputations. Then the player’s reputation – ‘World Cup hero’, say, or perhaps ‘Costa Rican’ – guides the scout’s judgement.

Similarly, Beane at the Oakland A’s noticed that baseball scouts had all sorts of ‘sight-based prejudices’. They were suspicious of fat guys or skinny little guys or ‘short right-handed pitchers’, and they overvalued handsome, strapping athletes of the type that Beane himself had been at age seventeen. Scouts look for players who look the part. Perhaps in football, blonds are thought to look more like superstars.

This taste for blonds is another instance of the ‘availability heuristic’: the piece of information is available, so it influences your decision. Blonds stick in the memory.

* * *

The inefficiencies we have cited so far are so-called systemic failures: more than just individual mistakes, they are deviations from rationality. There is now decades of research by psychologists showing that even when people try to act rationally they are prone to all sorts of cognitive biases that lead them astray. If decision-makers are aware of these biases, they stand a better chance of avoiding them. All this is what you might call Transfer Market 101. To learn more about how to play the market, we need to study the masters.

DRUNKS, GAMBLERS AND BARGAINS: CLOUGH AND TAYLOR AT FOREST

Probably nobody in English football has ever done a better job of gaming the transfer market than Nottingham Forest’s manager Brian Clough (or ‘Old Big Head’, as he fondly called himself) and his assistant Peter Taylor. As manager of Forest from 1975 to 1993, Clough managed to turn the provincial club into European champions while turning a profit on the transfer market (and, as we’ll see in the next chapter, making enough on deals to slip the odd illegal bonus into his own pocket on the side).

Clough and Taylor met while playing in a ‘Probables versus Possibles’ reserve game at Middlesbrough in 1955. They seem to have fallen in love at first sight. Pretty soon they were using their free time to travel around the north watching football and coaching children together. Taylor never became more than a journeyman keeper, but Clough scored the fastest 200 goals ever notched in English football. Then, at the age of 27, he wrecked his right knee skidding on a frozen pitch on Boxing Day 1962. Three years later he phoned Taylor and said: ‘I’ve been offered the managership of Hartlepool and I don’t fancy it, but if you’ll come, I’ll consider it.’ He then immediately hung up. Taylor took the bait, though to get in he had to double as Hartlepool’s medical department, running on with the sponge on match days. It was the prelude to their legendary years together at Derby and Nottingham Forest.

David Peace’s novel The Damned United – and Tom Hooper’s film of it – is in large part the love story of Clough and Taylor. The men’s wives only have walk-on parts. As in all good couples, each partner has his assigned role. As Peace’s fictional Clough tells himself: ‘Peter has the eyes and the ears, but you have the stomach and the balls.’ Taylor found the players, and Clough led them to glory.

The relationship ended in ‘divorce’ in 1982, with Taylor’s resignation from Forest. It seems that the rift had opened two years before, when Taylor published his excellent but now forgotten memoir With Clough by Taylor. More of this in a moment, because it is the closest thing we have to a handbook to the transfer market.

But clearly the couple had other problems besides literature. Perhaps Clough resented his partner because he needed him so badly – not the sort of relationship Clough liked. Indeed, the film The Damned United depicts him failing at Leeds partly because Taylor is not there to scout players, and finally driving down to Brighton with his young sons to beg his partner’s forgiveness. He finds Taylor doing the gardening. At Taylor’s insistence, he gets down on his knees in the driveway, and recites: ‘I’m nothing without you. Please, please, baby, take me back.’ And Taylor takes him back, and buys him the cut-price Forest team that wins two European Cups. Because, whatever their precise relationship, the duo certainly knew how to sign footballers. Here are a few of their coups:

 Buying Gary Birtles from the non-league club Long Eaton for £2,000 in 1976, and selling him to Manchester United four years later for £1.25 million. A measure of what a good deal this was for Forest: United forked out £250,000 more for Birtles than they would pay to sign Eric Cantona from Leeds twelve years later, in 1992. Birtles ended up costing United about £86,000 a goal, and after two years was sold back to Forest for a quarter of the initial fee.

 Buying Roy Keane from an Irish club called Cobh Ramblers for £47,000 in 1990, and selling him to Manchester United three years later for £3.75 million, then a British record fee.

 Buying Kenny Burns from Birmingham City for £145,000 in 1977. Taylor writes in With Clough by Taylor that Burns was then regarded as ‘a fighting, hard-drinking gambler … a stone overweight’. In 1978, English football writers voted Burns Footballer of the Year.

 Twice buying Archie Gemmill cheaply. In 1970, when Gemmill was playing for Preston, Clough drove to his house and asked him to come to Derby. Gemmill refused. Clough said that in that case he would sleep outside in his car. Gemmill’s wife invited him to sleep in the house instead. The next morning at breakfast Clough persuaded Gemmill to sign. The fee was £60,000, and Gemmill quickly won two league titles at Derby. In 1977 Clough paid Derby £20,000 and the now forgotten goalkeeper John Middleton to bring Gemmill to his new club, Forest, where the player won another league title.

If there is one club where almost every pound spent on transfers bought results, it was Forest under Clough. In the 1970s the correlation must have been off the charts: they won two European Cups with a team assembled largely for peanuts. Sadly there are no good financial data for that period, but we do know that even from 1982 to 1992, in Clough’s declining years, after Taylor had left him, Forest performed as well on the field as clubs that were spending twice as much on wages. Clough had broken the usually iron link between salaries and league position.

Clough himself seemed to think that what explained Forest’s success was his and Taylor’s eye for players, rather than, say, any motivational gift or tactical genius. Phil Soar, the club’s chairman and chief executive for four years at the end of the 1990s, told us: ‘In hours of musings with Clough (I had to try to defend him from the bung charges) I obviously asked him what made this almost absurdly irrelevant little provincial club (my home town of course) into a shooting star. And he always used to say, “We had some pretty good players you know …”’

It’s hard to identify all of the duo’s transfer secrets, and if their rivals at the time had understood what they were up to, everyone would simply have imitated them. Taylor’s book makes it clear that he spent a lot of time trying to identify players (like Burns) whom others had wrongly undervalued owing to surface characteristics; but then everyone tries to do that. Sometimes Forest did splash out on a player who was rated by everybody, like Trevor Francis, the first ‘million-pound man’, or Peter Shilton, whom they made the most expensive goalkeeper in British history.

Yet thanks to With Clough by Taylor we can identify three of the duo’s rules. First, be as eager to sell good players as to buy them. ‘It’s as important in football as in the stock market to sell at the right time,’ wrote Taylor. ‘A manager should always be looking for signs of disintegration in a winning side and then sell the players responsible before their deterioration is noticed by possible buyers.’ (Or in Billy Beane’s words: ‘You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you’re fucked.’)

