ESPN FC's Alexis Nunes breaks down the most notable signings of the Premier League during the 2015 summer transfer window, when the 20 clubs spent a record £870 million.
In our book "Soccernomics," my co-author, Stefan Szymanski, and I analyzed wisdom and madness on the transferMARKET. Here's how some of our rules apply to this summer's transfer window:
1. The high fees are perfectly rational. When players are sold for more than £50 million, the deals are often dismissed as crazy or obscene. Many people say the soccer economy has become a bubble, like the housing bubble that burst in the U.S. in 2007. But that's wrong. To the contrary, big clubs are finally spending within their means. Yes, fees have risen (gross spending by English Premier League clubs this summer was £870m, an all-time record, say business analysts Deloitte). However, clubs' revenues have risen faster. For the 2013-14 season, every club in the Premier League declared its highest revenues ever, thanks largely to TV money. Clubs collectively made their first pretax profit since 1999, says Deloitte.
And English spending will keep rising. Next year clubs will get 70 percent more from TV. Not every extra penny will be spent on players, because the clubs, far from being crazy, are in fact showing unprecedented restraint, illustrated by their move from losses into profit. Player wages, too, have been rising more slowly than club revenues, according to Deloitte. But much of the extra income will be spent. This summer Kevin De Bruyne cost Manchester City £54m. Next summer his equivalent might cost £80m.
2. Man City, PSG, Milan and Chelsea fans, rejoice. Billionaire-owned clubs now have additional leeway to spend more than their revenues because UEFA relaxed its financial fair play rules in late June to encourage rich people to invest in soccer. I visited Paris Saint-Germain's general manager, Jean-Claude Blanc, just as UEFA was announcing its change of tack, and he crowed: "Today is a special day." It's no accident that PSG and Manchester City, chief beneficiaries of UEFA's U-turn, currently top their leagues. (City's gross spending this summer of £160m set a record for an English club, Deloitte says.) Meanwhile Milan, with a new Thai co-owner in Bee Taechaubol, had higher net summer spending than Barcelona, Real Madrid and every English club except Man City. Conversely, sugar-daddy-less Arsenal have lost the competitive position they thought they had acquired when financial fair play was firmer.
3. Arsene Wenger doesn't act rationally on the transfer market. Sure, the economics graduate from Strasbourg University probably knows more about money than any other club manager. He also seems to know the Soccernomics rule that the most reliable way to rise in the league is to raise your wage bill rather than spend on transfers. (That's largely because so many transferred players flop.)
But fans are right to believe Arsenal would do better (and really wouldn't go bust) if Wenger spent more. In February the club announced cash reserves of £138.8m, the most in European soccer, yet this summer Arsenal was the only big European club to buy zero outfield players. Wenger ought to shorten his time horizon.
4. Still, Wenger was right to buy a keeper. Goalkeeper is the cheapest position in the transfer market, even though keepers are crucial to success and have longer careers than outfield players. The £11m Arsenal spent on Petr Cech was a bargain. By contrast, the market's most expensive position is forward, though even that fact only begins to explain why 19-year-old Anthony Martial cost Manchester United £36m (and possibly much more after bonuses).
5. You need to replace older players even before they go -- and Manchester United haven't. Sir Alex Ferguson in his 2013 memoir explained his strategy of early replacement: "I did feel sentimental about great players leaving us. At the same time, my eye would always be on a player who was coming to an end. An internal voice would always ask, 'When's he going to leave, how long will he last?' Experience taught me to stockpile young players in important positions."
But starting in Ferguson's last season, United have abandoned that policy. Nemanja Vidic, Rio Ferdinand, Ryan Giggs, Robin van Persie and next possibly Wayne Rooney have been allowed to reach the end of their roads with little resale value and no successors in place. Although Louis van Gaal has spent £278m since arriving, United still look thin in multiple positions.
Contrast this with Chelsea's quiet replacement of most of their team since 2012. Starters like Eden Hazard, Kurt Zouma, Thibaut Courtois, Cesc Fabregas, Diego Costa, Nemanja Matic and Willian have come in, while the likes of David Luiz, Fernando Torres, Juan Mata, Petr Cech and Frank Lampard have gone. Yet during that period of transition, Chelsea had lower net spending than either Manchester club. Chelsea's title last season was a tribute to the professionalism of Jose Mourinho but also of owner Roman Abramovich's senior advisor Marina Granovskaia and Chelsea's technical director Michael Emenalo. Interestingly, those two are representatives of talent pools almost never tapped by soccer clubs' front offices: women and black men. A broader talent base might improve competence in the sector (see the transfer debacle over David De Gea).
