Soccernomics. Simon Kuper

Liverpool from 1998 to 2010. The club’s managers in this period, Gérard Houllier and Rafael Benitez, kept splashing out on big transfer fees, yet Liverpool hardly ever even threatened to win the league. Jamie Carragher, who played for Liverpool throughout these years, provides a dolefully comic commentary on some of the club’s misguided signings in his excellent autobiography, Carra:

       ‘Sean Dundee was not a Liverpool footballer.’

       ‘The signing I didn’t rate was Sander Westerveld. … I thought he was an average goalkeeper who seemed to think he was Gordon Banks.’

       ‘What about Josemi? He struggled to find a teammate six yards away. Djimi Traore had the same weakness.’

       ‘To be blunt, [Christian] Ziege couldn’t defend.’

       ‘The names El-Hadji Diouf and Salif Diao now make the legs of the toughest Liverpudlians shudder in fear. … The first concern I had with Diouf was his pace. He didn’t have any. … Do you remember being at school and picking sides for a game of football? We do this at Liverpool for the five-a-sides. Diouf was “last pick” within a few weeks.’

       ‘“You paid ten million for him and no one wants him in their team,” I shouted to Gérard.’

       ‘If Diouf was a disappointment, Diao was a catastrophe. … But even he wasn’t the worst arrival of this hideous summer [of 2002]. Houllier also signed Bruno Cheyrou.’

       On the expensive French striker Djibril Cissé: ‘He was supposed to be a strong, physical target man who scored goals. He was neither one nor the other.’

       ‘The greatest disappointment was Fernando Morientes. … He was a yard off the pace.’

      When Benitez replaced Houllier in 2004, writes Carragher, the Spaniard encountered ‘a host of poor, overpaid players and expectations as great as ever’. But the new man didn’t do much better than his predecessor. Carragher’s book is gentler with Benitez than with Houllier, presumably because the Spaniard was still his boss when he wrote it, but the waste of the Benitez years is remarkable. Most strikingly, perhaps, in 2008 Benitez handed Tottenham Hotspur £20 million for the twenty-eight-year-old forward Robbie Keane. The much-touted fact that Keane was a lifelong Liverpool fan turned out not to help much. Six months after buying the player, Benitez decided that Keane wasn’t the thing after all and shipped him back to Tottenham (who themselves would soon regret buying him) at a loss of £8 million. Virgin Trains took out newspaper advertisements that said, ‘A Liverpool to London return faster than Robbie Keane’.

      For all the spending, most of Liverpool’s best performers during the Houllier–Benitez years were home-grown players who had cost the club nothing: Steven Gerrard, Michael Owen and Carragher himself. Another stalwart for a decade, centre-back Sami Hyppiä, had come for only £2.6 million from little Willem II in the Netherlands. In short, there didn’t seem to be much correlation between transfer spending and quality.

      In October 2009, after Benitez’s sixth and last summer masterminding Liverpool’s transfers, Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper calculated the damage. It found that in those six years at Anfield, Benitez had spent £122 million more than he had received in transfer fees. Alex Ferguson’s net spend at Manchester United in the same period was only £27 million, yet in those years United had won three titles to Liverpool’s none. Arsène Wenger at Arsenal had actually received £27 million more in transfer fees than he had spent during the period, the newspaper estimated. From 2005 through 2009, Benitez had outspent even Chelsea on transfers. Yet at the end of this period he had the nerve to complain, ‘It is always difficult to compete in the Premier League with clubs who have more money.’ Ferguson later commented that he hadn’t been able to see any ‘strategy’ in Benitez’s buying. ‘It amazed me that he used to walk into press conferences and say he had no money to spend,’ Ferguson wrote in his 2013 autobiography. ‘He was given plenty. It was the quality of his buys that let him down. If you set aside Torres and Reina, few of his acquisitions were of true Liverpool standard. There were serviceable players – Mascherano and Kuyt, hard-working players – but not real Liverpool quality.’ (Mind you, with hindsight, Ferguson’s assessment of Mascherano wasn’t perfectly judged either.)

      Benitez’s failure at Liverpool was partially disguised by one night in Istanbul: the victory in the Champions League final of 2005, after having been 3–0 down to Milan after 45 minutes. However, as we’ll discuss later in the book, a large chunk of luck is involved in winning knockout competitions – even leaving aside the fact that Benitez got his tactics wrong going into the game and had to turn his team upside down at half-time. The most reliable gauge of a team’s quality is its performance in the league, and here Houllier and Benitez failed. Their expensive transfers didn’t bring commensurate results. If you add in agents’ fees, taxes on transfers and the constant disruption to the team, all this wheeling and dealing helps explain how Liverpool got left behind by Manchester United. To quote Carragher, ‘As I know to my cost at Anfield, having money is no guarantee of success. The skill is spending it on the right players.’

      The question, then, is what clubs can do to improve their status. If you are Liverpool now, owned by the American commodities trader John Henry, who understands statistics, and you have this knowledge of the relative importance of wages and unimportance of transfers, how can you win more matches? The obvious answer is to spend less of your income on transfers and more of it on wages. In general, it may be better to raise the pay of your leading players than to risk losing a couple of them and have to go out and buy replacements. Benitez had a net transfer spend of minus £122 million in six years. If he had merely balanced his transfer budget in that period, let alone made a profit as Wenger did, he could have raised his team’s salaries by £20 million a year. In the 2008–2009 season, that boost would have given Liverpool a slightly larger wage bill than Manchester United. United won the title that year.

      Clubs need to make fewer transfers. They buy too many Dioufs. But they will keep buying players, and the transfer market is probably the area in which clubs can most easily improve their performance. They need to learn from the few clubs and managers who have worked out some of the secrets of the transfer market.

      Any inefficient market is an opportunity for somebody. If most clubs are wasting most of their transfer money, then a club that spends wisely is going to outperform. Indeed, a handful of wise buyers have consistently outperformed the transfer market: Brian Clough and his assistant-cum-soul mate Peter Taylor in their years at Nottingham Forest, Wenger during his first decade at Arsenal (though not since) and, most mysteriously of all, Olympique Lyon, who rose from obscure provincial club to a period of dictatorial rule over French football. From 2002 through 2008, Lyon won the French league seven times running. That era is now over, and the club subsequently made mistakes, as it tried and failed to compete with clubs with much higher revenues, such as Real Madrid or Manchester United. Lyon got tempted into paying big transfer fees for supposed ‘stars’ – for instance, gambling £18 million on the slow playmaker Yoann Gourcuff in 2010. It is now recovering through a new strategy focused on youth development. However, its seven-year reign remains an extraordinary feat. The usual way to win things in football is to pay high salaries. These clubs found a different route: they worked out the secrets of the transfer market.

      There is a fourth master of the transfer market who is worth a look, even if he works mostly in a different sport across an ocean: Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team. In his book Moneyball, Michael Lewis explains how Beane turned one of the poorest teams in baseball into one of the best by the simple method of rejecting what everyone in the sport had always ‘known’ to be true about trading for players. Lewis writes, ‘Understanding that he would never have a Yankee-sized checkbook, Beane had set about looking for inefficiencies in the game.’ It’s odd how many of the same inefficiencies exist in football, too.

      MARKET INCOMPETENCE

      If we study these masters of transfers, it will help us uncover the secrets of the market that all the other clubs are missing. First of all, though, we present a few of the most obvious inefficiencies in the market. Although it doesn’t take a Clough or a Beane to identify these, they continue