The moment when a player reaches the top of his particular hill is like the moment when the stock market peaks. Clough and Taylor were always trying to gauge that moment, and sell. Each time they signed a player, they would give him a set speech, which Taylor records in his book: ‘Son, the first time we can replace you with a better player, we’ll do it without blinking an eyelid. That’s what we’re paid to do – to produce the best side and to win as many things as we can. If we see a better player than you but don’t sign him then we’re frauds. But we’re not frauds.’ In 1981, just after Kenny Burns had won everything with Forest, the club offloaded him to Leeds for £400,000.

Second, older players are overrated. ‘I’ve noticed over the years how often Liverpool sell players as they near or pass their thirtieth birthday,’ notes Taylor in his book. ‘Bob Paisley [Liverpool’s then manager] believes the average first division footballer is beginning to burn out at thirty.’ Taylor added, rather snottily, that that was true of a ‘running side like Liverpool’, but less so of a passing one like Forest. Nonetheless, he agreed with the principle of selling older players.

The master of that trade for many years was Wenger. Arsenal’s manager is one of the few people in football who can view the game from the outside. In part, this is because he has a degree in economic sciences from the University of Strasbourg in France. As a trained economist, he is inclined to trust data rather than the game’s received wisdom. Wenger is obsessed with the idea that in the transfer market clubs tend to overvalue a player’s past performance. That prompts them to pay fortunes – in transfer fees and salaries – for players who have passed their prime. FIFA TMS analysed the pay of players who moved internationally to Brazil, Argentina, England, Germany, Italy and Portugal in 2012, and found, remarkably, that the average man earned his peak fixed salary at the ripe old age of 32.

Seniority is a poor rationale for pay in football (and probably in other industries). All players are melting blocks of ice. The job of the club is to gauge how fast they are melting, and to get rid of them before they turn into expensive puddles of water. Wenger often lets defenders carry on until their mid-thirties, but he usually gets rid of his midfielders and forwards much younger. He flogged Thierry Henry for £16 million aged twenty-nine, Patrick Vieira for £14 million aged twenty-nine, Emmanuel Petit for £7 million aged twenty-nine and Marc Overmars for £25 million aged twenty-seven, and none of them ever did as well again after leaving Arsenal.

The average striker has peaked by age twenty-five, at least as measured by goals scored, as the French economist Bastien Drut has shown – think of Michael Owen, Robbie Fowler, Fernando Torres and Patrick Kluivert. Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Didier Drogba, who improved after their mid-twenties, are exceptions, probably because they never relied much on pace in the first place. Yet many clubs still insist on paying for past performance. Forty per cent of players bought by Premier League clubs from 2010 to 2016 were signed after passing their prime age, says Blake Wooster, chief executive of 21st Club, which advises football clubs. Manchester United’s hiring on loan of the twenty-eight-year-old Colombian striker Radamel Falcao just after severe injury was an especially bad decision, as was Chelsea’s repetition of United’s mistake a year later. English clubs particularly overvalue Premier League experience, says Wooster – it just isn’t that important.

The same overvaluation of older players exists in baseball, too. The conventional wisdom in the game had always been that players peak in their early thirties. Then along came Bill James from his small town in Kansas. In his mimeographs, the father of sabermetrics showed that the average player peaked not in his early thirties, but at just twenty-seven. Beane told us, ‘Nothing strangulates a sports club more than having older players on long contracts, because once they stop performing, they become immovable. And as they become older, the risk of injury becomes exponential. It’s less costly to bring a young player. If it doesn’t work, you can go and find the next guy, and the next guy. The downside risk is lower, and the upside much higher.’

Finally, Clough and Taylor’s third rule: buy players with personal problems (like Burns, or the gambler Stan Bowles) at a discount. Then help them deal with their problems.

Clough, a drinker, and Taylor, a gambler, empathized with troubled players. While negotiating with a new player they would ask him a stock question, ‘to which we usually know the answer,’ wrote Taylor. It was: ‘Let’s hear your vice before you sign. Is it women, booze, drugs, or gambling?’

Clough and Taylor believed that once they knew the vice, they could help the player manage it. Clough was so confident of his psychological skills that in the early 1970s he even thought he could handle Manchester United’s alcoholic womanizing genius George Best. ‘I’d sort George out in a week,’ he boasted. ‘I’d hide the key to the drinks cabinet and I’d make sure he was tucked up with nothing stronger than cocoa for the first six months. Women? I’d let him home to see his mum and his sisters. No one else in a skirt is getting within a million miles of him.’

Taylor says he told Bowles, who joined Forest in 1979 (and, as it happens, failed there), ‘Any problem in your private life must be brought to us; you may not like that but we’ll prove to you that our way of management is good for all of us.’ After a player confided a problem, wrote Taylor, ‘if we couldn’t find an answer, we would turn to experts: we have sought advice for our players from clergymen, doctors and local councillors.’ Taking much the same approach, Wenger helped Tony Adams and Paul Merson combat their addictions.

All this might sound obvious, but the usual attitude in football is, ‘We paid a lot of money for you, now get on with it,’ as if mental illness, addiction or homesickness should not exist above a certain level of income.

It should be added that often the shrewdest actors in the transfer market are not managers at all, but agents. Raiola told us that he tries to decide which club a player should join, and then sometimes persuades the club to make the move happen. In his words, ‘I always try to formulate a goal with a player: “That is what we want. We’re not going to sit and wait and see where the wind blows.”’ For instance, in 2004, when his client Zlatan Ibrahimovic was a wayward young striker at Ajax, Raiola decided that the best place for him to learn professionalism (while earning good money) was Juventus. Juve may believe that it chose Zlatan, but that ain’t necessarily so. In 2006 Raiola told his player that Juve’s ship was sinking and it was time to join Inter. In 2009 he moved Ibrahimovic to Barcelona, then to Milan, and in 2012 (very much against the player’s will) to Paris Saint-Germain. There the Swede earned €14 million a season in a top-class team while underfunded Milan sank.

In 2016, Raiola brought Ibrahimovic, Pogba and Henrikh Mkhitaryan to Manchester United. Why join a club that hadn’t qualified for the Champions League and had underperformed for three years? Raiola told us: ‘Because I think: you have to go to the club that needs you. This club needed them.’

He claims to have foreseen United’s need as early as 2015, when the club signed the young forwards Anthony Martial and Memphis Depay. Raiola insists he knew they wouldn’t succeed. ‘Not if you have to perform now,’ he says, slapping a fat fist into a fat hand. ‘Martial and Depay come in and say, “We have to carry Manchester United, a giant institution?” So already last year [2015] I told the people at United, “You’ll have to put in a guy like Zlatan to restore the balance. Then the attention goes to Zlatan. He has the experience, and he dares to take the responsibility.”’

Raiola continues, ‘At clubs that understand me, I have three or four players. Now at United, and before at Juventus, Milan, Paris Saint-Germain.’ In these cases, he says, he becomes a club’s ‘in-house consultant’. He then effectively shares a seat with the club’s top management. No wonder that in 2017, Manchester United paid Everton £75 million (plus potential bonuses) for his client Romelu Lukaku.