6. Van Gaal, too, needs to tap a wider talent pool. The Dutchman likes to buy players he has worked with before. As Mourinho once said, managers who do this give the impression of not knowing the broader market.
At United, Van Gaal has brought in old familiars in Bastian Schweinsteiger, Memphis Depay, Daley Blind and Sergio Romero (his keeper long ago at AZ Alkmaar).
By contrast, there's another group of players the manager doesn't seem to like working with: Latin Americans. Romero was an exception. Look at the manager's relations with De Gea, Rafael, Javier Hernandez, Angel Di Maria, Marcos Rojo and Radamel Falcao. (Rivaldo, benched by Van Gaal at Barcelona in 1999 just after being named European Footballer of the Year, won't be surprised.) Van Gaal's very Dutch straightforwardness, especially his habit of shouting at individual players in front of everyone else, doesn't seem to appeal to these players. A global club needs a culturally sensitive manager.
7. The Premier League is now in a financial league of its own, and yet Bayern Munich, Barcelona and Real Madrid remain bigger lures. Europe's second most profligate league, Italy's Serie A, had a gross spending this summer of £406m, according to Deloitte. That's less than half the Premier League's outlay. The Spanish league's gross was £400m, followed by the Bundesliga with £290m.
The gap between English clubs and the rest keeps widening, especially after the pound's surge against the euro. This summer a massive German club like Borussia Dortmund was reduced to taking Adnan Januzaj on loan until such time as he might be mature enough for Manchester United. Even Bayern couldn't offer De Bruyne a salary to compete with Man City, said Martin Winterkorn, chief executive of Volkswagen and a director of Bayern.
And yet each time an English club tapped a regular starter at Bayern, Barca or Madrid, the player said no. Gareth Bale, Sergio Ramos, Neymar, Thomas Muller and Robert Lewandowski all preferred to stay with the world's best teams. Only reserves like Schweinsteiger and Pedro made the leap to England.
The Premier League's financial domination has its downside. When an English club wants to ditch an expensive player -- see Spurs with Emmanuel Adebayor -- there's barely a foreign club that can now afford his wages, especially after the ruble's slide made Russian clubs uncompetitive.
8. Match data are of limited use in the transfer market. Big clubs now routinely use stats to inform their transfer decisions. Data analysts study a player's maximum sprinting speed, completed passes in the final third, percentage of shots on target and so on. But whereas stats have helped baseball clubs unearth unappreciated talent, in soccer, numbers count for much less. That's partly because they reveal little about what a player does in the 89 minutes per match that he doesn't have the ball. One sign of data's limited value: John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox, bought Liverpool five years ago hoping to do a "Moneyball" of soccer. He hasn't yet.
9. The most fashionable nationality in the transfer market is now Belgian.Clubs will pay more for players from "fashionable" soccer countries. For decades the market's preferred nationality was Brazilian. A Brazilian agent who exported very humble players to the Faeroe Islands and Iceland told Alex Bellos, author of "Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life," "It is much easier selling, for example, a crap Brazilian than a brilliant Mexican. The Brazilian gets across the image of happiness, party, carnival."
That sentiment hasn't survived the 7-1 German thrashing in Belo Horizonte. That World Cup made Costa Ricans fashionable. The total value of transfer fees for Costa Rican players moving internationally rose from $922,000 in 2013 to almost $10 million in 2014, reported FIFA TMS, the department of FIFA that oversees international transfers.
But the new must-haves are Belgians. Thomas Vermaelen's move to Barcelona last year, plus the De Bruyne deal and the £32.5m that Liverpool paid Aston Villa for Christian Benteke suggest Belgians are now being valued above their pay grade.
Still, the most overvalued nationality of all may be Englishmen. Given the country's paucity of talent and noisy tabloid press, any talented Englishman gets slathered in hype. Call it the Andy Carroll Phenomenon. That might explain the £49m that Manchester City paid Liverpool for Raheem Sterling (nearly double what United spent on his contemporary Depay, and about as much as Chelsea paid for Pedro and Costa put together). Similarly, Everton reportedly rejected £37m from Chelsea for John Stones. Another problem with Englishmen: it's hard to sell them abroad because they usually fail there.
In short, Rooney was probably wrong to suggest that Manchester United sign Spurs' Harry Kane. The betting must be that Kane won't match his 21 league goals of last season. The striker himself says he achieved as much last year as he had hoped to do in a career. He sounds like a more astute judge of value than many club managers.
Simon Kuper is a contributor to ESPN FC and co-author, with Stefan Szymanski, of Soccernomics.
No comments:
Post a Comment