Soccernomics. Simon Kuper

who bought a great Latin American player and hired a good relocation consultant to help him adjust would be onto a winner. Yet few clubs did. Years used to go by without any English club buying a Latin American.

      In 2008 Manchester City took a gamble on Robinho. As a Brazilian forward who had had his moments in the World Cup of 2006, he was bound to be overvalued, and was also very likely to relocate badly. So it’s little wonder that City paid a then British record transfer fee of £32.5 million for him, or that eighteen months later it gave up on him and sent him home to Santos on loan. Robinho never returned to English football. The experience obviously taught City a lesson, because for the next two years the club switched to a policy of buying only players who had already established themselves in England. It also finally began to take relocation seriously.

      Bit by bit in recent years, the football business has become more intelligent. Way back in the mid-1990s, Liverpool had become one of the first clubs to hire some sort of employee to help new players settle. Ajax Amsterdam was another pioneer. The woman who first handled relocations at Ajax found that some of the problems of new players were absurdly easy to solve. When Steven Pienaar and another young South African player came to Amsterdam, they were teenagers, had never lived on their own before and suddenly found themselves sharing an apartment in a cold country at the other end of the earth. Inevitably, they put their music speakers on the bare floor and cranked up the volume. Inevitably, the neighbours complained. The South Africans had a miserable time in their building, until the woman from Ajax came around to see what was wrong and suggested they put their speakers on a table instead. They did. The noise diminished, their lives got easier, and that might just have made them better able to perform for Ajax.

      Most clubs in the Premier League now have ‘player care officers’ – football code for relocation consultants. Some of these officers are full-timers, others not. Some do a serious job. Manchester City in particular learned from Robinho’s failure. When we visited the club’s training ground in 2012, on a wall just behind reception we saw a map of Manchester’s surroundings, designed to catch the eyes of passing players. The map highlighted eight recommended wealthy towns and suburbs for them to live; not on the list was Manchester’s city centre with its vibrant nightlife.

      These recommendations are just the start. City’s ‘player-care department’ aims to take care of almost every need a new immigrant might have, whether it’s a nanny or a ‘discreet car service’. Even before a new player signs, the club has already researched his off-duty habits and his partner’s taste in restaurants. When he arrives for pre-season training, the club might say to him, ‘Well, you’re going to be busy for a couple of weeks, but here’s a little restaurant your girlfriend might like.’ It’s not true that behind every successful footballer there is a happy woman (or man), but it probably does help.

      In 2011 City signed the young Argentine striker Sergio Agüero. Nobody doubted his talent. However, many doubted whether he would adapt to English football and rainy provincial life. His transfer fee of £38 million seemed a gamble, even for Manchester City. But Agüero scored twice on debut. He finished his first English season with 30 goals, including the last-second strike in the last game of the season against QPR that won City their first league title since 1968. In part, Agüero succeeded thanks to City’s excellence at relocation. Gavin Fleig, the club’s head of performance analysis, told us: ‘The normal transition time for a foreign player is considered in the industry to be about a year. Normally those players are in a hotel for the first three months. We were able to get from agreeing a fee to Sergio living in his house within two weeks, with a Spanish sat-nav system in his car, linked to the Spanish community in Manchester. We had our prize asset ready to go from day one.’

      Then there was City’s signing of Kevin De Bruyne from Wolfsburg in 2015. The Belgian was flown to Manchester in a private jet. ‘It was like in a film,’ his agent Patrick De Koster later recalled. ‘We thought we’d have a lot of work finding a new house, opening a bank account, phone cards, a car. But everything was sorted in three hours. Incredible.’

      Raiola says, ‘In England the clubs have kept getting better at it. But it’s just that in Italy it’s done in a very Italian way, human: “Lovely, and we’ll go and get a bite to eat, and how are the children?” In England it’s much more businesslike. There’s something to be said for both ways.’

      Still, a few clubs continue to undervalue or even neglect relocation. One player care officer in the Premier League told us, ‘Some very well-known managers have said to me they can’t understand why you can possibly need it. They have said, “Well, when I moved to a foreign country as a player I had to do it myself.” Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. You probably had to clean boots, too, but nobody does that now.’

      THE NICEST TOWN IN EUROPE: HOW OLYMPIQUE LYON BOUGHT AND SOLD

      If you had to locate the middle-class European dream anywhere, it would be in Lyon. It’s a town the size of Oakland, about two-thirds of the way down France, nestled between rivers just west of the Alps. On a warm January afternoon, drinking coffee outside in the eighteenth-century Place Bellecour where the buildings are as pretty as the women, you think: nice. Here’s a wealthy town where you can have a good job, nice weather and a big house near the mountains.

      Lyon also has some of the best restaurants in Europe, known locally as bouchons, or ‘corks’. Even at the town’s football stadium you can have a wonderful three-course pre-game meal consisting largely of intestines or head cheese, unless you prefer to eat at local boy Paul Bocuse’s brasserie across the road and totter into the grounds just before kick-off. And then, for a remarkable decade or so, you could watch some very decent football, too.

      Until about 2000 Lyon was known as the birthplace of cinema and nouvelle cuisine, but not as a football town. It was just too bourgeois. If for some reason you wanted football, you drove thirty-five miles down the highway to gritty proletarian Saint-Étienne. In 1987 Olympique Lyon, or OL, or les Gones (the Kids), was playing in France’s second division on an annual budget of under £2 million. It was any old backwater provincial club in Europe. From 2002 to 2008 Lyon ruled French football. The club’s ascent was in large part a story of the international transfer market. Better than any other club in Europe, for a while Lyon worked out how to play the market.

      In 1987 Jean-Michel Aulas, a local software entrepreneur with the stark, grooved features of a Roman emperor, became club president. Aulas had played fairly good handball as a young man and had a season ticket at OL.

      ‘I didn’t know the world of football well,’ he admitted to us in 2007 over a bottle of OL mineral water in his office beside the stadium (which he was already aiming to tear down and replace with a bigger one). Had he expected the transformation that he wrought? ‘No.’

      Aulas set out to improve the club step by step. ‘We tried to abstract the factor “time”,’ he explained. ‘Each year we fix as an aim to have sporting progress, and progress of our financial resources. It’s like a cyclist riding: you can overtake the people in front of you.’ Others in France preferred to liken Aulas to ‘un bulldozer’.

      In 1987 even the local Lyonnais didn’t care much about les Gones. You could live in Lyon without knowing that football existed. The club barely had a personality, whereas Saint-Étienne was the ‘miners’ club’ that had suffered tragic defeats on great European nights in the 1970s. Saint-Étienne’s president at the time said that when it came to football, Lyon was a suburb of Saint-Étienne, a remark that still rankles. At one derby after Lyon’s domination began, les Gones’ fans unfurled a banner that told the Saint-Étienne supporters, ‘We invented cinema when your fathers were dying in the mines.’

      Aulas appointed local boy Raymond Domenech as his first coach. In Domenech’s first season, OL finished at the top of the second division without losing a game. Right after that it qualified for Europe. Aulas recalled, ‘At a stroke the credibility was total. The project was en route.’

      It turned out that the second city in France, even if it was a bit bourgeois, was just hungry enough for a decent football club. The Lyonnais were willing to buy match tickets if things went well, but if things went badly, they weren’t immediately waving white handkerchiefs in the stands and demanding that