Some readers may be surprised to hear us praise agents, who are always accused of breaking laws and sucking money out of the game. True, some of them are criminals (who often act in cahoots with clubs) but most agents get an unfair rap. We understand why clubs wish they didn’t exist. A club would love to be able to tell a twenty-year-old player from a poor background who hasn’t had any financial education, ‘Here’s your contract, congratulations. Now run up and see the chief executive, and he’ll tell you your salary.’ This sort of talk plays well with the fans. However, football needs professional agents, who will take a closer long-term interest in their players’ wellbeing than any club ever will.

RELOCATION, RELOCATION, RELOCATION: THE RICE KRISPIES PROBLEM

Clough and Taylor understood that many transfers fail because of a player’s problems off the field. In a surprising number of cases, these problems are the product of the transfer itself.

Moving to a job in another city is always stressful; moving to another country is even more so. The challenge of moving from Rio de Janeiro to Manchester involves cultural adjustments that just don’t compare with moving from Springfield, Missouri to Springfield, Ohio. An uprooted footballer has to find a home and a new life for his family, and gain some grasp of the social rules of his new country. Yet European clubs that pay millions of pounds for foreign players are often unwilling to spend a few thousand more to help the players settle in their new homes. Instead the clubs have historically told them, ‘Here’s a plane ticket, come over, and play brilliantly from day one.’ The player fails to adjust to the new country, underperforms, and his transfer fee is wasted. ‘Relocation’, as the industry of relocation consultants calls it, has long been one of the biggest inefficiencies in the transfer market.

All the inefficiencies surrounding relocation can be assuaged. Most big businesses know how difficult relocation is and do their best to smooth the passage. When a senior Microsoft executive moves between countries, a relocation consultant helps his or her family find schools and a house and learn the social rules of the new country. If Luther Blissett had been working for Microsoft, a relocation consultant could have found him Rice Krispies. An expensive relocation might cost £20,000, or 0.05 per cent of a large transfer fee. But in football, possibly the most globalized industry of all, spending anything at all on relocation was until very recently regarded as a waste of money.

Boudewijn Zenden, who played in four countries, for clubs including Liverpool and Barcelona, told us during his stint in Marseille in 2009:

It’s the weirdest thing ever that you can actually buy a player for 20 mil, and you don’t do anything to make him feel at home. I think the first thing you should do is get him a mobile phone and a house. Get him a school for the kids, get something for his missus, get a teacher in for both of them straightaway, because obviously everything goes with the language. Do they need anything for other family members, do they need a driving licence, do they need a visa, do they need a new passport? Sometimes even at the biggest clubs it’s really badly organized.

Milan: best club ever. AC Milan is organized in a way you can’t believe. Anything is done for you: you arrive, you get your house, it’s fully furnished, you get five cars to choose from, you know the sky’s the limit. They really say: we’ll take care of everything else; you make sure you play really well. Whereas unfortunately in a lot of clubs, you have to get after it yourself. … Sometimes you get to a club, and you’ve got people actually at the club who take profit from players.

For any foreign player, or even a player who comes in new, they could get one man who’s actually there to take care of everything. But then again, sometimes players are a bit – I don’t want to say abusive, but they might take profit of the situation. They might call in the middle of the night, just to say there’s no milk in the fridge. You know how they are sometimes.

Raiola laughingly endorses Zenden’s assessment of golden-age Milan: ‘I always used to say, “I think they’ll come and put a pill on your tongue if you have a headache.” Whereas Inter would say, “Here’s your contract, go and figure it all out yourself.”’

In football, bad relocations have traditionally been the norm. In 1961, two fifteen-year-olds from Belfast took the boat across the Irish Sea to become apprentices with Manchester United. George Best and Eric McMordie had never left home before. When they landed at Liverpool docks, they couldn’t find anyone from the club to meet them. So they worked out for themselves how to get a train to Manchester, eventually found the stadium, and wound up feeling so lonely and confused that on their second day they told the club: ‘We want to go back on the next boat.’ And they did, recounts Duncan Hamilton in his biography of Best, Immortal. In the end, Best decided to give Manchester one last try. McMordie refused. He became a plasterer in Belfast after leaving school, though he did later make a respectable football career with Middlesbrough. Just imagine how the botched welcome of Best might have changed United’s history.

Yet bad relocations continued for decades, like Chelsea signing Dutch cosmopolitan Ruud Gullit in 1996 and sticking him in a hotel in the ugly London dormitory town of Slough, or Ian Rush coming back to England from a bad year in Italy marvelling, ‘It was like another country.’ Many players down the years would have understood that phrase. In 1995 Manchester City bought the Georgian playmaker Georgi Kinkladze, who spoke no English, and stuck him on his own in a hotel for three months. No wonder his early games were poor. His improvement, writes Michael Cox in The Mixer, ‘coincided with the arrival of two Georgian friends and his mother, Khatuna, who brought some home comforts: Georgian cognac, walnuts, and spices to make Kinkladze his favourite dishes.’

But perhaps the great failed relocation, one that a Spanish relocation consultant still cites in her presentations, was Nicolas Anelka’s to Real Madrid in 1999.

A half-hour of conversation with Anelka is enough to confirm that he is self-absorbed, scared of other people and not someone who makes contact easily. Nor does he appear to be good at languages, because after well over a decade in England he still spoke very mediocre English. Anelka was the sort of expatriate who really needed a relocation consultant.

Real had spent £22 million buying him from Arsenal. The club then spent nothing on helping him adjust. On day one the shy, awkward twenty-year-old reported to work and found that there was nobody to show him around. He hadn’t even been assigned a locker in the dressing room. Several times that first morning, he would take a locker that seemed to be unused, only for another player to walk in and claim it.

Anelka doesn’t seem to have talked about his problems to anyone at Madrid. Nor did anyone at the club ask him. Instead he talked to France Football, a magazine that he treated as his newspaper of record, like a 1950s British prime minister talking to The Times. ‘I am alone against the rest of the team,’ he revealed midway through the season. He claimed to possess a video showing his teammates looking gloomy after he had scored his first goal for Real after six months at the club. He had tried to give this video to the coach, but the coach hadn’t wanted to see it. Also, the other black Francophone players had told Anelka that the other players wouldn’t pass to him. Madrid ended up giving him a forty-five-day ban, essentially for being maladjusted.

Paranoid though Anelka may have been, he had a point. The other players really didn’t like him. And they never got to know him, because nobody at the club seems ever to have bothered to introduce him to anyone. As he said later, all that Madrid had told him was, ‘Look after yourself.’ The club seems to have taken the strangely materialistic view that Anelka’s salary should determine his behaviour. But even in materialistic terms, that was foolish. If you pay £22 million for an immature young employee, it is bad management to make him look after himself. Wenger at Arsenal knew that, and he had Anelka on the field scoring goals.

