Soccernomics

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.