Soccernomics. Simon Kuper

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