Even a player with a normal personality can find emigration tricky. Tyrone Mears, an English defender who spent a year at Marseille, where his best relocation consultant was his teammate Zenden, said, ‘Sometimes it’s not a problem of the player adapting. A lot of the times it’s the family adapting.’ Perhaps the player’s girlfriend is unhappy because she can’t find a job in the new town. Or perhaps she’s pregnant and doesn’t know how to negotiate the local hospital, or perhaps she can’t find Rice Krispies (‘or beans on toast’, added Zenden, when told about the Blissett drama). The club doesn’t care. It is paying her boyfriend well. He simply has to perform.

Football clubs never used to bother with anything like an HR department. As late as about 2005, there were only a few relocation consultants in football, and most weren’t called that, and were not hired by clubs. Instead they worked either for players’ agents or for sportswear companies. If Nike or Adidas is paying a player to wear its shoes, it needs him to succeed. If the player moves to a foreign club, the sportswear company – knowing that the club might not bother – sometimes sends a minder to live in that town and look after him.

The minder gives the player occasional presents, acts as his secretary, friend and shrink, and remembers his wife’s birthday. The minder of a young midfielder who was struggling in his first weeks at Milan said that his main task, when the player came home from training frustrated, lonely and confused by Italy, was to take him out to dinner. At dinner the player would grumble and say, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to tell the coach what I really think of him,’ and the minder would say, ‘That might not be such a brilliant idea. Here, have some more spaghetti alle vongole.’ To most players, this sort of thing comes as a bonus in a stressful life. To a few, it is essential.

After international transfers became common in the 1990s, some agents began to double as player minders. When the Dutch forward Bryan Roy moved from Ajax to Foggia in Italy in 1992, Raiola’s personal service included spending seven months with Roy in Foggia, and helping paint the player’s house. He later said, ‘I already realized then that that this kind of guidance was very important in determining the success or failure of a player.’

Many of Raiola’s players still treat him as an all-purpose helpmeet. Mario Balotelli once phoned him to say his house was on fire; Raiola advised him to try the fire brigade. Nowadays Raiola’s younger players Facetime him. He waddles around his office imitating them as they hold up their phones to show him objects they want to buy: ‘“I’m walking through the house. What do you think of it?”’ He chuckles fondly. He considers it all part of his job.

But part of the history of football is that agents such as Raiola have tended to be cleverer than the people who run clubs. Most clubs took a long time to see the value of relocation. Drogba in his autobiography recounts joining Chelsea from Olympique Marseille in 2004 for £24 million. He writes, ‘I plunged into problems linked to my situation as an expatriate. Chelsea didn’t necessarily help me.’ Nobody at the club could help him find a school for his children. All Chelsea did to get him a house was put him in touch with a real estate agent who tried to sell him one for £10 million. For ‘weeks of irritation’ the Drogba family lived in a hotel while Drogba, who at that point barely spoke English, went house hunting after training.

All Chelsea’s expensive foreign signings had much the same experience, Drogba writes. ‘We sometimes laughed about it with Gallas, Makelele, Kezman, Geremi. “You too, you’re still living in a hotel?” After all these worries, I didn’t feel like integrating [at Chelsea] or multiplying my efforts.’

Chelsea were no worse than other English clubs at the time. The same summer Drogba arrived in London, Wayne Rooney moved thirty-five miles up the motorway from Everton to Manchester United and had an almost equally disorienting experience. United had paid a reported £25.6 million for him but then stuck its eighteen-year-old star asset in a hotel room. ‘Living in such a place I found horrible,’ reports Rooney in his My Story So Far. The nearest thing to a relocation consultant he found at United seems to have been a teammate: ‘Gary Neville tried to persuade me to buy one of his houses. I don’t know how many he has, or whether he was boasting or winding me up, but he kept telling me about these properties he had.’

At a conference in Rome in 2008, relocation consultants literally lined up to tell their horror stories about football. Lots of them had tried to get into the sport and been rebuffed. A Danish relocator had been told by FC Copenhagen that her services weren’t required because the players’ wives always helped one another settle. Many clubs had never even heard of relocation. Moreover, they had never hired relocation consultants before, so given the logic of football, not hiring relocation consultants must be the right thing to do. One Swedish relocator surmised, ‘I guess it comes down to the fact that they see the players as merchandise.’

The only relocation consultants who had penetrated football happened to have a friend inside a club or, in the case of one Greek woman, had married a club owner. She had told her husband, ‘All these guys would be happier if you find out what their needs are, and address their needs.’

Another relocator had entered a German club as a language teacher and worked her way up. She said, ‘I was their mother, their nurse, their real estate agent, their cleaning lady, their everything. They didn’t have a car; they didn’t speak the language.’ Did her work help them play better? ‘Absolutely.’ The club was happy for her to work as an amateur, but as soon as she founded a relocation company, it didn’t want her anymore. She had become threatening.

And so countless new signings continued to flop abroad. Clubs often anticipated this by avoiding players who seemed particularly ill-equipped to adjust. For instance, on average Latin Americans are the world’s most skilful players. Yet historically, English clubs rarely bought them, because Latin Americans don’t speak English, don’t like cold weather and don’t tend to understand the core traditions of English football, such as drinking twenty pints of beer in a night. Few Latin Americans adjust easily to English football.

Instead of Latin Americans, English clubs traditionally bought Scandinavians. On average, Scandinavians are worse footballers than Latin Americans, but they are very familiar with English, cold weather and twenty pints of beer. Scandinavians adapted to England, and so the clubs bought them. But the clubs were missing a great opportunity. Anyone who bought a great Latin American player and hired a good relocation consultant to help him adjust would be onto a winner. Yet few clubs did. Years used to go by without any English club buying a Latin American.

In 2008 Manchester City took a gamble on Robinho. As a Brazilian forward who had had his moments in the World Cup of 2006, he was bound to be overvalued, and was also very likely to relocate badly. So it’s little wonder that City paid a then British record transfer fee of £32.5 million for him, or that eighteen months later it gave up on him and sent him home to Santos on loan. Robinho never returned to English football. The experience obviously taught City a lesson, because for the next two years the club switched to a policy of buying only players who had already established themselves in England. It also finally began to take relocation seriously.

Bit by bit in recent years, the football business has become more intelligent. Way back in the mid-1990s, Liverpool had become one of the first clubs to hire some sort of employee to help new players settle. Ajax Amsterdam was another pioneer. The woman who first handled relocations at Ajax found that some of the problems of new players were absurdly easy to solve. When Steven Pienaar and another young South African player came to Amsterdam, they were teenagers, had never lived on their own before and suddenly found themselves sharing an apartment in a cold country at the other end of the earth. Inevitably, they put their music speakers on the bare floor and cranked up the volume. Inevitably, the neighbours complained. The South Africans had a miserable time in their building, until the woman from Ajax came around to see what was wrong and suggested they put their speakers on a table instead. They did. The noise diminished, their lives got easier, and that might just have made them better able to perform for Ajax.

