Soccernomics. Simon Kuper

term in a place like that than in a ‘football city’ like Marseille or Newcastle. Moreover, players were happy to move to a town that is hardly a hardship posting. Almost nothing they got up to in Lyon made it into the gossip press. Another of Lyon’s advantages: the locals had money. ‘It allowed us to have not just a “popular clientele”, but also a “business clientele”,’ said Aulas.

      Talking about money is something of a taboo in France. It is considered a grubby and private topic. Socially, you’re never supposed to ask anyone a question that might reveal how much somebody has. Football, to most French fans, is not supposed to be about money. They find the notion of a well-run football club humourless, practically American.

      It therefore irritated them that Aulas talked about it so unabashedly. He might have invented the word ‘moneyball’. Aulas’s theme was that over time, the more money a club makes, the more matches it will win, and the more matches it wins, the more money it will make. In the short term you can lose a match, but in the long term there is a rationality even to football. (And to baseball. As Moneyball describes it, Beane believes that winning ‘is simply a matter of figuring out the odds, and exploiting the laws of probability. … To get worked up over plays, or even games, is as unproductive as a casino manager worrying over the outcomes of individual pulls of the slot machines.’)

      In Aulas’s view, rationality in football works more or less like this: if you buy good players for less than they are worth, you will win more games. You will then have more money to buy better players for less than they are worth. The better players will win you more matches, and that will attract more fans (and thus more money), because Aulas spotted early that most football fans everywhere are much more like shoppers than like religious believers: if they can get a better experience somewhere new, they will go there. He told us in 2007, ‘We sold 110,000 replica shirts last season. This season we are already at 200,000. I think Olympique Lyon has become by far the most beloved club in France.’

      Polls at the time suggested that he was right: in Sport+Markt’s survey of European supporters in 2006, Lyon emerged as the country’s most popular club just ahead of Olympique Marseille. This popularity was a recent phenomenon. In 2002, when Lyon first became champions of France, the overriding French emotion towards the club had still been, ‘Whatever.’ The editor of France Football magazine complained around that time that when Lyon won the title, his magazine didn’t sell. But as the club won the title every year from 2002 to 2008 – the longest period of domination by any club in any of Europe’s five biggest national leagues ever – many French fans began to care about them.

      With more fans, Lyon made more money. On match days you could get a haircut at an official OL salon, drink an OL Beaujolais at an OL café, book your holiday at an OL travel agency and take an OL taxi to the game – and many people did. Lyon used that money to buy better players.

      But for all Aulas’s OL mineral water, what made the club’s rise possible was the transfer market. On that warm winter’s afternoon in Lyon, Aulas told us, ‘We will invest better than Chelsea, Arsenal or Real Madrid. We will make different strategic choices. For instance, we won’t try to have the best team on paper in terms of brand. We will have the best team relative to our investment.’ Here are Lyon’s rules of the transfer market:

       Use the wisdom of crowds. When Lyon was thinking of signing a player, a group of men would sit down to debate the transfer. Aulas would be there, and Bernard Lacombe, once a bull-like centre-forward for Lyon and France, who served from the late 1980s until 2017 as the club’s sporting director and then Aulas’s ‘special adviser’. Lacombe was known for having the best pair of eyes in French football. He coached Lyon from 1997 to 2000, but Aulas clearly figured out that if you have someone with his knack for spotting the right transfer, you want to keep him at the club long term rather than make his job contingent on four lost matches. The same went for Peter Taylor at Forest.

       Whoever happened to be Lyon’s head coach at the time would sit in on the meeting, too, and so would four or five other coaches. ‘We have a group that gives its advice,’ Aulas explained. ‘In England the manager often does it alone. In France it’s often the technical director.’ Lacombe told us that the house rule was that after the group had made the decision, everyone present would then publicly get behind the transfer.

       Like Lyon, the Oakland A’s sidelined their manager, too. Like Lyon, the A’s understood that he was merely ‘a middle manager’ obsessed with the very short term. The A’s let him watch baseball’s annual draft. They didn’t let him say a word about it.

       Lyon’s method for choosing players is so obvious and clever that it’s surprising all clubs don’t use it. The theory of the ‘wisdom of crowds’ says that if you aggregate many different opinions from a diverse group of people, you are much more likely to arrive at the best opinion than if you just listen to one specialist. For instance, if you ask a diverse crowd to guess the weight of an ox, the average of their guesses will be very nearly right. If you ask a diverse set of gamblers to bet on, say, the outcome of a presidential election, the average of their bets is likely to be right, too. (Gambling markets have proved excellent predictors of all sorts of outcomes.) The wisdom of crowds fails when the components of the crowd are not diverse enough. This is often the case in American sports. But in European football, opinions tend to come from many different countries, and that helps ensure diversity.

       Clough and Taylor at least were a crowd of two. However, the traditional decision-making model in English football is not ‘wisdom of crowds’, but short-term dictatorship. At many clubs the manager is still treated as a sort of divinely inspired monarch who gets to decide everything until he is sacked. Then the next manager clears out his predecessor’s signings at a discount. Lyon, noted a rival French club president with envy, never had expensive signings rotting on the bench. It never had revolutions at all. It understood that the coach was only a temp. OL won its seven consecutive titles with four different coaches – Jacques Santini, Paul Le Guen, Gérard Houllier and Alain Perrin – none of whom, judging by their subsequent records, was exactly a Hegelian world-historical individual. When a coach left Lyon, not much changed. No matter who happened to be sitting on the bench, the team always played much the same brand of attacking football (by French standards).

       Emmanuel Hembert grew up in Lyon supporting OL when it was still in the second division. Later, as head of the sports practice of the management consultancy firm A. T. Kearney in London, he was always citing the club as an example to his clients in football. ‘A big secret of a successful club is stability,’ Hembert explained over coffee in Paris a few years ago. ‘In Lyon, the stability is not with the coach, but with the sports director, Lacombe.’

       Even a club run as a one-man dictatorship can access the wisdom of crowds. Ferguson at Manchester United would regularly consult his players on transfers. When he was thinking of buying Eric Cantona from Leeds in 1992, writes Michael Cox, he ‘asked centre-backs Gary Pallister and Steve Bruce for their opinion after Leeds’s visit to Old Trafford. Both men suggested he was a difficult opponent because he took up unusual positions.’ Ferguson bought Cantona. A year later, after United’s players unanimously vouched that Nottingham Forest’s Roy Keane was top-class, Ferguson broke the British transfer record to sign him too. And most famously, in 2003, on the plane home from a friendly in Portugal, United’s defenders told Ferguson what a handful Sporting Lisbon’s little-known teenage winger had been. The manager promptly forked out £12.24 million for Cristiano Ronaldo.

       The best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties. Aulas said, ‘We buy young players with potential who are considered the best in their country, between twenty and twenty-two years old.’ It’s almost as if he has read Moneyball. The book keeps banging away about a truth discovered by Bill James, who wrote, ‘College players are a better investment than high school players by a huge, huge, laughably huge margin.’

       Baseball clubs traditionally preferred to draft high school players. But how good you are at seventeen or eighteen is a poor predictor of how good you will become as an adult. By definition, when a player is that young there is still too little information on which to judge him. Beane himself had been probably the hottest baseball prospect in the United States