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?’
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.
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