Most clubs in the Premier League now have ‘player care officers’ – football code for relocation consultants. Some of these officers are full-timers, others not. Some do a serious job. Manchester City in particular learned from Robinho’s failure. When we visited the club’s training ground in 2012, on a wall just behind reception we saw a map of Manchester’s surroundings, designed to catch the eyes of passing players. The map highlighted eight recommended wealthy towns and suburbs for them to live; not on the list was Manchester’s city centre with its vibrant nightlife.

These recommendations are just the start. City’s ‘player-care department’ aims to take care of almost every need a new immigrant might have, whether it’s a nanny or a ‘discreet car service’. Even before a new player signs, the club has already researched his off-duty habits and his partner’s taste in restaurants. When he arrives for pre-season training, the club might say to him, ‘Well, you’re going to be busy for a couple of weeks, but here’s a little restaurant your girlfriend might like.’ It’s not true that behind every successful footballer there is a happy woman (or man), but it probably does help.

In 2011 City signed the young Argentine striker Sergio Agüero. Nobody doubted his talent. However, many doubted whether he would adapt to English football and rainy provincial life. His transfer fee of £38 million seemed a gamble, even for Manchester City. But Agüero scored twice on debut. He finished his first English season with 30 goals, including the last-second strike in the last game of the season against QPR that won City their first league title since 1968. In part, Agüero succeeded thanks to City’s excellence at relocation. Gavin Fleig, the club’s head of performance analysis, told us: ‘The normal transition time for a foreign player is considered in the industry to be about a year. Normally those players are in a hotel for the first three months. We were able to get from agreeing a fee to Sergio living in his house within two weeks, with a Spanish sat-nav system in his car, linked to the Spanish community in Manchester. We had our prize asset ready to go from day one.’

Then there was City’s signing of Kevin De Bruyne from Wolfsburg in 2015. The Belgian was flown to Manchester in a private jet. ‘It was like in a film,’ his agent Patrick De Koster later recalled. ‘We thought we’d have a lot of work finding a new house, opening a bank account, phone cards, a car. But everything was sorted in three hours. Incredible.’

Raiola says, ‘In England the clubs have kept getting better at it. But it’s just that in Italy it’s done in a very Italian way, human: “Lovely, and we’ll go and get a bite to eat, and how are the children?” In England it’s much more businesslike. There’s something to be said for both ways.’

Still, a few clubs continue to undervalue or even neglect relocation. One player care officer in the Premier League told us, ‘Some very well-known managers have said to me they can’t understand why you can possibly need it. They have said, “Well, when I moved to a foreign country as a player I had to do it myself.” Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. You probably had to clean boots, too, but nobody does that now.’

THE NICEST TOWN IN EUROPE: HOW OLYMPIQUE LYON BOUGHT AND SOLD

If you had to locate the middle-class European dream anywhere, it would be in Lyon. It’s a town the size of Oakland, about two-thirds of the way down France, nestled between rivers just west of the Alps. On a warm January afternoon, drinking coffee outside in the eighteenth-century Place Bellecour where the buildings are as pretty as the women, you think: nice. Here’s a wealthy town where you can have a good job, nice weather and a big house near the mountains.

Lyon also has some of the best restaurants in Europe, known locally as bouchons, or ‘corks’. Even at the town’s football stadium you can have a wonderful three-course pre-game meal consisting largely of intestines or head cheese, unless you prefer to eat at local boy Paul Bocuse’s brasserie across the road and totter into the grounds just before kick-off. And then, for a remarkable decade or so, you could watch some very decent football, too.

Until about 2000 Lyon was known as the birthplace of cinema and nouvelle cuisine, but not as a football town. It was just too bourgeois. If for some reason you wanted football, you drove thirty-five miles down the highway to gritty proletarian Saint-Étienne. In 1987 Olympique Lyon, or OL, or les Gones (the Kids), was playing in France’s second division on an annual budget of under £2 million. It was any old backwater provincial club in Europe. From 2002 to 2008 Lyon ruled French football. The club’s ascent was in large part a story of the international transfer market. Better than any other club in Europe, for a while Lyon worked out how to play the market.

In 1987 Jean-Michel Aulas, a local software entrepreneur with the stark, grooved features of a Roman emperor, became club president. Aulas had played fairly good handball as a young man and had a season ticket at OL.

‘I didn’t know the world of football well,’ he admitted to us in 2007 over a bottle of OL mineral water in his office beside the stadium (which he was already aiming to tear down and replace with a bigger one). Had he expected the transformation that he wrought? ‘No.’

Aulas set out to improve the club step by step. ‘We tried to abstract the factor “time”,’ he explained. ‘Each year we fix as an aim to have sporting progress, and progress of our financial resources. It’s like a cyclist riding: you can overtake the people in front of you.’ Others in France preferred to liken Aulas to ‘un bulldozer’.

In 1987 even the local Lyonnais didn’t care much about les Gones. You could live in Lyon without knowing that football existed. The club barely had a personality, whereas Saint-Étienne was the ‘miners’ club’ that had suffered tragic defeats on great European nights in the 1970s. Saint-Étienne’s president at the time said that when it came to football, Lyon was a suburb of Saint-Étienne, a remark that still rankles. At one derby after Lyon’s domination began, les Gones’ fans unfurled a banner that told the Saint-Étienne supporters, ‘We invented cinema when your fathers were dying in the mines.’

Aulas appointed local boy Raymond Domenech as his first coach. In Domenech’s first season, OL finished at the top of the second division without losing a game. Right after that it qualified for Europe. Aulas recalled, ‘At a stroke the credibility was total. The project was en route.’

It turned out that the second city in France, even if it was a bit bourgeois, was just hungry enough for a decent football club. The Lyonnais were willing to buy match tickets if things went well, but if things went badly, they weren’t immediately waving white handkerchiefs in the stands and demanding that the president or manager or half the team be gotten rid of. Nor did the French media track the club’s doings hour by hour. It’s much easier to build for the long term in a place like that than in a ‘football city’ like Marseille or Newcastle. Moreover, players were happy to move to a town that is hardly a hardship posting. Almost nothing they got up to in Lyon made it into the gossip press. Another of Lyon’s advantages: the locals had money. ‘It allowed us to have not just a “popular clientele”, but also a “business clientele”,’ said Aulas.

Talking about money is something of a taboo in France. It is considered a grubby and private topic. Socially, you’re never supposed to ask anyone a question that might reveal how much somebody has. Football, to most French fans, is not supposed to be about money. They find the notion of a well-run football club humourless, practically American.

