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.’
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,