Soccernomics. Simon KuperЧитать онлайн книгу.
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
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