It therefore irritated them that Aulas talked about it so unabashedly. He might have invented the word ‘moneyball’. Aulas’s theme was that over time, the more money a club makes, the more matches it will win, and the more matches it wins, the more money it will make. In the short term you can lose a match, but in the long term there is a rationality even to football. (And to baseball. As Moneyball describes it, Beane believes that winning ‘is simply a matter of figuring out the odds, and exploiting the laws of probability. … To get worked up over plays, or even games, is as unproductive as a casino manager worrying over the outcomes of individual pulls of the slot machines.’)

In Aulas’s view, rationality in football works more or less like this: if you buy good players for less than they are worth, you will win more games. You will then have more money to buy better players for less than they are worth. The better players will win you more matches, and that will attract more fans (and thus more money), because Aulas spotted early that most football fans everywhere are much more like shoppers than like religious believers: if they can get a better experience somewhere new, they will go there. He told us in 2007, ‘We sold 110,000 replica shirts last season. This season we are already at 200,000. I think Olympique Lyon has become by far the most beloved club in France.’

Polls at the time suggested that he was right: in Sport+Markt’s survey of European supporters in 2006, Lyon emerged as the country’s most popular club just ahead of Olympique Marseille. This popularity was a recent phenomenon. In 2002, when Lyon first became champions of France, the overriding French emotion towards the club had still been, ‘Whatever.’ The editor of France Football magazine complained around that time that when Lyon won the title, his magazine didn’t sell. But as the club won the title every year from 2002 to 2008 – the longest period of domination by any club in any of Europe’s five biggest national leagues ever – many French fans began to care about them.

With more fans, Lyon made more money. On match days you could get a haircut at an official OL salon, drink an OL Beaujolais at an OL café, book your holiday at an OL travel agency and take an OL taxi to the game – and many people did. Lyon used that money to buy better players.

But for all Aulas’s OL mineral water, what made the club’s rise possible was the transfer market. On that warm winter’s afternoon in Lyon, Aulas told us, ‘We will invest better than Chelsea, Arsenal or Real Madrid. We will make different strategic choices. For instance, we won’t try to have the best team on paper in terms of brand. We will have the best team relative to our investment.’ Here are Lyon’s rules of the transfer market:

 Use the wisdom of crowds. When Lyon was thinking of signing a player, a group of men would sit down to debate the transfer. Aulas would be there, and Bernard Lacombe, once a bull-like centre-forward for Lyon and France, who served from the late 1980s until 2017 as the club’s sporting director and then Aulas’s ‘special adviser’. Lacombe was known for having the best pair of eyes in French football. He coached Lyon from 1997 to 2000, but Aulas clearly figured out that if you have someone with his knack for spotting the right transfer, you want to keep him at the club long term rather than make his job contingent on four lost matches. The same went for Peter Taylor at Forest.

Whoever happened to be Lyon’s head coach at the time would sit in on the meeting, too, and so would four or five other coaches. ‘We have a group that gives its advice,’ Aulas explained. ‘In England the manager often does it alone. In France it’s often the technical director.’ Lacombe told us that the house rule was that after the group had made the decision, everyone present would then publicly get behind the transfer.

Like Lyon, the Oakland A’s sidelined their manager, too. Like Lyon, the A’s understood that he was merely ‘a middle manager’ obsessed with the very short term. The A’s let him watch baseball’s annual draft. They didn’t let him say a word about it.

Lyon’s method for choosing players is so obvious and clever that it’s surprising all clubs don’t use it. The theory of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ says that if you aggregate many different opinions from a diverse group of people, you are much more likely to arrive at the best opinion than if you just listen to one specialist. For instance, if you ask a diverse crowd to guess the weight of an ox, the average of their guesses will be very nearly right. If you ask a diverse set of gamblers to bet on, say, the outcome of a presidential election, the average of their bets is likely to be right, too. (Gambling markets have proved excellent predictors of all sorts of outcomes.) The wisdom of crowds fails when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough. This is often the case in American sports. But in European football, opinions tend to come from many different countries, and that helps ensure diversity.

Clough and Taylor at least were a crowd of two. However, the traditional decision-making model in English football is not ‘wisdom of crowds’, but short-term dictatorship. At many clubs the manager is still treated as a sort of divinely inspired monarch who gets to decide everything until he is sacked. Then the next manager clears out his predecessor’s signings at a discount. Lyon, noted a rival French club president with envy, never had expensive signings rotting on the bench. It never had revolutions at all. It understood that the coach was only a temp. OL won its seven consecutive titles with four different coaches – Jacques Santini, Paul Le Guen, Gérard Houllier and Alain Perrin – none of whom, judging by their subsequent records, was exactly a Hegelian world-historical individual. When a coach left Lyon, not much changed. No matter who happened to be sitting on the bench, the team always played much the same brand of attacking football (by French standards).

Emmanuel Hembert grew up in Lyon supporting OL when it was still in the second division. Later, as head of the sports practice of the management consultancy firm A. T. Kearney in London, he was always citing the club as an example to his clients in football. ‘A big secret of a successful club is stability,’ Hembert explained over coffee in Paris a few years ago. ‘In Lyon, the stability is not with the coach, but with the sports director, Lacombe.’

Even a club run as a one-man dictatorship can access the wisdom of crowds. Ferguson at Manchester United would regularly consult his players on transfers. When he was thinking of buying Eric Cantona from Leeds in 1992, writes Michael Cox, he ‘asked centre-backs Gary Pallister and Steve Bruce for their opinion after Leeds’s visit to Old Trafford. Both men suggested he was a difficult opponent because he took up unusual positions.’ Ferguson bought Cantona. A year later, after United’s players unanimously vouched that Nottingham Forest’s Roy Keane was top-class, Ferguson broke the British transfer record to sign him too. And most famously, in 2003, on the plane home from a friendly in Portugal, United’s defenders told Ferguson what a handful Sporting Lisbon’s little-known teenage winger had been. The manager promptly forked out £12.24 million for Cristiano Ronaldo.

 The best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties. Aulas said, ‘We buy young players with potential who are considered the best in their country, between twenty and twenty-two years old.’ It’s almost as if he has read Moneyball. The book keeps banging away about a truth discovered by Bill James, who wrote, ‘College players are a better investment than high school players by a huge, huge, laughably huge margin.’

Baseball clubs traditionally preferred to draft high school players. But how good you are at seventeen or eighteen is a poor predictor of how good you will become as an adult. By definition, when a player is that young there is still too little information on which to judge him. Beane himself had been probably the hottest baseball prospect in the United States at seventeen, but he was already declining in his senior year at high school, and he then failed in the major leagues. Watching the 2002 draft as the A’s general manager, he ‘punches his fist in the air’ each time rival teams draft schoolboys.

