The transfer market is the arena
in which football players are available for transfer to clubs.
In their aptly-titled football manual SOCCERNOMICS, Stefan Szymanski (a sports
economist) and Simon Kuper (a journalist) outline a simplistic 12-step guide to
the transfer-market. In this article I outline 10-steps that still pertain to
the current transfer market these steps can be found in Chapter 3(GENTLEMEN
PREFER BLONDS-How to Avoid Silly Mistakes in the Transfer Market);
A
new manager wastes money on transfers; don’t let him.-there
is a tendency in football when a new manager arrives at a new club to clear-out
all existing players of the previous manager and sign his own players. In football
a manager in any part of the world is considered lucky if he can have 3 years
at a club. So never leave transfer issues to managers as you will be stuck with
the dead wood long after they are gone.
Use
the wisdom of crowds.- the wisdom of the
crowds deals with how many individuals sanction a transfer i.e. the transfer of
a player. They cited the example of Lyon(2002-2008), where club president
Jean-Michel Aulas, the technical director Bernard Lacombe(who was the club
coach between 1996 and 2006 but was given this role because Aulas wanted to
keep him forever than lose him after he lost four matches) and whoever was the
current club coach also sat-in during such transfer meetings ensuring that
individual biases were disposed off when trying to sign a player. “Lyon’s
method for choosing players is so obvious and smart 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.
Stars of recent
World Cups or European championships are overvalued; ignore them.- Stefan
and Simon argue that “The worst time to buy a player is in the summer when he’s
just done well at a big tournament. Everyone in the transfer market has seen
how good the player is, but he is exhausted and quite likely sated with success.”
They agree that clubs make these sorts of transfers because the clubs demand it
and also it is a marketing gimmick to the fans; “Buying a big name is a way of
saying, “Yes, we are a big club.” It gives the sup porters the thrill of
expectation, a sense that their club is going somewhere, which may be as much
fun as actually winning things. Buying big names is how these clubs keep their
customers satisfied during the three-month summer shutdown.
Certain
nationalities are overvalued.-
“Clubs will pay more for a player from a “fashionable” soccer country. American
goalkeeper Kasey Keller says that in the transfer market, it’s good to be
Dutch. “Giovanni van Bronckhorst is the best example,” Keller told the German
journalist Christoph Biermann. “He went from Rangers to Arsenal, failed there,
and then where did he go? To Barcelona! You have to be a Dutchman to do that.
An American would have been sent straight back to DC United.” A wise club will
buy unfashionable nationalities—Bolivians, say, or Belarusians—at discounts”.
Center forwards are
overvalued; goalkeepers are undervalued.-
Center forward is the most overpriced position in the transfer market.
(Goalkeeper is the most underpriced, even though keepers have longer careers than
outfield players).
Gentlemen prefer
blonds: identify and abandon “sight-based prejudices.”- On a random soccer pitch you are most likely to pay
notice to a player with an outrageous Mohawk, a player wearing colourful boots
or a blond. “At least one big English club noticed that its scouts kept recommending
blond players. The likely reason: when you are scanning a field of twenty-two
similar-looking players, the blonds tend to stand out (except, presumably, in
Scandinavia). The color catches the eye. So the scout notices the blond player
without understanding why. The club in question began to take this distortion into
account when judging scouting reports.”
The best time to
buy a player is when he is in his early twenties.- In soccer, brilliant teenagers tend to disappear soon
afterward. “Here are a few recent winners of the Golden Ball for best player at
the under-seventeen World Cup: Philip Osundo of Nigeria, William de Oliveira of
Brazil, Nii Lamptey of Ghana, Scottish goalkeeper James Will, and Mohammed
al-Kathiri of Oman. Once upon a time they must have all been brilliant, but
none of them made it as adults. (Will ended up a policeman in the Scottish
Highlands playing for his village team.) The most famous case of a teenager who
flamed out is American Freddy Adu, who at fourteen was the next Pelé and
Maradona. Only a handful of world-class players in each generation, most of them
creators—Pelé, Maradona, Wayne Rooney—reach the top before they are eighteen.
Most players get there considerably later. You can be confident of their
potential only when they are more mature.”
Sell any player
when another club offers more than he is worth. sell any player if another club offers more than he is
worth. This is what Aulas means when he says, “Buying and selling players is not
an activity for improving the soccer performance. It’s a trading activity, in
which we produce gross margin. If an offer for a player is greatly superior to
his market value, you must not keep him. Before Essien’s transfer, Aulas spent
weeks proclaiming that the Ghanaian was “untransferable.” He always says that
when he is about to transfer a player, because it drives up the price. In his
words, “Every international at Lyon is untransferable. Until the offer
surpasses by far the amount we had expected.”
Replace your best
players even before you sell them.-“
Lyon knows that sooner or later its best players will attract somebody else’s
attention. Because the club expects to sell them, it replaces them even before
they go. That avoids a transition period or a panic purchase after the player’s
departure. Aulas explains, “We will replace the player in the squad six months
or a year before. So when Michael Essien
goes [to Chelsea for $43 million], we already have a certain number of players who
are ready to replace him. Then, when the opportunity to buy Tiago arises, for
25 percent of the price of Essien, you take him.”
Help your players
relocate.- the most clear example
is of Nicholas Anelka’s protracted transfer to Real Madrid. “Real had spent $35
million buying him from Arsenal. It then spent nothing on helping him adjust.
On day 1 the shy, awkward twenty year old reported at the club, and found that
there was nobody to show him around. He hadn’t even been assigned a locker in
the dressing room. Several times that first morning, he would take a locker
that seemed to be unused, only for another player to walk in and claim it. Anelka
doesn’t seem to have talked about his problems to anyone at Real. Nor did anyone
at the club ask him. Instead, he talked to France Football, a magazine that he
treated as his newspaper of record, like a 1950s prime minister talking to The
Times. “I am alone against the rest of the team,” he revealed midway through
the season. He claimed to possess a video showing his teammates looking gloomy
after he had scored his first goal for Real after six months at the club. He
had tried to give this video to the coach, but the coach hadn’t wanted to see
it. Also, the other black Francophone players had told Anelka that the other
players wouldn’t pass to him. Real ended up giving him a forty-five-day ban,
essentially for being maladjusted. Paranoid though Anelka may have been, he had
a point. The other players really didn’t like him. And they never got to know
him, because nobody at the club ever seems to have bothered to introduce him to
anyone. As he said later, all Real had told him was, “Look after yourself.” The
club seems to have taken the strangely materialistic view that Anelka’s salary
should determine his behavior. But even in materialistic terms, that was
foolish. If you pay $35 million for an immature young employee, it is bad
management to make him look after himself. Wenger at Arsenal knew that, and he
had Anelka on the field scoring goals. 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.
Alternatively, clubs could just stick with the
conventional wisdom.
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