Soccernomics. Simon Kuper

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,