It’s the same in football, where brilliant teenagers tend to disappear soon afterwards. Here are a few winners of the Golden Ball for best player at the under-seventeen World Cup since the 1980s: Philip Osundo of Nigeria, William de Oliveira of Brazil, Nii Lamptey of Ghana, Scottish goalkeeper James Will, Mohammed al-Kathiri of Oman, Sergio Santamaria of Spain and the Nigerian Sani Emmanuel. Once upon a time they must have all been brilliant, but none of them made it as adults. (Will ended up as a policeman in the Scottish Highlands playing for his village team, while Emmanuel seems to have drifted out of professional football aged twenty-three.) The most famous case of a teenager who flamed out is American Freddy Adu, who at fourteen was the next Pelé and Maradona. Ben Lyttleton, our partner in the Soccernomics consultancy, points out in his book Edge: ‘It can be a challenge for a youngster who is suddenly successful – maybe even harder than coping with failure.’ Many gifted teenagers are probably destroyed by acclaim and money. Liverpool is now trying to deal with the problem by capping salaries for first-year professionals (who are typically seventeen years old) at £40,000 a year.

Yet there’s a converse to all these early flameouts: some ugly ducklings become swans. When Helmut Schulte was head of Schalke 04’s youth academy, he had to decide over the futures of the teenaged Manuel Neuer and Mesut Özil. He remembers the fourteen-year-old Neuer as ‘a totally normal keeper’ who, moreover, was small. Schalke’s coaches and scouts recommended getting rid of him. Schulte agonized over the decision, and finally decided to keep him. ‘I overruled the others on three or four occasions during my time at Schalke, and it never worked out, except with Manuel.’

Soon after Neuer’s narrow escape, he had a growth spurt, and got better. By the time he was about eighteen, he was playing for German national youth teams. Schulte recommended that he be given a senior contract. Schalke’s general manager, Rudi Assauer, came to watch the kid at training. It happened that the session was a passing exercise, and Neuer could pass as well as any outfield player. Assauer, whose main criterion was skill on the ball, decided instantly to give him a contract.

The teenage Özil was even skinnier than Neuer. Nor did he seem particularly brilliant. Schalke soon let him go to the smaller local club Rot-Weiss Essen. Later, Schalke was asked whether Özil could train with their youth players in the mornings. ‘As long as he doesn’t disrupt training, he can join in’, was the verdict. Like Neuer, Özil belatedly got better. However, when his dad announced, ‘Mesut isn’t a player for Schalke. He’s a player for Barcelona or Real Madrid,’ Schalke’s coaches laughed at him. In short, when it comes to teenage footballers, the famous phrase of the Hollywood scriptwriter William Goldman applies: ‘Nobody knows anything.’

Only a handful of world-class players in each generation, most of them creators – Pelé, Maradona, Rooney, Lionel Messi, Cesc Fàbregas – reach the top by the age of eighteen. Most players get there considerably later. Almost all defenders and goalkeepers do. You can be confident of their potential only when they are more mature.

Beane knows that by the time baseball players are in college – which tends to put them in Lyon’s magical age range of twenty to twenty-two – you have a pretty good idea of what they will become. There is a lot of information about them. They have grown up a bit. They are old enough to be nearly fully formed, but too young to be expensive stars. FIFA TMS analysed international transfers to England in 2013, and found that players moving aged twenty to twenty-two were 18 per cent cheaper than players aged twenty-five to twenty-seven. Moreover, the younger players tended to have lower salaries, and higher future resale values.

Lyon always tried to avoid paying a premium for a star player’s ‘name’. Here, again, it was lucky to be a club from a quiet town. Its placid supporters and local media didn’t demand stars. By contrast, the former chairman of a club in a much more raucous French city recalls, ‘I ran [the club] with the mission to create a spectacle. It wasn’t to build a project for twenty years to come.’ A team from a big city tends to need big stars.

Football being barely distinguishable from baseball, the same split between big and small towns operates in that sport, too. ‘Big-market teams’, like the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, hunt big-name players. Their media and fans demand it. In Moneyball, Lewis calls this the pathology of ‘many foolish teams that thought all their questions could be answered by a single player’. (It’s a pathology that may sound strangely familiar to European football fans.) By contrast, the Oakland A’s, as a small-market team, were free to forgo stars. As Lewis writes, ‘Billy may not care for the Oakland press but it is really very tame next to the Boston press, and it certainly has no effect on his behaviour, other than to infuriate him once a week or so. Oakland A’s fans, too, were apathetic compared to the maniacs in Fenway Park or Yankee Stadium.’ But as Beane told us, English football is ‘even more emotional’ than baseball. ‘It’s the biggest sport in the world,’ he said. ‘And that’s the biggest league in the world, and then you put in sixty million people and a four-hour drive from north to south, and that’s what you have.’

That’s why most English football clubs are always being pushed by their fans to buy stars. Happy is the club that has no need of heroes. Lyon was free to buy young unknowns like Michael Essien, Florent Malouda, Mahamadou Diarra or Hugo Lloris just because they were good. And unknowns accept modest salaries. According to L’Equipe, in the 2007–2008 season Lyon spent only 31 per cent of its budget on players’ pay. The average in the English Premier League was about double that. Like Clough’s Forest, Lyon for many years performed the magic trick of winning things without paying silly salaries.

 Try not to buy centre-forwards. Centre-forward is the most overpriced position in the transfer market, perhaps simply because centre-forwards are the players who score most and therefore end up on TV. Strikers in general also cost the most in salaries. In Italy’s Serie A between 2009 and 2014, forwards earned an average of €1.1m, midfielders €820,000 and defenders €700,000, calculates French economist Bastien Drut.

Admittedly Lyon ‘announced’ itself to football by buying the Brazilian centre-forward Sonny Anderson for £12 million in 1999, but the club mostly scrimped on the position afterwards. Houllier left OL in 2007 grumbling that even after the club sold Malouda and Eric Abidal for a combined total of £23 million, Aulas still wouldn’t buy him a centre-forward.

By contrast, goalkeeper is the most underpriced position in football’s transfer market. Keepers also earn less than outfield players (according to a study by German economist Bernd Frick), even though they make a very large contribution to results and have longer careers than strikers.

 Help your foreign signings relocate. All sorts of great Brazilians have passed through Lyon: Sonny Anderson; the long-time club captain Cris; the future internationals Juninho and Fred; and the world champion Edmilson. Most were barely known when they joined the club. Aulas explained the secret: ‘Ten years ago [in 1997] we sent one of our old players, Marcelo, to Brazil. He was an extraordinary man, because he was both an engineer and a professional footballer. He was captain of Lyon for five years. Then he became an agent, but he works quasi-exclusively for OL. He indicates all market opportunities to us.’ As a judge of players, Marcelo was clearly in the Lacombe or Peter Taylor class.

Marcelo said he scouted only ‘serious boys’. Or as the former president of a rival French club puts it, ‘They don’t select players just for their quality but for their ability to adapt. I can’t see Lyon recruiting an Anelka or a Ronaldinho.’

