of the ‘availability heuristic’: the piece of information is available, so it influences your decision. Blonds stick in the memory.
* * *
The inefficiencies we have cited so far are so-called systemic failures: more than just individual mistakes, they are deviations from rationality. There is now decades of research by psychologists showing that even when people try to act rationally they are prone to all sorts of cognitive biases that lead them astray. If decision-makers are aware of these biases, they stand a better chance of avoiding them. All this is what you might call Transfer Market 101. To learn more about how to play the market, we need to study the masters.
DRUNKS, GAMBLERS AND BARGAINS: CLOUGH AND TAYLOR AT FOREST
Probably nobody in English football has ever done a better job of gaming the transfer market than Nottingham Forest’s manager Brian Clough (or ‘Old Big Head’, as he fondly called himself) and his assistant Peter Taylor. As manager of Forest from 1975 to 1993, Clough managed to turn the provincial club into European champions while turning a profit on the transfer market (and, as we’ll see in the next chapter, making enough on deals to slip the odd illegal bonus into his own pocket on the side).
Clough and Taylor met while playing in a ‘Probables versus Possibles’ reserve game at Middlesbrough in 1955. They seem to have fallen in love at first sight. Pretty soon they were using their free time to travel around the north watching football and coaching children together. Taylor never became more than a journeyman keeper, but Clough scored the fastest 200 goals ever notched in English football. Then, at the age of 27, he wrecked his right knee skidding on a frozen pitch on Boxing Day 1962. Three years later he phoned Taylor and said: ‘I’ve been offered the managership of Hartlepool and I don’t fancy it, but if you’ll come, I’ll consider it.’ He then immediately hung up. Taylor took the bait, though to get in he had to double as Hartlepool’s medical department, running on with the sponge on match days. It was the prelude to their legendary years together at Derby and Nottingham Forest.
David Peace’s novel The Damned United – and Tom Hooper’s film of it – is in large part the love story of Clough and Taylor. The men’s wives only have walk-on parts. As in all good couples, each partner has his assigned role. As Peace’s fictional Clough tells himself: ‘Peter has the eyes and the ears, but you have the stomach and the balls.’ Taylor found the players, and Clough led them to glory.
The relationship ended in ‘divorce’ in 1982, with Taylor’s resignation from Forest. It seems that the rift had opened two years before, when Taylor published his excellent but now forgotten memoir With Clough by Taylor. More of this in a moment, because it is the closest thing we have to a handbook to the transfer market.
But clearly the couple had other problems besides literature. Perhaps Clough resented his partner because he needed him so badly – not the sort of relationship Clough liked. Indeed, the film The Damned United depicts him failing at Leeds partly because Taylor is not there to scout players, and finally driving down to Brighton with his young sons to beg his partner’s forgiveness. He finds Taylor doing the gardening. At Taylor’s insistence, he gets down on his knees in the driveway, and recites: ‘I’m nothing without you. Please, please, baby, take me back.’ And Taylor takes him back, and buys him the cut-price Forest team that wins two European Cups. Because, whatever their precise relationship, the duo certainly knew how to sign footballers. Here are a few of their coups:
Buying Gary Birtles from the non-league club Long Eaton for £2,000 in 1976, and selling him to Manchester United four years later for £1.25 million. A measure of what a good deal this was for Forest: United forked out £250,000 more for Birtles than they would pay to sign Eric Cantona from Leeds twelve years later, in 1992. Birtles ended up costing United about £86,000 a goal, and after two years was sold back to Forest for a quarter of the initial fee.
Buying Roy Keane from an Irish club called Cobh Ramblers for £47,000 in 1990, and selling him to Manchester United three years later for £3.75 million, then a British record fee.
Buying Kenny Burns from Birmingham City for £145,000 in 1977. Taylor writes in With Clough by Taylor that Burns was then regarded as ‘a fighting, hard-drinking gambler … a stone overweight’. In 1978, English football writers voted Burns Footballer of the Year.
Twice buying Archie Gemmill cheaply. In 1970, when Gemmill was playing for Preston, Clough drove to his house and asked him to come to Derby. Gemmill refused. Clough said that in that case he would sleep outside in his car. Gemmill’s wife invited him to sleep in the house instead. The next morning at breakfast Clough persuaded Gemmill to sign. The fee was £60,000, and Gemmill quickly won two league titles at Derby. In 1977 Clough paid Derby £20,000 and the now forgotten goalkeeper John Middleton to bring Gemmill to his new club, Forest, where the player won another league title.
If there is one club where almost every pound spent on transfers bought results, it was Forest under Clough. In the 1970s the correlation must have been off the charts: they won two European Cups with a team assembled largely for peanuts. Sadly there are no good financial data for that period, but we do know that even from 1982 to 1992, in Clough’s declining years, after Taylor had left him, Forest performed as well on the field as clubs that were spending twice as much on wages. Clough had broken the usually iron link between salaries and league position.
Clough himself seemed to think that what explained Forest’s success was his and Taylor’s eye for players, rather than, say, any motivational gift or tactical genius. Phil Soar, the club’s chairman and chief executive for four years at the end of the 1990s, told us: ‘In hours of musings with Clough (I had to try to defend him from the bung charges) I obviously asked him what made this almost absurdly irrelevant little provincial club (my home town of course) into a shooting star. And he always used to say, “We had some pretty good players you know …”’
It’s hard to identify all of the duo’s transfer secrets, and if their rivals at the time had understood what they were up to, everyone would simply have imitated them. Taylor’s book makes it clear that he spent a lot of time trying to identify players (like Burns) whom others had wrongly undervalued owing to surface characteristics; but then everyone tries to do that. Sometimes Forest did splash out on a player who was rated by everybody, like Trevor Francis, the first ‘million-pound man’, or Peter Shilton, whom they made the most expensive goalkeeper in British history.
Yet thanks to With Clough by Taylor we can identify three of the duo’s rules. First, be as eager to sell good players as to buy them. ‘It’s as important in football as in the stock market to sell at the right time,’ wrote Taylor. ‘A manager should always be looking for signs of disintegration in a winning side and then sell the players responsible before their deterioration is noticed by possible buyers.’ (Or in Billy Beane’s words: ‘You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise you’re fucked.’)
The moment when a player reaches the top of his particular hill is like the moment when the stock market peaks. Clough and Taylor were always trying to gauge that moment, and sell. Each time they signed a player, they would give him a set speech, which Taylor records in his book: ‘Son, the first time we can replace you with a better player, we’ll do it without blinking an eyelid. That’s what we’re paid to do – to produce the best side and to win as many things as we can. If we see a better player than you but don’t sign him then we’re frauds. But we’re not frauds.’ In 1981, just after Kenny Burns had won everything with Forest, the club offloaded him to Leeds for £400,000.
Second, older players are overrated. ‘I’ve noticed over the years how often Liverpool sell players as they near or pass their thirtieth birthday,’ notes Taylor in his book. ‘Bob Paisley [Liverpool’s then manager] believes the average first division footballer is beginning to burn out at thirty.’ Taylor added,