After Lyon signed the serious boys, it made sure they settled. Drogba noted enviously, ‘At Lyon, a translator takes care of the Brazilians, helps them to find a house, get their bearings, tries to reduce as much as possible the negative effects of moving. … Even at a place of the calibre of Chelsea, that didn’t exist.’

Lyon’s ‘translator’, who worked full time for the club, sorted out the players’ homesickness, bank accounts, nouvelle cuisine, and whatever else. Other people at the club educated the newcomers in Lyon’s culture: no stars or show-offs.

 Sell any player if another club offers more than he is worth. This is what Aulas meant when he said, ‘Buying and selling players is not an activity for improving the football performance. It’s a trading activity, in which we produce gross margin. If an offer for a player is greatly superior to his market value, you must not keep him.’ The ghost of Peter Taylor would approve.

Like Clough and Taylor, and like Billy Beane, Lyon never got sentimental about players. In the club’s annual accounts, it booked each player for a certain transfer value. (Beane says, ‘Know exactly what every player in baseball is worth to you. You can put a dollar figure on it.’) Lyon knew that sooner or later its best players would attract somebody else’s attention. Because the club expected to sell them, it replaced them even before they went. Ferguson at United also pursued a strategy of early replacement: ‘I did feel sentimental about great players leaving us. At the same time, my eye would always be on a player who was coming to an end. An internal voice would always ask, “When’s he going to leave, how long will he last?” Experience taught me to stockpile young players in important positions.’

Bringing in replacements before they are needed avoids a transition period or a panic purchase after the player’s departure. Aulas explained, ‘We will replace the player in the squad six months or a year before. So when Michael Essien goes [to Chelsea for £24 million], we already have a certain number of players who are ready to replace him. Then, when the opportunity to buy Tiago arises, for 25 per cent of the price of Essien, you take him.’

Before Essien’s transfer in 2005, Aulas spent weeks proclaiming that the Ghanaian was ‘untransferable’. He always said that when he was about to transfer a player, because it drove up the price. In his words, ‘Every international at Lyon is untransferable. Until the offer surpasses by far the amount we had expected.’

 Don’t worry too much about buying or keeping superstars. Media and fans tend to obsess about the team’s best player (as Essien was) but in fact you can usually let him go without damaging performance too much.

In general, most clubs don’t spend their transfer budgets very rationally. Here, as a free service, are the thirteen main secrets of the transfer market in full:

1 A new manager wastes money on transfers; don’t let him.

2 Use the wisdom of crowds.

3 Stars of recent World Cups or European Championships are overvalued; ignore them.

4 Both superstars and weakest links are overvalued: your top three players matter most.

5 Certain nationalities are overvalued.

6 Older players are overvalued.

7 Centre-forwards are overvalued; goalkeepers are undervalued.

8 Gentlemen prefer blonds: identify and abandon ‘sight-based prejudices’.

9 The best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties.

10 Sell any player when another club offers more than he is worth.

11 Replace your best players even before you sell them.

12 Buy players with personal problems, and then help them deal with their problems.

13 Help your players relocate.

Alternatively, clubs could just stick with the conventional wisdom.

NOTE

1. Our view of transfers has been challenged in the book Pay as You Play: The True Price of Success in the Premier League Era, written by three Liverpool fans, Paul Tomkins, Graeme Riley and Gary Fulcher. The book is a treasure trove of interesting financial facts, with the added benefit that the authors are donating all their royalties to the children’s charity Post Pals.

Pay as You Play uses data on transfer fees put together by Riley, by day a senior accountant at Adecco, by night an accomplished football statto. He collected figures for transfer fees paid by Premier League clubs since 1992–1993 from newspapers and any other sources he could find. It’s a true labour of love.

The authors’ approach to transfers is very reasonable. As they point out, adding up the total transfer fees paid for all the players in a squad over many years is misleading because of inflation in transfer fees – the average spend per player has roughly doubled in a decade. The authors therefore convert past transfer fees into the ‘current transfer fee purchase price’ (CTPP), using average transfer fees as an index. For example, Thierry Henry cost Arsenal an estimated £10.5 million in 1999, which converts to a CTPP of £24.6 million. By giving every transferred player a value, they can compare a team’s spending on transfers to performance in the league.

When Tomkins then published a blog by Zach Slaton headlined ‘Soccernomics Was Wrong: Transfer Expenditures Matter’, naturally we sat up and took notice.

Slaton argued that transfer fees were just as good a predictor of league position as is wage spending. One of us (Stefan) contacted Slaton and the authors to find out a bit more about what was going on. Riley kindly showed us the data he had used to calculate his index.

It then became clear where the differences lay. The Pay as You Play index refers only to transfer fees paid. But when we said that spending on transfers bears little relation to where a club finishes, we were referring to net transfer spending – transfer fees paid minus transfer fees received. (We have clarified that point in this edition.) The net figure is the crucial one, because hardly any clubs can just keep buying players without occasionally selling some to stop their spending from going too far out of whack. Once you look at net spending, it’s clear that very few clubs run successful transfer policies: their net spending barely predicts where they finish in the league. If managers and clubs were valuing players accurately, you’d expect to see a significant correlation between net spending and performance, at least over time.

The reliability of the Pay as You Play data is also doubtful. Data on wages is pretty accurate: it’s drawn from each club’s audited financial accounts, which are publicly available in England. But transfer fees quoted in the media are less trustworthy. Take the following comparison of transfer fees paid for members of Arsenal’s 2008–2009 squad from Pay as You Play data and from another reputable source, transfermarkt.co.uk:

Player	Pay as You Play (£)	transfermarkt.co.uk (£)
Mannone	350,000	440,000
Almunia	500,000	0
Silvestre	750,000	836,000
Song	1,000,000	3,520,000
Eboue	1,540,000	1,936,000
Fabiański	2,000,000	3,828,000
Vela	2,000,000	2,640,000
Fàbregas	2,250,000	2,816,000
Van Persie	3,000,000	3,960,000
Denilson	3,400,000	4,400,000
Diaby	3,500,000	2,640,000
Gallas	5,000,000	0
Ramsey	5,000,000	5,632,000
Sagna	6,000,000	7,920,000
Adebayor	7,000,000	8,800,000
Walcott	12,000,000	9,240,000
Nasri	12,800,000	14,080,000
Arshavin	15,000,000	14,520,000

There are clearly some big differences here. No wonder, as transfer fees are almost never officially disclosed, only leaked to the media by the club or the player’s agent, generally with a spin. Nonetheless, and given these caveats, the Pay as You Play index does quite well at explaining the variation in team performance in the Premier League for the years covered.

That’s hardly surprising. A club that spends a big transfer fee buying a player will almost always also spend a big sum on his wages. So in this sense, in the very short term, transfer fees can be almost as good an explanation of success as wages. However, real success in the transfer market means buying cheap and selling dear. For that you need to know a club’s net spending, which shows very little correlation with team performance. The transfer market remains far from efficient.